Ski turn initiation, Sliding or carving

Hi Bandit, I'm thinking that practice, practice is the key, I Have lots of drills etc that I would like to try, I guess if I get stuck I will get some more tuition. The sofa ski school is a great learning tool and I will be taking that with me on the next holiday!

Andi282 wrote:Hi Bandit, I'm thinking that practice, practice is the key, I Have lots of drills etc that I would like to try, I guess if I get stuck I will get some more tuition. The sofa ski school is a great learning tool and I will be taking that with me on the next holiday!

It's great that you want to improve and are prepared to work hard to achieve a good standard of skiing. I do wonder how you will know if you have mastered using the correct muscle groups, and will manage to avoid cementing bad technique into your skillset. These are issues that a good ski teacher can help you to avoid. Correct use of the body to work the skis needs to unnderpin your skiing.
Once you become an intermediate, and aspire a higher skill level, it takes much longer to undo bad technique.

Right now, no-one who's trained to look, is giving you accurate feedback.

Teaching yourself is one of the hardest ways to learn, ski instructor even for a couple of hours in a week will sort out alot of problems. Even if you feel your weight and stance is forward and even if you think you feel as though your doing everything right, you may not be.If you don't want to get a ski instructor a good way of checking your stance and turns is to get someone to video you coming down the slope, watch it over yourself and you may see what your doing wrong. I often ski thinking everything is ok until I watch myself on video, and then say oh my god, how bad was that?

Sofa ski is a very good DVD, and he has some very good drills.

Also a good thing to do is to do everything wrong on purpose, ski in the backseat, rotate upperbody etc. so you know what happens when things go wrong, and know then how to correct it in future.

I'm still with Bandit on this one!

Credit where credit is due that you want to improve your skiing ability and I am sure Sofa ski is useful but I don't think you can use it as your sole tool for improvement. Practice is key to skiing however its practising the correct technique and not the wrong technique....

I suppose it depends on what type of skiier you aspire to be however if you want to have the correct technique and get the best from your ability then I fully believe the best way to improve is to have a third party watching you who is then able to specifically identify your specific problem and, in my opinion, the best people to do this are often instructors or experienced skiiers.

I am fully aware that I have many faults with my skiing and whilst I can recitfy many of them myself I also know I have faults that I am not specifically aware of and in all likely hood it will only be an experienced skiier or instructor that could identify and rectify the problem (unless it comes to moguls where anyone can tell me what I am doing wrong (pole plant being the biggest thing) however be throwing my dummy out of the pram along with the rest of the pram contents before you even get chance to tell me my faults :lol:

Yes I am very open to getting some quality tuition, I will have a look at sol as the prices are very cheap compared to other resorts so I think I will take a look at that! and yes I have had some videos taken and I new straight away were I was going wrong, yes I was leaning to far in the back seat, hence burning legs and swinging the shoulders too! and also standing too straight! I guess that's why they say it's easy to learn to ski but very hard to master!

I guess I enjoy the technical challenge of skiing just wish we had more snow in Devon to play around!!

Just wondered where Verbia was....?

Andi282 wrote:Lots

The solution to your problem is probably less complicated (and more fundamental) than you think. I'd bet the solution isn't all that complicated either.

IMO, this is why an instructor could be so much more useful rather than over-analysing your mistakes on the internet. You should post your videos up.

Have you got a leather sofa, or a fabric one Andi? Could be where you're going wrong....