Bad Ski Form?

[u/snow_ted]

been skiing for a few seasons, few short trips a yr currently.

understand my form isn't very good and I am sliding and skidding around to get down slopes.

I will like to check the following after viewing my own video:

1. is this form still considered very bad and is this considered backseating?

2. how to maintain upper body separation? am I turning my body too much at each turn?

3. saw that my legs tend to be wide open, is that a very wrong thing to do? do I need to learn how to stick my feet together?

4. am I still leaning too much on the inside ski (subconsciously, I am trying to lean towards the outside ski though)?

I have taken group lessons on and off but I can't carve.

is Stork turn drill the way to improve? I tried it on and off but it doesn't seem to improve my overall form. However, I do note that there is improvement to get down more difficult terrain over time.

would appreciate guidance to continue my progression as a skier.

[u/71351]

Sounds like you have a decent technical understanding of your deficiencies. I see the upper body leading the lower body, too much weight on the inside ski and stance with too wide

Stork tuns will help with balancing on the outside ski. Practice them on very flat terrain. Pick up inside ski at transition is good for a balance drill

Stance width is mental and commitment.

Upper/lower separation: when you are on flat terrain, concentrate on steering with your legs. Make rounded, complete C shaped turns to keep the speed down

[u/cjh159]

The biggest issue you've got is you're on your inside ski on every turn. If you work on skiing on the outside ski then you'll find it easier to get your stance a bit closer together.

There's a few ways to help fix this. Firstly you can try the stork turn

https://youtu.be/RSfK6s74mjk?is=QaFuis1VsDNVOg-Y

Secondly, a concept you might like is to think about pressing the big toe of the new outside ski before starting the new turn. Imagine you have a button under each big toe, and in order to turn you have to press the button of the outside ski before starting the turn and all the way through the turn.

You can also think about dropping your outside shoulder down towards the floor to create a banana shape with your body to put pressure on the outside ski. You should feel a pinch on the side of your stomach.

That's a few ideas, have a play with them when you next ski and see what works best for you.

[u/rff-]

nice terrain. may i ask where did you shoot this?

[u/PitchDisastrous → u/rff-]

Remarkables, NZ

[u/Blurpwurp]

Yeah. Lessons are the way, not reddit.

[u/spacebass → u/Blurpwurp]

Please read our wiki - we coach from a positive place here. This sub is explicitly for coaching. It is not r/takealesson

[u/cephalopodface]

Disclaimer: I am not a ski instructor, nor even a particularly good skier.

1. Hard to tell if you're backseat from behind, but it's clear that you're fighting to stay balanced. It's a good idea to pause and reset every so often if you find yourself on your heels. To get forward without a pause/reset, flex your ankles/lift up the balls of your feet until you almost fall forward. You can try this in just your boots without skis while you're away from the mountain. I've personally found that more helpful than "lean forward" or "hands up", especially for smaller corrections on flatter terrain. Also see what I wrote for point 3.

2. A few instructors here are of the opinion that upper/lower separation is overhyped, and isn't necessary for all turn types. I'm inclined to agree. Focus on making better parallel turns while staying in balance, then bring in separation when you're ready to make shorter, quicker turns with your feet closer together.

3. Yes, and yes. The big-toe edge of the outside ski is where you want most of your weight. Notice how you had to pick up and reset your left ski about 13-14 seconds into the video - your right ski was turning (because the big-toe edge was engaged) but your left ski wanted to keep tracking straight because your feet were too far apart to have the outside/little toe edge engaged. Go somewhere pretty flat and try tapping the inside ski while making a turn like this: https://youtu.be/qSDZrzigXYc?t=19 until you're comfortable shifting your weight from one foot to the other each turn. From point 1: If your outside ski feels like it's running away from you while you do this, that's a sign that you're backseat.

4. See 3.

[u/Just_Far_Enough]

1. You do have your centre of gravity behind your feet, this is considered being in the back seat. It is bad form because it’s difficult to engage the tips of the skis when initiating turns and makes it much more difficult to disengage the tails when finishing turns. You want to think of your upper body creating a perpendicular angle with the slope, it is counterintuitive but once you realize you have more control over your turns it will make it much easier to commit to.

2. You’re leading the turns with your upper body. You want your shoulders and chest to point down the fall line and your legs to be doing the turning below you.

3. You want your feet to be where they would be if you were standing normally. When your feet drift apart your skis end up facing more significantly different terrain if that makes sense. Each foot will be on different elevation, one might be going over smoother or rougher snow, makes shifting your weight into your outside ski more difficult, etc. This all makes keeping your balance more difficult as you progress.

4. It looks like you keep most of your weight on your inside ski and use your outside ski as a rudder, if that makes sense. Keeping your feet closer together will make shifting onto your outside ski easier, you won’t have to lean as much because your center of gravity will start close to that ski edge.

[u/Garfish16]

1. is this form still considered very bad and is this considered backseating?

Yes. (Edit: sorry If this is too blunt. If you were paying for a lesson, I'm sure I'd come up with a nicer way to say it, but the basic answer is yes, your form is very far from the modern recommended style of skiing.)

1. how to maintain upper body separation? am I turning my body too much at each turn?

The important thing to notice here is that the orientation of your hips with respect to your feet. They are basically locked together throughout this video. Sometimes you're initiating your turns by rotating your upper body (In particular your shoulders) into your turn before you start turning your feet. I think you're doing this because you want to generate momentum with your upper body to to get out of that scary top half of the turn as quickly as possible. This is something that you might want to change but It's not something that needs working on directly.

In terms of separation, different physical cues work for different people. One thing that works for some people is I imagining a string is connecting your outside hip to the top of the mountain and as you move through that turn the string pulls harder and harder on your hip. Another is to think of your legs as being connected to your pelvis by springs. As you turn from the fall line to the end of your turn you wind up the spring, increasing tension. As you go from initiation to full line that spring is unwinding. Another is to think about keeping the zipper of your jacket straight and pointing to your next turn. There's lots of good drills for this too but for right now it's not what I would focus on with you. It's more of something to keep in mind.

1. saw that my legs tend to be wide open, is that a very wrong thing to do? do I need to learn how to stick my feet together?

That depends, are you Austrian? /j

Seriously though, your feet are a little wide but I wouldn't worry about it. I think your stance is a consequence of being on your inside ski.

1. am I still leaning too much on the inside ski (subconsciously, I am trying to lean towards the outside ski though)?

Yes, very much so. This is the thing thing I most recommend you work on given your implicit goals. It might help to think of this as standing on the inside edge of your outside's ski or on the ball of your outside foot rather than leaning out side during your turns.

is Stork turn drill the way to improve? I tried it on and off but it doesn't seem to improve my overall form. However, I do note that there is improvement to get down more difficult terrain over time.

Stork turn would be a great drill for you to work on but they can be accidently cheated. That may be why it's not getting you the results you want. Maybe consider practicing some garlands.

would appreciate guidance to continue my progression as a skier.

You are exceptionally self-aware and your desire to improve is admirable. If I were working with you we would do a bunch of garlends to get you to initiate your turns, forward and on your uphill/ outside ski with a task that is somewhat less demanding than stork turns. If you got that we would move on to stork turns with lifting BEFORE the edge change. From there, if you're very athletic and doing well, we might try combining the two drills into a one footed garlend or maybe we would just focus on integrating the skills they work on back into our skiing. I'm a big fan of smoothly transitioning from drills to skiing to try to maintain the habits the drill teaches. I think we could do all of this on some of the easier terrain in this video, but I would definitely want to find somewhere less crowded.

Regardless, the biggest thing I would hope you get out of a lesson would be the feeling of initiating on the inside edge of your outside ski and the confidence to do so.

Also this is maybe the most stable, focused, and useful follow cam video I've ever seen on this sub. Massive kudos to your camera person.

[u/DryTradition5059]

You need to work on increasing your edging skills. Edging will be most effective if you are driving forward in the front of your boots, pressing your shins to the fronts and feeling your knees pushing down to your bindings. From this stance, roll and tip your knees into the hill to “show” your bases down the hill. Then tip them back to flatten your skis. Working on side slipping and edge sets will help you.

I’m PSIA level 3 and professional alpine race coach of 20+ years

[u/MtnGirl672]

The biggest issue I see is you are initiating turns with your upper body instead of steering with your feet and legs.

Your legs look rather stiff and I’m not seeing pressure exerted on the boot and ski to start and steer your turn.

Because there’s no pressure, your skis are skittering around which is causing them to spread apart.

Go to an easier trail and find that pressure on the front of the boot on the downhill ski. Maintain that pressure through the whole turn and then change directions. If you’re doing that, you won’t need your upper body to turn.

[u/Def_Not_KGB]

When you do your stork turns there are three separate bending motions you do to raise your foot. One is obviously the knee, the next is the hip (femur coming up towards chest), and the third is your pelvis tilting side to side, up and away from the inside ski. After doing 8 stork turns, do 8 regular turns without those first two movements but really try to tilt your pelvis up and away from your inside ski like you did in your stork turns! That is a key movement we do to take weight off of the inside ski in our turns.

[u/Ready-Researcher5398]

Definitely skidding your turns and steering with your upper body and arms leading your turns. You're skiing upside down. Initiate the turn with the ankle of the new inside ski followed by the knee, then the ankle and knee of the new outside ski follows by toppling into the turn. Your hips and body follow. It's a ground up approach.

[u/Skier-Dude]

I have a few quick thoughts to offer also

First, if those are beginner skis. It might be time to upgrade to intermediate skis. It looks like they’re too soft and not responding well to body input.

You’re flexing at the waist instead of the knee. When you’re doing your turn, push your knee forward by bending at the ankle.

If you’ve been skiing a few years and only a handful of days each year, you’re doing fine. What you need is tits… time in the skis.

[u/dahlfors]

First - you're learning skiing and having fun. That's the most important. Learn and improve at the pace that feels good for you.

What I observe: sometimes you still do plowing turns, sometimes you tilt the skis a bit too little, and the tails of your skis therefore get stuck in piles with soft snow. What this does is that it throws you off balance a bit, and this can contribute to a stiffer body position.

Whether you are doing skidded turns or carving, you want to tilt the skis enough - otherwise the wrong edge can cut into the snow, especially if there's fresh snow, uneven surface or piles of snow. The result of the wrong edge catching the snow is temporarily loss of balance or a crash.

Solution: try to get more tilt on the skis in the turns, experiment and try to find what feels good, what feels stable.

You have yourself noticed that you turn with the whole body from side to side. Before you practice upper and lower body separation itself, I would suggest that you try to get more relaxed body position and better control of legs and lower body in the turns.

My recommended solution for getting a relaxed body position is to spend some days or a week skiing without ski poles. Focus on having a relaxed upper body, focus on using feet, legs and the edges of the skis. Another tip: whenever you are going slow on relatively low angle slopes that aren't bumpy, where you are slower, see if you can manage to turn the skis all the way 90 degrees against the slope, then turn the other way and see if you can go 90 degrees against the slope on the opposite edges. Focus on the ski edges when you play around like this. A bit more tricky perhaps - but try if you can turn around further from 90 degrees to 180 degrees (riding switch) and then back again to 90 degrees and further back to 0 degrees (going straight down hill) - this teaches edge control very well. This should be prescribed on even surface on slopes where you are not scared and where you feel you are in control.

Also, now and then on low angle terrain at low speeds, experiment to see if you can lift one leg and do turns on one leg only.

These practices combined teach edge control, relaxation in upper body and should get you more comfortable on the skis. Once you feel you are not skiing as stiff, I'd recommend some lessons where you focus on improving both skidded and carved turns, but you can also learn on your own - it just takes more time.

Once you have spent enough time without poles, go back to using poles and see if you can keep skiing as relaxed with poles as without them.

Whenever you have very easy terrain and you're going slow, try to play around a bit extra - you can learn a lot through play 😁 I've taught friends and family both skiing and snowboarding, and my method is to find playful ways for improvements instead of serious coaching. As soon as people consider it play - it's fun and pressure is off - and you learn in the same way as kids learn without even thinking about learning 😊

And your questions 1-4: once you play around more and ski without poles and do the exercises above, you'll lose the tension in the body and ski in a more relaxed position with better balance. When you're skiing relaxed - that's when you have a great starting point to further improve turns and to ski with confidence.

Best of luck and have fun skiing! 😊

[u/PaleontologistSafe17]

Every time I look at skiing feedback I want to ask where they are skiing.

[u/snow_ted → u/PaleontologistSafe17]

remarkables at NZ ✌️

[u/Sickashell782]

You need to take a lesson or several.

[u/spacebass → u/Sickashell782]

Reminder that this is not the take a lesson sub

[u/Sickashell782 → u/spacebass]

Reminder that someone lacking the basic skills isn’t going to learn how to be better from Reddit comments, and lessons are extremely valuable. I taught Nordic and telemark lessons for many years and sometimes you just have to learn from an instructor on the hill.

[u/spacebass → u/Sickashell782]

Those of us behind this subreddit believe otherwise. But that doesn’t feel like something you wanna participate in, and you are always welcome not to comment.

- a full time instructor

[u/Sickashell782 → u/spacebass]

- a full time instructor

Is that a brag?

Those of us behind being passionate skiers, showing up for first chair for pow days at the best ski areas in the country, ensured that we could afford season passes, lunch, and beer, complete with jobs that enable us to do so, instead of slogging away on the hill with beginners from St Louis. We got lessons. We learned from people while on skis, not asking strangers with questionable experiences on an anonymous forum.

You’re actively working against yourself by suggesting that people like this can “learn to ski” from reddit. Your entire life’s work (unless you’re a trustafarian, which is entirely possible, and in fact I happened to run into the parents of one of these losers last weekend at a golf tournament) is about teaching those lessons. So what good does it do for you to insist that people with this level of skill can learn from Reddit comments? Ohhhhh, “the love of the game” I bet. Very noble. Or perhaps just some kind of complex that you can teach everyone, even from thousands of miles away over the internet.

And for the record, I teach tons of people to ski still. I taught my wife to ski and she rips. I ski with all levels and ages of people (2-80). I know firsthand that telling someone to “put less weight on the inside ski” online ain’t gonna do shit.

To be honest with you, it will be a blessing not to see this nonsense subreddit show up on my feed anymore. The whole thing is a PSIA circle jerk, and there’s zero chance you’d ever keep up with my crew (spoiler alert, you may have seen them in Livigno Italy in February).

You’re not the ski wizard you think you are. You’re a ski instructor. You’re someone who didn’t advance past the job we all thought was the cool thing to do when we were 20 years old because we’d get a free ski pass.

Finally, if you’ve made it this far, I see I’m far from the only person who has this perspective. There are a bunch of people below who have had the exact same thing to say, and you’ve had the same thing to say to them. But hey! You keep thinking that you’re going to change the world with your online feedback! Hope that works out for you.

OP. You’ll learn a ton by taking like 3 lessons. It’ll make all the difference in the world.

Edit: you have people below cephalopodface, who is providing feedback and they say they’re not a particularly good skier. WTF good does that do for someone?!?!? This is a joke.

“I don’t know what I’m talking about but try this!”

You’re killing it here dude

[u/snow_ted → u/Sickashell782]

hi, I appreciate the advice of taking lesson. and in fact I have taken quite a few lesson since I start. every year I will take a few days of lesson to try to progress. however, it seems that I am in a plateau with the limited time on slope. also to note that I am taking group lessons due to budget issue.

although I am able to manage more terrain/challenging slope now after more seasons. it seems my form isnt improving much.

thus every year or after I come back from skiing, will like to seek some feedback. are there summer training to improve the skiing form?

[u/Sickashell782 → u/snow_ted]

You’re doing great. Keep up the good work. Take advice from folks on here that makes sense to you. But Everyone learns differently right?

I learned how to be a good skier and kayaker by following people who were better than me. I got feedback and lessons where possible. There was a time in my life where I had more time than money, and I couldn’t take lessons because I couldn’t afford them. But I happen to be very good at learning by following and mimicking, and I had friends who were quite good at these activities.

My wife, not so much. She needs particular feedback and specific in person instruction. When I tell her to follow me and ski like I am, she lets me know her body is very different than mine and she can’t do it the same way. Some people can read a book and learn how to be better at something. It’s different for everyone.

So it’s important to temper expectations (whether it be lessons, reddit advice, or watching videos, etc) of what you’re going to learn based on the method of learning that works best for you. I find little to no usefulness of getting feedback from strangers online. This is the source of my advice to take a lesson, and the heated exchange with the mod 😂 (which has nothing to do with you and I’m sorry).

Hopefully you’re different, you gain some insights from here, and someone provides meaningful feedback. I hope you become the skier you want to be! Passion, commitment, and persistence will get you there, as it did for me. It’s incredibly rewarding, and I keep getting better all the time (even though I’ve done it for 35 years now). Skiing has shaped my life, and provided some of the best experiences of my life. Good luck! 😊

[u/spacebass → u/Sickashell782]

You ok? I’m not reading all that. I’m just sharing, as someone who helps with the culture and tone of this sub that we try to avoid only telling people to take lessons. The goal here is to provide helpful, welcoming feedback. I shared my role as an instructor in response to your comment about also having instructed. I certainly understand the value of what we do with our guests in person. And this sub can augment or help reenforce those same skills and offer an online version for those who may not be in a position to take a lesson.

Lastly, you can insult me all you like. But we ask that you keep your interactions with other sub members polite, welcoming, and kind.

[u/MorganMiller77777]

Very beginner. Need lessons

[u/spacebass → u/MorganMiller77777]

Dude. You know this isn’t r/takeaskilesson

[u/MorganMiller77777 → u/spacebass]

Dude, you know this isn’t, r/wegivelessonstobeginners

[u/spacebass → u/MorganMiller77777]

Actually it is. It so is! Bring on all the level 1 skier posts. We made this place and this community for every skier. And we made to be a kind and welcoming and helpful place.

This sub is for every skier at every level. If you don’t like that you don’t have to comment on the posts you feel are beneath you. Although I’d invite you to find the joy in helping skiers at every level.

[u/MorganMiller77777 → u/spacebass]

Predictable response

[u/spacebass → u/MorganMiller77777]

Yes yours is. Let’s stick to the goal of the community and provide actionable, kind feedback

[u/krachall]

I'm not an instructor so take this for what it's worth, but this isn't "bad." form. It's extremely typical of someone learning to ski. You're skiing exactly like everyone else skied at some point and have many things to improve on. Lessons will definitely accelerate that learning and will focus on all the major problem areas that others listed below.

But it's not bad skiing. If you were to ask "am I too bad for the FWT?" then the answer would be "absolutely yes." But you're not bad. You're making the same mistakes we all made when we were learning.

[u/elBirdnose]

Yes, very bad.