[Please consider supporting SeniorsSkiing.com with a donation. We appreciate your help. Click here.]

Perhaps The Underlying Question Is: “What Do You Want Your Skiing To Be?”.  

There is no right or wrong answer.

If you want your skiing to be about maximizing bar time, that’s fine. I’m happy with that.  If you want it be “covering as many miles, or ticking off trails, in a day as possible”, that’s fine, too.  If it’s checking your wearable gadget to see your maximum speed that day, so be it.   If it’s “having a laugh”, who could complain?

But none of those is concerned with developing skill.   The replies to the recent Question For You on How Did You Learn suggested that a considerable percentage of skiers did not commit to any structured long term learning process, instead choosing to get out there and “do it” perhaps with a few intermittent lessons, perhaps in the belief that skill is developed by learning a few “secret” tips.  It isn’t.  But I can live with that, it’s your skiing after all.

The tacit belief is that practice makes perfect. It doesn’t.  Any expert observation of a skiing piste with plenty of skiers on it, confirms that: though it fully supports paragraph two, above.

The reason is that practice does not make perfect: practice makes permanent.  Only perfect practice makes perfect. SeniorsSkiing contributor Pat McCloskey made that crystal clear with his video of Kristoffersen proving the point. The racer has a deep understanding of his subject and spends hours perfectly practicing his technique, to become more skillful at executing it. Practice is a process of habituation; the psychologists call it an “associative” phase of learning.

Skill is the learned ability to bring about pre-determined outcomes with maximum certainty, often with minimum effort. Accurately throwing an American football to a wide receiver is not a skill; watch me try it! It is a technique at which you can either be skillful or useless.  Guess which I am? Answers on a postcard to …..

And so to my main point: respondents made reference to all sorts of unfortunate mis-understandings which will perforce have constrained the respondents’ skill development. They may not care too much about skill development, but there was a sense of slight frustration. The sort of feeling that, “You know, I was hoping to improve on this year’s trip, but I came back at the end of the week no better than last year. Still, it was fun”.  A trace of disappointment.

Some examples of incorrect perceptions from those responses (please, I’m not picking on anybody!)  –

• “Shifting your weight”: No, please no! I see this being taught today! Was that forward/back, or side to side?  Shifting your weight laterally will reduce the tilt on the ski.  It will obtain less resistance and may slip.
• “Rotating the ski” (to ‘do’ a turn): It depends, but usually it’s better not to. It will work, sort of.  But what it is doing is commencing the new arc with a skid.  It’s better to end with a skid.
• “Steering with the inside ski”: Don’t tell Kristoffersen that, it’ll kill him. Quite possibly the writer didn’t mean this. For stability, the snow resistance (steering force) needs to be obtained with the outside ski rather than a “leaning-in” toward the arc’s centre. Pressurizing the inside ski is destabilizing.
• “Counter rotation”: An ancient and thoroughly mistaken and mistaken Austrian idea from the 40s and 50s that grew from faulty observation. (Which, incidentally grew from “watching and copying”!) My comments about this concept deserve a more extensive discussion. Basically the idea started as a misconception of what Austrian racers were doing and became a branded, “national” ski technique. More on this at another time.

Further reference made by a number of respondents was to “styles” of skiing. This is treacherous terrain. There is only ever one correct solution to a problem of physics. The idea of skiing “styles” is a marketing one, not a technical one. The skiing nations needed to try to differentiate what they were selling, from what the others were selling, and pretend it is (was) in some way superior.

So, you got a “French style” of skiing, involving feet clamped together, swish the tails about by waggling your bum, keep your elbows near your torso and flick them “stylishly” behind you after your pole plant. Or the “Austrian style” involving clamped feet, skis across the mountain, and arms and torso twisted to face down the mountain. The “Italian style” involved (don’t know if it still does) a weird kind of extra bobbing up and down, immediately prior to any attempted direction change.  They all get you down the mountain, but not as well as you might.

Mine is not a criticism of SeniorsSkiing respondents, they may well get from their skiing everything they want, and I hope they do. But all that (what I call) “instructor speak”, and potted short-cuts will not develop your skill as a skier – there are few short cuts to anywhere worth going.  My job was/is as a sports coach specializing in skill development, and in particular in recreational skiers.  I care about it.