Tips To Ski Fluidly | For Intermediate and Advanced Skiers

When you do get this early outside ski pressure, it's going to help with being able to control speed and manage all the forces that you are feeling throughout the turn. It's going to feel really good like you're flowing turn to turn with your body moving with your skis. Hi, I'm Katie White. I'm the ski school director here in Portillo, Chile. Today, I'm going to share some of my top tips on how to ski more fluidly by improving your early weight transfer for each turn. So we'll use carve to measure how much outside ski pressure you get early in the turn and it will also measure how little inside ski pressure you have at the start of the turn. It's important to note that this is looking at the very first part of your turn as you release the old edges and move into the new edges. I'm going to do a handful of my first couple turns. This is a thing I like to where I just lift the tail of my inside ski as I roll from pinky toe to big toe edge on my new outside ski. So I'm going to lift my left foot, roll to the new edge, lift my right foot, roll to the new edge. And that usually sets me up with the kinesthetic feeling I like to have in my foot on that outside ski. Most of the pressure happening through the turn and releasing the pressure as I come across the fall line. Yeah, so that's kind of my warm-up and how I go through trying to find that outside ski to outside ski. It's sometimes a bit much to talk too many words so a lot of times in my brain I'll say right foot, left foot, and that's my cue. Right foot, left foot, right foot. Yeah, thanks that was awesome. One of the main challenges for intermediate skiers is a little bit of fear where you want to get your skis to come across the hill to help you control speed. So here I'm going to demonstrate what it looks like to have late outside ski pressure where we come around and you can see my hips as I finish the turn are uphill of my feet which doesn't really set me up in a very good position for the next turn to move on to that outside ski. But if you want to get to that next level making that nice rounded turn which I'm going to show here early outside ski pressure on the right foot, left foot. Speed control comes from the turn rather than from the skis just coming across the fall line and to me that feels way more smooth less chatter at the end of the turn. For advanced skiers looking to take your skiing to the next level I always like to think about having someone below me with a camera who's on like a quick shutter speed and they're taking still shots of me as I go through my turn and ideally I'm never in the same position in the next shot so I'm always constantly moving applying pressure and then releasing pressure. I like to think about having the most pressure through the apex of the turn and then releasing the old outside ski and as I enter into the new turn thinking about having a light and precise inside ski. One thing to keep in mind is that when we talk about outside ski pressure we don't want to have that outside ski pressure move away from us we want to keep the outside foot really stacked below our hips so that way we can build pressure throughout the turn. When this is going right it feels very fluid from turn to turn you don't feel many back and forth of the center of mass it feels like you're moving with your skis down the hill when things are not going right I feel maybe a little more jumpy or jolty so looking for that fluidity from turn to turn. Having a cue or two that really relates to you or that you can identify with is very helpful when you're skiing and I think it could you could consider it like your skiing mantra maybe one or two words that you can say turn to turn to help connect the mind to the body for me it's left foot right foot.