HOW TO INCREASE YOUR EDGE ANGLE | 4 Skiing Tips from a Pro

Hi everyone, welcome to Beautiful Zeldin. Today I've got perfect conditions for carving turns, slopes are amazingly prepared. Let me introduce myself, I'm Thomas, I'm a level 4 trainer examiner, two times Interski demo team member. Carving for me, it's a roller coaster. Carving for me, it's my favorite style of skiing. Carving means big and high edge angles. Today I'm going to talk to you about how to increase those edge angles. Before we go skiing, my first tip is to jump from side to side, from foot to foot. Try to carve with no skis on. You need to build up your platform underneath your outside ski before you start building that edge angle. A great way how to experience that is just simple jumping from one foot onto the other over your skis. This is what it looks like. Next step, my tip number two, will be skating. Have you ever ice skated or roller bladed? It's pretty much the same. We'll take our jumping from foot to foot and we'll put it back into skiing. We'll skate down the mountain, we'll move from outside ski to outside ski in order to increase the edge angle. Try to maintain a contact with the snow all the time. Just feel, imagine yourself, you are skating in the ice rink. Pretty much the same sensations. Let's test it out. After we feel good about skating down the mountain, now we will try to execute our turn on the outside ski. Jumping from foot to foot tip as well as skating requires us to move our legs freely underneath a stable upper body in order to create the angulation. Outside ski tip is a great exercise which is going to tell you whether you are good at it or not. Start off from the lower position and try to extend your outside leg from the platform. You should feel a nice gradual edge increase and pressure increase. In between the turns, put your uphill ski back into the snow. As soon as it touches the ground, lift your old outside ski in the air and try to start executing the next turn purely on your outside ski. Make sure you are extending away from the platform, from your foot, in the same manner we learned in our first tips. All these drills are helping us to execute better carving turns. I've been using my carve edge angle monitor to really receive direct feedback from my feet, from my skis, how my edge angle is developing throughout the turn. Pretty cool. In our today's carving session, we went through four very basic tips how to achieve a higher edge angle. We did a little bit of a hopping from foot to foot. We put this hopping into skiing and we used some skating in order to feel it while going down the mountain. We also did one ski drill, outside ski drill, which is really giving us a feedback whether we are over the outside ski, balanced over the outside ski or not. Our carve units are providing us with the feedback how our edge angle is developing throughout the turn. Test it out and remember, skiing is a game. See you next time. Go Cougars!