How To Ski With Style

What does the word style mean to you? Style is... Ooh, that's a good one. Style is like the expression of yourself. Yeah, how it comes out. It's unique and individual to each person and based on their body type and shape. What is beauty? It really lays in the eye of the beholder. There's a certain level of confidence that shows up with someone who's really stylish. I think it's like the balance of like composure and going big. Like that's style right there. I don't know, style is just like an attitude. I think it's just how comfortable you are around your skis on the mountain. You don't need to be even skiing to have style. You can have style in the parking lot. The beauty of I think the concept is that maybe it's something that's difficult to put a finger on. We all like the idea of having good style. But just how stylish are we? And how equipped are we to determine whether what we feel when we ski is also how others perceive us? To dig a little deeper, we met up with five expert skiers with their own distinct style. My name is Marcus Gaston and I'm a professional freeride skier. I think if I had to describe my skiing style, maybe it's how I'd want it to be described. Hopefully powerful and dynamic. My name is Todd Laguerre. I'm a professional big mountain skier. I made a name for myself in the industry for skiing consequential style. Big airs. I'm really charging. In the simplest terms, I travel around looking for soft snow. My name is Alex Hackl. I competed in two X Games and won two X Games medals. My style is a little unconventional. I don't have the coolness on the whole time. My hands might be here, they might be there. I'm Annie Wengler and I'm a professional skier. I'm like constantly on the edge. I really enjoy the play with gravity. Being on the edge, but you somehow get away with it. My name is Morgan. I've been certifying ski instructors for 27 years and I'm currently working with the PSIC. To me, a good style is something that's relaxed and achievable in all terrain. And we wanted to know if difference in style is something you can measure. I'm Alex, one of the co-founders of Carve. So we looked at these skiers' Carve data to find out exactly what the skills are that make some people look so great on the slopes. To see if that's something that can be broken down and measured. And if us regular skiers can learn how to improve our own style. At Carve, we look at skiing all day long and we look at thousands of times. And the thing that's really clear, when the skiing's beautiful, we see it in the data. Come here. Yeah. Do you want to talk about style? You just got a hair cap, bro. Want to talk about your hairstyle? We all know good style when we see it. We've all sat in the chairlift and thought, wow, look at that stylish skier. But what exactly makes someone stylish? And can it be learned? I think the biggest misconception people have is they think of style first and technique second. And it's very important to understand that function will determine form. People can learn to become a smooth and stylish skier. It just takes effort. I typically never think about style when I'm skiing. Always thinking about fundamentals. If the fundamentals are there, you don't have to think about your skiing. You can focus on everything else and your senses are free and you can just evolve from there. I don't think you can have good style without having fundamentals. You can have style, just not good style. You can only go so far if you don't have a baseline of knowledge. Because being able to do it the technically correct way, you can break the rules and add your own style to it. But if you don't know how to do it technically correct, then you're building a foundation, a house of cards. You kind of need those fundamentals and then put your style on top of it. I always say the three most important things in skiing are balance, rhythm, and personal expression, which is style. Rather than going out and trying to work on being stylish, go out and work on your balance and your rhythm and let your style shine. So, what are the telltale signs that someone has not spent enough time working on their fundamentals? Overactive arms. They plant the pole and fling the door open. Everything is locked and tight. Every muscle is under tension. You'll see them overly twist with their upper body. That's a big no-no. Nobody on earth looks good with their body rotating inside. The more your upper body moves, the sloppier the image. It doesn't look put together. Okay. Great. So, becoming a stylish skier requires a certain technical proficiency. But for us mere mortals who have not spent years mastering our turns, how do we know which aspect of our skiing to focus on? And where do we begin? The reality is most of us don't quite ski like we think we do in our heads. One thing I tell my clients is that our bodies lie to us all the time. It's like singing in the shower. What you think you sound like is not actually the reality. So, we wanted to use CARVE data to understand exactly what's going on when you ski. And specifically, what sets really stylish skiing apart from less stylish skiing. And when we looked at the data, we found four things that, if you work on them, will unlock much more stylish skiing on snow. One of the key parts of skiing stylishly is actually being controlled, being balanced, even when we're skiing something really challenging or really intense. So, the first thing we're going to look at is balance. A really good stylish skier is showing that they're balanced. They might come in and out of it in ways, that's part of skiing on vertical terrain, but there's still some sort of way that you can see that they are balanced or at least coming back to it. In order to look at balance, I'm going to show you an average turn graph. It's sort of like a technique fingerprint for that particular skier. On the X axis, we have the time through the turn. On the Y axis, we have the acceleration that your feet experience in the fore and aft plane. Let's look at a skier who's in control of their balance. Notice how smooth this graph is. The skier's maintaining a really great balance control throughout the turn and not getting thrown around by the mountain. They're not jerky and they're always in the driving seat and in control of their skiing. What we can see is they have a really distinct and smooth pattern of behaviour, where their skis and their balance are experiencing really smooth patterns of acceleration. Let's compare to someone who's not quite so balanced. We can see there's a totally different shape to what Carve is able to pick up in their data. They don't have a really clear and smooth pattern of movement here. Now, in reality, what does that mean? It basically means that they're never quite in control and over multiple turns, they're really unable to keep their balance. We don't just see this pattern on just the forwards and backwards plane of movement. You see this pattern in balance in general. Here, we're looking at the side-to-side movements or the forces that you experience laterally as you're skiing. A really great skier has the same sort of characteristics. They're experiencing really high force, but they have a really smooth and well-controlled trajectory. A less good skier is definitely going to be experiencing a lot of movements and forces that it's not quite so easy for them to control. You can see in the acceleration curves, they're really shaky and wobbly. They're experiencing a lot of force and then it's changing and going away. And that's because they're not very progressive in their skiing. They're not able to progressively balance and build up those forces. And so again, the mountain is really driving them rather than the other way around. The most obvious tip-offs that you're not in balance are one, your shoulders are leaning into the hill and your outside ski is coming up. To me, balance is a very subtle thing that happens with the lower joints. They're moving ever so slightly, constantly throughout the turn. And it doesn't seem like any condition phases them. And balance is actually a thing you can work on a lot. Not even just on skis, but also at home. Doing a lot of coordination training, brushing your teeth on your tippy toes and using your left hand instead of the right hand. Little balance boards and stuff. And that leads me on to the second feature of stylish skiing. Flow. Flow, I think that can mean a few different things. For me, that means moving with the terrain and allowing the mountain to carry you. If someone is flowing and skiing, it looks like a dance. There's no force movements or anything. In carve, we tend to interpret flow when the ski is making smooth, rounded turns as opposed to jerky, reactive ones. Carve measures the rotation of your feet. And it's actually doing this in the yaw plane, which is twisting. Now, a really good turn shape, we're going to see smooth, rounded twisting that is not jerky and is not very reactive. Less stylish skiing, we're going to see really jerky movements where the ski is making Z-shaped turns. And they're going across the hill and then quickly changing to brake and across and braking. Now, what we actually see in the data is this creates a divergence of the skis where they splay outwards or a convergence at various points in the turn. And that's exactly what we can see in the graph here. In order to create a smooth turn shape, both of your skis need to twist at the same rate. Now, twisting happens when you have a pivot point. If you're a great skier, you've got a very stable upper body and both of your legs can twist with that as the pivot point. If you're a less stylish skier, what tends to happen is you try and initiate the turn with something else, maybe your arms or your upper body. And your body still needs a pivot point to create the rotation. And it tends to be one of your legs or the other, which ultimately leads to a really jagged turn where one ski is doing something different to the other. If I think of flow and rhythm, what you're doing is you're transferring energy from one turn to the next. And you're not having to recreate it. And you start to see that flow. That's the type of person you want to stop and say, man, I really like how you're skiing. The third thing we're going to look at is the dynamism. Specifically, the transition of the turn. And the weight release that occurs at transition. I feel like where maybe I've been successful isn't because I'm the best skier. But because I've just been able to ski my own way. Being dynamic, that's what I like to feel. Coming out of a roll while backseat, juiced up tails, floating over or whatever. Those things that I like to feel. The thing is most of us actually feel pretty dynamic when we're skiing. We actually feel there's really dynamic forces, there's moments of weightlessness. Now the crazy thing is when you look at the data from Carve, we see that most of us actually aren't. Really great skiers are really dynamic in how they're able to release the weight from their skis. Particularly in tougher terrain. So let's look at another average turn graph. This is actually data from Marcus Castam. What we're seeing here is the acceleration vertically through his feet. So specifically Marcus has these moments towards the end of the turn where there's a lot of vertical acceleration. And then he has this moment of weightlessness where you can see in the acceleration there's a massive change as his feet start to come down and they enter the next turn. And this shape, this really dynamic shape, is exactly what allows him to get into control no matter how dynamically he's skiing. Let's look at a skier who's not quite so stylish. Now the main thing that we can see here is actually an absence of movement. They don't really have a lot of acceleration at the end of the turn and they don't have a lot of unweighting occurring. One of the most important things is you should look athletic. Your joints should be bent, it should look like you're playing a sport. You need to be able to be in a position to accept anything at any time and be ready to move. Finally, we see something really interesting in the way that the ski's edges roll into and out of the turn. In Carve we can detect this pattern really clearly, called edge similarity. What we can detect is rate of roll throughout the turn. Now great edge similarity is really hard to achieve but it basically happens when the rate of roll is the same for both the outside and the inside ski. Bad edge similarity happens when one ski rolls at a different rate and this tends to be the outside ski with the inside ski either at a different time or a different amount. Let's have a look at this in the data. So what we see here is the roll of both skis. So we have a line for the outside ski and a line for the inside ski. And we can see they're rolling onto edge as the skier progresses through the turn. This is actually Ted Ligety's data that we're looking at here. The amazing thing about this data, and of course Ted is the absolute master, is not only is he getting onto a really high edge angle, but he's doing it at the same rate and he's doing it across both of his skis. And this is why he looks so good. If we contrast that to a less stylish skier, this is still a very advanced skier. The first thing we see is the outside ski is rolling onto a much higher edge angle but is actually doing it faster. The inside ski comes up to its maximum edge angle a bit later and they both roll off edge angle together. So the problem here is they're actually rolling the outside ski a little bit more aggressively than the inside ski. And this is going to create an A-frame which is going to reduce your control, reduce your ability to make your turn tighter, more critical and ski on steeper terrain. Ultimately it's going to make you a less dynamic and less exciting skier. You know I think one of the best ways to address A-frame is make sure that the old outside knee kind of leads that effort into the next turn. That's just a really good way to get it to start moving. So, can anyone become a stylish skier? It can be learned, absolutely. Style is something that is open to anybody who spends time on skiing. It just depends on how much capacity you have to learn and how much effort you put in for each day. Style is definitely a function of setting your own goals. The biggest thing is to connect more with the act of progressing and seeing yourself improving and gaining confidence. That's when you are able to then implement more of your individuality in your skiing. So next time you see an amazing skier glide effortlessly down the hill, remember that behind those beautiful turns is a lot of time on snow, focusing on small everyday improvements. It's just something that comes with time and a sh** ton of turns. The cool thing about the data, and believe me we look at a lot of data, is you can spot an amazing skier from a mile off when you look at these graphs. If you look at enough of them you can see it really clearly. Really great skiing is about being really exciting but also being in control. Only when you're in control can you create movements and balance forces that create these amazing curves. Yeah, don't overthink it. Just work on the fundamentals. You'll have style.