3 Common Mistakes Beginner Freestyle Skiers Do When Jumping, Spinning & Sliding Boxes

Today we're out here in Laax and we're going to look into the three most common mistakes beginner to intermediate freestyle skiers do. These mistakes are going to ruin your fun and hold back your progression. It's really important to fix these mistakes. Stay tuned till the end of the video where we are going to have a little competition. Let's get started. Common mistake number one, having poor takeoffs or poor pop. This is terrible and gonna ruin all your 180s, 360s and basically anything. If you think yours is already good have someone film you from the side of the jump. You'll see how much of a range of motion you are having. I bet you're not popping more than like 80 percent. I do this at every single camp I do during the first day because everyone thinks they can jump well but truth is almost no one can. That's why this is really important to fix. So let's get started with that. There is a couple of reasons why you may have a poor pop. One of the reasons may be that you're skiing into the jump and being too back seated. What you need to correct then is your skiing so check out our beginner ski tutorials but here is the basics you need to get down. String yourself up and just sink down in the ski boots with a gentle bend at the ankles, knees and hip. This is all you need to do and from here this is where you pop. It's not a very long motion but it's important to do the whole motion. The second reason why you pop may be poor and it could be due to fear and just bad habits. That's why we're going to break it down and take it a couple of steps back again before we start hitting bigger jumps again. So what many people do as they approach the jump they start the pop sometimes already extended all the way but then pull the feet up again to absorb the end of the jump. This is terrible and often leads to back seated landings and here's what we got to do. When you pop you have to have the timing right so you start extending your legs quite quickly and just before you leave the jump you tighten the butt and bring the hip forwards. This is going to help you tip forwards and hit the landing so you land perfectly perpendicular. Since absorbing the end of the jump is such a deeply ingrained bad habit for many people you need to do a lot of repetitions where you do good pops every time. You really bring that hip forwards. I suggest you first do a couple of pops skiing slowly down a slope and then to make it more difficult you can pop over a pole laying on the ground. If you have a couple of friends you know put 10 poles in a row just pop over all of them to get used to doing this properly. Then start popping off little side hits before you start increasing the size of the jump gradually. Because fear is ruining so many people's pop it's really important that you slowly increase your confidence. Common mistake number two is when rotating blocking the rotation with the inside arm like that. It doesn't only block the rotation but your visibility too. You can't see the landing. This is not so often a problem of the arm not opening up but that you're spinning too slowly or that you feel like you're spinning too slowly and you want to sort of push it around using the counter rotation. So let's fix this. All right to spin faster find a flat spot take your skis off and let's practice a couple of spins. To spin faster with a straight takeoff so no carving involved this is important. String yourself up come down in the ski boots and then we wind up a bit of rotation in the opposite direction that we want to spin. So push from there there to there a little bit this way that's just a little bit. If you do too much you end up with the body weight on one foot that's not good. You want to stay in the middle. So show it again a little bit of a twist knee hip shoulder arms and then when you want to pop and do the rotation you do like a normal pop but you push off from the right foot's big toe through the ankle knee hip shoulder and you can pull in your arms. It looks something like this and I suggest you try spinning like this with the arms and also without the arms. Make sure that you always like pull that elbow back so you don't end up doing that again. Then do many small 360s of side hits and small jumps and you'll feel how you get more relaxed and you don't have to do that counter rotation to get around. It's all in the set and the takeoff of the jump. Now when you can spin faster again and you want to hit bigger jumps. If this problem still persists I suggest you try a couple of t-set 360s where you ride into the jump with the arms straight out like a tee. A tad bit of wind up set off and keep them out there. This is the practice to keep this arm out of your way. Once this works for you relax again keep the arms where you feel comfortable. Common mistake number three is people tend to believe there's friction on boxes and rails. Of course there is some friction but my point is that people try to hockey stop their way over it and that's gonna lead to a lot of crashes and hip bruises. So let's fix this. To fix this problem let's first explain what the perpendicular means. So if it's 90 degrees here and 90 degrees there that means that this is perpendicular and it's natural for a human being that if that's downhill the person is going to stay vertical like that and that's all fine when you're standing on a slope. But on a box if you try to be like this you're just going to go bam slide out. Feet are going to slide out underneath you. Not cool. So what you're going to do when you're on a box. This is the box this is you. You have to commit down towards the valley and this is a little tricky to do. So I have a couple of suggestions for you. I suggest the first box you're trying this on should be super flat like this one but it's still a little bit downhill so it's enough that you really have to lean forwards anyway. If you want to do a box like switch so that you rotate on and off it. First thing feet pretty wide extend this leg so you put more weight in the front and put the front hand by the knee this is going to help you stay forwards like this. If you're going to box slide to straight again and using counter rotation I suggest you do the same. So you jump on it use the counter rotation but then you try to keep both hands by the front ski or maybe even in front of them like before extend that leg and the feet pretty wide. Try that many times and if you work on this really hard you'll be surprised how fun it can be to slide more advanced boxes and rails. It's really so playful and there's so many different tricks you can learn. That's it for this video. So the competition is again you have a chance to win a merino 250 top and bottom and ski socks from Smartwool if you do the following two things. Post a video of yourself doing a nice jump spin or box slide with the hashtag I stomped it and go and follow Smartwool Europe and you have a chance to win that. If you really want to take your skiing to the next level you could consider joining one of our freestyle camps for adults or check out our two-hour long online course that takes you from nothing to 360s, box slides, locking, grabs all of that good stuff. Stay tuned and see you in the next video.