7 Drill Levels for Ski Control (Rotation, Pressure & Balance)

Let's challenge our edging skills with these seven levels of drills from easy to very difficult. So by practicing these drills you'll become an expert at engaging the edge differently by moving your center of mass and pressure along it so the ski grips differently and that will make it rotate. Not that direction though. Level one out of seven is the side slip. Here we'll learn to engage the knees by rolling the feet, the ankles and the knees up the hill to stop and bring them a little bit down the hill to start sliding down. Make sure you keep the feet together quite close. If you go too wide, you might catch that edge and that's not great. So keep them there and look down the hill. Perfect technique if you come across a too steep section and stop again. It's not harder than that. Level two out of seven is a falling leaf. It's called that because it falls kind of like this. We're going to blend the side slip with leaning a little bit back or forth or even better you try to move the feet under your body rather than the body over your feet to put more pressure on the front which is going to make you go that way or if you put more pressure on the tail it's going to go that way. Check it out. First you start sliding down, lean back and I go this way. If I then bring the feet back underneath me the noses will grab more and then I bring the feet forward again it's going to go this way. So this way you can control where you're going as you're trying to skip on this slightly steeper section. See the difference between bringing the hip forward or the body forward and then the body backwards versus getting the feet forward and then the feet backwards. That's much quicker to change your fore and aft to control how the edges grip the snow. Falling leaf for you. Make sure you do it on both sides. Let's move it up a notch to the slope spin. First and foremost you have to keep your feet pretty close together especially when you're going switch. So keep them like hip width apart. You can even have the boots touch each other as a little reminder and we're going to use the same fore and aft technique from the falling leaf to make a spin around and try to just look around the shoulder as you're spinning. First time you do it go up the slope a little bit to start the rotation just like this. So I'm spinning up and leaning forward keeping the skis together now leaning back to the tails leaning forwards again and to quickly change the fore and aft thresholds on this drill it's quicker to move your feet under you than move the body over the feet. Do some slope spin 360s 720s 1080s whatever you want to have some fun with it. On your first slope spins you're probably gonna look down the hill that's fine to see that you get your feet close together but as you get better look up around your shoulder for better balance and control. Look at that corduroy how sexy yum. Let's do something that looks like a real turn the brakkage drill. Many people just keep the hip fully across the slope like that and twist the spine down the hill maybe the feet knees a little bit but we want to keep the hip down the hill maybe it's going to be like 45 degrees across it and we twist the legs in the hip socket quite a lot. It's going to look something like this and I'm trying to go straight down the hill with just the feet turning a full 180 degrees and we try to keep our fore and aft balance very centered so we go straight down. That was smooth. First slopes you do this on should really be like today quite smooth ideally first thing in the morning before you got any tracks on it. To help smoothly rotate the skis around in the brakkage it's helpful to know what the feet look like. The feet kind of look like triangles with a straight line between the heel and the big toe and a bit of an outward line between the little toe and the heel so when you want to do a brakkage to the left in this case your outer ski you want to put some pressure onto the ball of your foot and the big toe but on the inside to get down on edge you're going to go to rotate the knee outwards so you get pressure onto the blade of your foot and even towards the heel of it it's going to give you a smooth brakkage. Start feeling the outside foot getting that pressure onto the big toe as you start rotating the skis. After you've done it a few times think only about the inside foot now how you have to go over the blade of the foot towards the heel for a smooth turn of the ski. Join us and our awesome coaching team for a stomp it ski technique camp for adults. We're going to push your skiing to the next level on short turns, moguls, bumps, ridge riding, sick half turns too. Links bookings are open now. I'm ---- at talking. Bookings are open now. Let's do some slope spin butters so we get into that experimental range of extreme fore and aft pressure just so we become masters of it. When you want to go up on a nose but you can just lean forward there's a greater risk you might pop out of the binding but if you lean forward you kind of jump a little bit so you like follow the arc of a little circle down here it's easy to make it up and the same for the tail butter and then we combine that now with the slope spin we've already been doing. First slope spin butter just start a little slope spin with a small jump like that just so the tails go up. I also use a little bit of rotation not only pressure but boom. Let's try it also now with the tail butter so we want to start a falling leaf kind of backwards and then shift the weight onto the tails like that and it's extremely important that you keep your feet very close together when you're doing this and the more comfortable you get the more you may dare to get onto the noses by either leaning further forward or jumping a little bit so you come up higher onto the noses or tails just wicked fun have fun with it play mess around fall over get better. I chose my freestyle skis for making this video to make it a bit easier for me especially on the nose butter because they're more center mounted make it easier to nose butter but then tail butters might be easier on the peace ski or about the same so if you're on peace skis focus on the tail butters it will be easier for you. Now it's going to get quite difficult here with a one-legged slope spin. I will start it on the downy leg first and then later on try starting it on the upper leg. This is going to be quite hard move the legs underneath you to change the fore and off so lean forward lean backwards forwards once you can do it on the outside ski then start it on the inside ski instead lean forward oh god this is a harder way oh the slush isn't helping you can feel it so good how i was like pulling the leg up and down to change the fore and off quickly to make it happen and also remember to spin the other way and do it on both legs so you challenge yourself to your own max see if you can spin faster going a little bit advanced here as soon as you got bumpy it got way too hard to continue at that speed well let's go to let's go to level seven out of seven in difficulty with a one-legged brackage the reason why this one is more difficult than the slope spin is that you need to change direction of rotation between every turn let's go for a slide and see if i can do it even i'm not sure i haven't done this for so long such a side slip get that rotation in and it's that yeah pressure along the ski that helps me rotate it so now i get pressure on the heel and then more pressure on the front of the boot and ski that wasn't that hard damn it ---- let's do that again my left foot is pretty incompetent at this i need to focus pressure to get it started come on god damn it there we go enough here oh why am i so bad on my left foot i really thought i was more evenly trained on my legs and chances are you're gonna do it like me there struggle to get it around what the hell am i doing why is it not turning oh ---- i'm leaning the wrong way i thought my left foot really knew how to do this better let me know how you get on great drill by practicing these drills you're gonna get pretty good at sweet short turns to use when those couloirs get shallow or narrow or it gets extremely steep well that got pretty difficult with the brackage on one leg especially my weak left leg hope you enjoyed this video consider joining one of our freestyle camp ski technique or freeride camps for adults check out this video youtube think you will love it and have a good one see you next video ciao that's where you want to do some of these drills