I’ve been reading a lot lately about deliberate learning, improving oneself, and decided to try this for my skiing.
I’ve never had a formal skiing lesson. But that doesn’t mean I can’t learn well.

Backstory

In 2014 I skied I think a total of three days. The first time, someone spent an hour with me (cheers for your patience, mate) and talked me through how to brake with the pizza move, turning with a pizza, and generally going downhill. Given that I was reasonably well balanced from unicycle practice, this went well and I had a fun day skiing greens. The next two skiing days were spent going faster with this basic technique and I even got a couple blues.

I then snowboarded until 2021. This probably helped my later skiing improvement, as I got familiar with a metal edge on snow, but it’s hard to quantify. I certainly got familiarity with ski slopes and the terrain that can occur, which was useful.

For something like getting to know terrain, practice and slope time are the best things.

I didn’t formally learn to snowboard either – I just watched other people, tried things to see what worked, and repeated the process.

In 2021 I started backcountry skiing, also known as ski touring. This requires a lot of skiing skill as you encounter a large range of terrain, all ungroomed. It could be powder, breakable crust, hard crust, ice, wet concrete, etc, and even transition points between those. When I skied St Helens top to bottom it featured ice, corn, breakable crust, wet concrete, and then nice “groomed” hardpack.

I hadn’t skied since 2014, but I gave it a bash - and wasn’t too bad. I fumbled my way through some steep slopes and difficult turns, with a lot of crashes, but also made it down alright (What I should have done at the same time was improve my skiing, so that I could hold better on those steep slopes).

As of 2023 I’m back into resort skiing, and thought “well this is easier than backcountry, since the terrain is a lot more predictable and often groomed”. I didn’t focus on any particular learning, I just skied and had fun. While there’s nothing wrong with this, it did mean that when things went wrong - I got chatter on my front tips, or was consistently slower, or even just generally struggled – I didn’t understand why and also never got better.

Trying to improve

Cue Deliberate Practice, and Actively trying to improve. I went to White Pass, and Hannah – skiing for 26 years – gave me some good tips after watching my form. I tried these on the next few runs, and it helped.

Her main tip was about form. I was leaning upper body too far forward, and facing the direction of the skis. Secondarily, my boots were too loose – an artifact of touring I suppose. I tried the form she suggested – torso just forward of upright, weight over centre of feet, torso loose but body ready from hips down. Knees bent a bit, with actuation coming from the glutes and the hips. And finally, face the shoulders down the mountain and keep them that way. Rotate from the hips only. This made a considerable difference! Instead of throwing the upper body around every time, I could hold with the core and just use the hips and legs to drive the back of the ski through a turn.
My practice consisted of consciously watching myself ski, noticing which muscles were tense – quads should be – and noticing what wasn’t and when I was using upper body, and focusing on correcting that.

A couple weeks later I skied a day with another friend and he pointed out that my form was good, I just needed to fix up where my weight was. I’d read some tip that said in a turn you want to focus on instead of driving the heel out, just leaning onto your inner little toe. Luke said while that was difficult, it captured the spirit: what you want, ideally, is to lean into the turn and just follow the edge of the ski. The ski naturally wants to make a certain turning circle, and fighting this causes chatter of the tips, or braking, or other things. For smooth high speed … follow the ski.

Results

I tried this on a few runs – starting off with some slower green areas, then steeper blues, and finally a particularly difficult blue – this one had a lot of chatter until I realised I wasn’t trusting the ski, and had my weight poorly positioned.

Other people might think of it differently, but my solution is: you want your weight, your focus point, to be on the inside edge for your outside foot. So you are leaning on the part of the ski edge just along the downhill foot.
This really helped me improve, and the next time I went I was carving so well; it really made me understand the turning circle of a ski properly.

All this as an example to highlight deliberate practice: I would go down the ski run to enjoy myself first and foremost, but I was paying attention to my weight, my balance points, and therefore my control as I went, noticing the outcomes of actions. When I shifted my weight – chatter! Alright, shift weight back – chatter disappears! Ha!

For the next run, try that more consistently – yep, going a lot faster and remaining in control!

Now I’m a far better skier, and all it took was a few important tips, then trying some things to translate those tips into a language I understand, and then consistently practice practice practice.

The attitude makes a significant difference. Instead of just “that run was more fun” as when I was just skiing for funsies without trying, I was actively thinking “let’s improve”. Mentioning things to friends, asking for advice, asking “did that go better” or just getting a feel for it myself, and always having a little process in the back of the mind watching what I was doing. An attitude of “let’s learn and improve”.