Author Archives: Bobski

Ski Training – do it in your bedroom

Ski Training and how you can use your bedroom full-length mirror to enhance your skiing.

Do just three a week of my ten-minute sessions with your full length mirror and you’ll transform your skiing next season

Practice does not make perfect. Not automatically anyway: it might do but more than likely won’t. What practice does is to make permanent, no matter what you practice or how you practice it. So it can do more harm than good if you are not careful. As John Shedden observed, “Humans get good at what they do”. So be careful what you do.

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Skiing-with-Confidence: How to build yours.

Skiing-with-confidence makes all the difference between enjoying it, and not doing.  But the kind of thing in the picture, just doesn’t work.  There is no point in someone, or ourselves telling us to “Be Confident”.  If it were that easy it would not even be a topic,  never mind one as important as it is.  You might just as well say “Be Taller!”

This kind of thing doesn't work - just saying "Be Confident". But there is much you CAN do to get there.

This kind of thing doesn’t work – just saying “Be Confident”. But there is much you CAN do to get there.

This “just be confident” admonition is a something-for-nothing policy.  Like most attempted short cuts it saves time in getting you to somewhere that isn’t worth going in the first place.

To ski-with-confidence is a process, not an event.  You generate it internally and it does not automatically happen.  Like so much else, to be any good you have to work at it.

More, below the fold – read on  Continue reading →

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SKIING LESSONS: Get more for less.

Not a time for gross movements!

Not a time for gross movements!

Skiing lessons are a good example of the need to get more out for less in.

Watch a skilful skier skiing fast – a downhiller in a race for example – and it all looks pretty wild. Arms flailing, legs pumping, skis jumping around like jumping beans.

But in reality it’s a game of subtleties, so you need fine control, and finesse.  And that is what your own skiing is about as well. Read below the fold for more detail. Continue reading →

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Ski instruction - hands forward, knees bent.

Ski technique: Your hands are more important than you think.

My ski coaching sometimes surprises when I pay so much heed to skiers’ hands regarding ski technique. Surely, skiing is about your feet?  Well it is, but it’s about a lot more. Glen Plake one of the world’s greatest extreme skiers told one group that the instant he couldn’t see his hands – it was too late.   But the instruction to “Carry your hands forward”  is simply awful.  It creates poor ski technique. Here’s why ..  Continue reading →

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Women Only Skiing is forty-something too late ?

Women Only Skiing.   Is the forty-something-or-over woman Britain’s most wasted resource?

This post on Women Only Skiing is philosophical not technical.  It was prompted by an observation I made decades ago, almost when I first started on ski instruction and long before I rose to become a skiing coach.

Women Only Skiing

You’re not past it, you’ve just got it.

Because I’m no spring chicken, women over shall we say forty, seem to have found my approach to helping you become a skillful skier less threatening and challenging than some others. And a lot more effective. Partly this is because I respect mature women-folk and their genuine potential. I have a very different approach to ski learning coming from a ski coaching background.  Ski instruction and ski coaching are very different.

Read on …  Continue reading →

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Ski learning and philosophy

Ski Learning and philosopy

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, philosopher and statesman. Born at Cordoba c. 4 BC.

Ski learning may not at first seem closely related to Roman philosophy.  The same is not true in reverse because philosophy is a part of everything in life.  Seneca had some very powerful and useful things to say about ski learning.  Take them to heart and you will be happier. Continue reading →

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Ski instruction needs better descriptors

Ski instruction - get them on their edges

Is this the ultimate ski design?
No!

Ski instruction is mostly delivered by ski schools and ski instructors.  Too many still use inappropriate words to convey the ideas that are most likely to help you to improve your skill.

The instructor knows what he/she means, but it’s no good if it puts the wrong idea into the pupil’s head.  Take the picture above, for example Continue reading →

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Ski Instruction tells you the wrong things.

Ski tows push.

Simon Trueman, the Waggoner at “The Victorian Farm” demonstrating an important skiing principle.

In most Ski Schools the Ski instruction uses bad language.  I don’t mean swearing, I mean they describe very badly what you need to do to improve your skiing.

Words are the keystrokes with which we programme our minds.  Use an incorrect or inappropriate word to describe something and you put the wrong idea, an incorrect understanding, into peoples’ minds.

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Improve your ski learning, keep to the essentials

Take them, or they won't work.

To improve your ski learning keep taking the tablets: they don’t work if you don’t take them.

To improve your ski learning– or indeed to improve skill with any technique or group of techniques, somewhat resembles looking after your health.

Your doctor diagnoses some ailment or other.  Next she prescribes a treatment that you need to keep applying.  She gives you the medication, and off you go.

You are keen to make things better, so you apply the medication regime, and sure enough things begin to improve.  They continue to improve right up to the point where you are no longer aware of the symptoms that drove you to her in the first place.  So it is with your skiing skill. Continue reading →

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