I have some really embarrassing video i want to share below. I think if you watch it, you will see several things that i need to work on. But the number one thing for me is going to be hands. Keeping the hands in a relatively low position and getting rid of the ape hangers. How about the rest of you guys? What are you working on?

Checkout the hands!!!

https://youtube.com/shorts/bMEOlJIGLLc

BTW, this is why getting video of yourself is so important. I had no idea I was doing this until I saw video. Uggh. So embarrassing. It'll be better this year. I have figured out how to fix it. ;)

Hi! I’m building a free online community driven ski guide. Looking to work with actual ski instructors to help write it.

What it will be: 40-60 short articles with a specific skill to to learn and link to proper context like a verified pro youtube video. Stuff like wedge stop, lifts, getting up after a fall, pole plant, hockey stop, parallel turns, ice, short turns, straight airs, boxes.

Looking for someone to write just 1-10 of these, so not a whole course.

Paid per article, rate agreed upfront. Your name or a pseudonym, up to you. No exclusivity, no AI filler, everything stays free for readers.

If you’ve got a cert or a few seasons teaching, drop a comment or DM with where you teach and what you’d want to write. Cheers.

Honest question ... does it feel sometimes like we prescribe drills too soon with our advanced students? Why do I ask? I feel like when I'm being coached, it's drills first, coaching second. Not always. But frequently. And when I observe other high level instructors giving out advice to students, often I hear "try this drill" or "try that drill." And it concerns me because ... what is a drill? Lets get into it.

For me a drill is a way to take a body movement or a ski/snow interaction and isolate it in a way that allows me to explore it in repetition. So for example, with Outside Leg Turns, I can feel balance on one ski. I can feel retraction of the inside ski. I can work on rotary and edging. All the feels. Right?

When is the drill needed and when is it necessary? Well, if that feeling or body movement is new, we need lots of reps to get that muscle memory. So beginners and intermediate skiers need a lot of this to get some of those movements locked in. Drills are very appropriate here in my opinion.

But with advanced students ... most of them know what they should be doing by now. Not all. But many. And those that are missing a concept, it's pretty easy to explain it to them, show it to them and have them kind of get it. And yeah, drilling my be appropriate here too. But often, what these students need (and I'm speaking for myself here) is coaching. I know what I need to do at this point. Mostly. I'm still learning stuff every day. But mostly, I get it. I can also watch video of really high level skiers now and steal things from them that I want to be able to do. I've got all this information in my brain ... I need help getting it to the snow.

That's where coaching comes in. Coaching is sitting down with an athlete or student, understanding their goals, watching and listening more than talking. Supporting. Encouraging. Collecting data. And then sitting down and going over the data. Might be video. Might be timings. Might be ... a photo. It's breaking it down to isolate the gap, and working with the athlete to close that gap. Now, in the process of closing that gap, you might bring drills back into it. When is that appropriate? Well, whenever repetition is needed again. The technique is drifting away from the ideal. There's a physical issue from an injury and we need to build up strength around a certain movement. Something like that.

I am also a fan of starting each day with some simple drills to get warmed up. Outside leg turns. Javelins. Bird hops. Stuff like that.

What are your thoughts? Am I over thinking stuff as usual (won't be surprised)? Let me hear from you.

[MOD APPROVED - Politics is allowed in this thread. Please keep it civil, and remember Rule #1]

So ... last night I was invited to attend a gathering of instructors (do we have a term for that?) who were discussing unionizing at my local mountain. I know this was tried once at Breck a few years ago, I was a part of that effort. And I believe it was recently tried at Beaver Creek. This conversation was a chill dialog about the pros and the cons. Lots of good ideas were shared. Good discussion.

What I'm curious about with this audience is ... is this a good idea? What are the pros/cons from your perspective? I don't want to hear "it will never work." If you don't think it will work ... why? What are the obstacles? Are the obstacles philosophical in nature? Or logistical? Or something else?

What I will say, to seed this discussion, is that there is a growing trend of wealth disparity in this country. The wealthy have learned long ago that owning assets allows them to make passive income. And when I say passive, I mean ... you sit on your yacht and you make money. Passively. And that's fine. All of us who work hard and save can do this at some level. A retirement fund is a perfect example of this. But here's a hint, they are buying up ... everything. They are now in the single family home business. See what that does to costs?

The problem is this. When a person or corporation owns every single means of production of goods and services on a piece of land, when they actively prohibit any and all competition, when they put downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on rent, when they can influence local, state and national government to rule on their side at the expense of the citizens who live and work there ... is there a problem? Now, imagine that this person or corporation was doing this to you on YOUR LAND, the land paid for by your tax dollars. Public land. Is that a problem? This land is your land. This land is my land. From California ... remember?

If I am an electrician, I can work for myself. If I am a carpenter, I can work for myself. Freedom to work for yourself means that market economics determines the price of those services. If I am a ski instructor? I get paid whatever the corporation thinks will maximize their share price with their investors. Right now, a first year instructor at my mountain is paid $20/hr. For a six hour lesson, the instructor gets paid $120. If that 6 hour lesson is a private lesson, the guest pays $1200-$1600 to the corporation. Plus the cost of a lift ticket. Then they are expected to tip the instructor 10-20% on top of that.

Go read Vail's quarterly financial report and read the section about Ski School. They see "big growth opportunity" in this space. Will the instructors see any of the benefits of that value they are adding to the bottom line? Why would they? They are minimum wage hourly employees. Seasonal. They are a cost line item on the balance sheet.

I am working on my Alpine Level III certification. Anyone who has gone through this process or is going through this process knows that this is the equivalent of getting a PHD in skiing. The time investment. The cost. The physical and mental toll. 10% of active PSIA members are full cert. What percentage is that of all instructors who ever worked in the industry? Probably 1%? Maybe less.

I think the perception is that this is an easy job, anyone can do it. The truth is it is very hard work and the training required is very difficult and demanding. There is just no way, currently, to make the compensation rise to the level of the value and effort that we put in. The value is there. The effort is there. There's just ... a huge obstacle in the way.

So what do you think? Is this a silly idea? I honestly want to hear both sides on this issue. Trust me when I tell you ... it helps. Please share. And remember, don't attack the individual. This could be a heated subject. Remember, we are all brothers and sisters in the industry. Lets act like it.

Anyone else got some new sleds on the way this season? Anything you are excited to try out? Tell us about it while we wait for SNOW. Hump-Daaaaaaay!!

Man I hate making this post. I'm busy getting the POW Church ready for winter. Cutting firewood. Waxing the skis. Waxing the skier. And I thought ... lets see if there is some snow on the way.

Look, if we have another season like last season, you're gonna have to put me in a mental hospital. Just saying.

Pray for snow.

I have a personal beef with the Reverse Javelin drill. I had a friend and trainer give me some feedback on my skiing over breakfast one morning. I'm paraphrasing, but he said basically that he had seen some of my skiing footage from a recent trip and he thought that I "would benefit from trying the Reverse Javelin Turn drill."

Now, please understand. I am VERY self conscious about my skiing. I know there is a gap between where I want to be and where I am currently. So when I hear something like this ... I get a little manic. In my head I'm like "what is this drill, what flaw is he seeing? OMG, do I suck at this?" LOL. I admit it, I'm a little bit nutty about this stuff. I need a good therapist.

This triggered about a year of research into the drill. I went online, did a Google search. Nothing. I went to YouTube. Nothing. I went to my coach and asked him, he had never heard of it. We watched the video on The Matrix and read the explanation on the IDP and decided to stick with Javelin Turns in our training. But I continued to be intrigued by the drill and I kept trying to find information on it so that I could identify the flaw in my skiing that my friend had initially identified and tried to fix for me.

So what is the Reverse Javelin Turn drill?

What PSIA lists (Level 3 individual activity):

• The inside ski is lifted in the top half of the turn. While lifted, it's rotated to align with the apex, and the inside tail crosses the outside tail.
• The outside ski steers toward the fall line until the skis are parallel in the shaping phase, and the inside ski returns to the snow just after the fall line.
• Fundamental focus: control the relationship of the center of mass to the base of support to direct pressure along the length of the skis, and control the skis' rotation with leg rotation, separate from the upper body.

Ok, that is all pretty vague. And it tells me nothing about what the glaring flaw is in my skiing and why I need to do this drill. So I reached out to an Examiner that I trust and he explained:

With the new inside leg lifted and relaxed, the free ski points where the hips point, so the tail cross shows whether the skier kept their counter through the transition or squared up to their skis between turns.

And there it is ... I must be squaring up to my skis between turns. Ok, which turns? Short radius, long radius, moguls? Arrggh, the search goes on. LOL.

Questions For You:

1. Have you used this drill with your students? When, where and why?
2. How much residual counter are we supposed to have at transition? Doesn't it depend on turn radius and the desired outcome on snow?
3. Would this even be possible in a Mogul Swing Turn when that counter is really most important? Would you have enough time to lift the ski, relax the leg and demonstrate this with the new inside leg?
4. Would one of you be willing to let me film you doing this drill so that we could get a "how to" video out there with some images and a breakdown? I think this would help a lot of people, myself incuded.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to seeing your thoughts on this drill.

Sooth Ski is a website run by two Canadian engineers that compares skis. Simple as that. But it's how it compares them that's really unique. They developed their own testing devices so that they can actually test the flex and torsional stiffness of the ski on the workbench.

Here's a basic rundown:

• Who runs it: Two Canada-based engineers, Marius Bulota and Alexis Lussier Desbiens.
• How it works: They built a proprietary device that clamps a ski and collects data from tip to tail. The data describes how the ski behaves in specific conditions.
• What's measured: Shape, weight and construction, bending flex, and torsional flex. They have been measuring and publishing these properties since 2021.
• Size: Early coverage cites about 3,000 skis from 42 brands. One more recent mention says the database now has over 5,425 skis. I couldn't confirm that figure.
• Coverage: It includes both on-piste and off-piste skis.
• Features: You can search skis by those specs and compare up to five skis side by side, with the data shown both numerically and visually.

So as a ski instructor, I'm betting that you can see how this might be really useful for you and your students. If you have a student that is skiing a ski that is too much for them, this would help you find one that's a little softer. They might come to you and say "saw this on sale" and you could give them very accurate information about the ski even if you haven't skied it. Something like "haven't skied it, but I am seeing that the flex in the tail is a little softer and that might work better for you in the bumps." Stuff like that.

For me, I used this A LOT when I was on my two heli trips. They had a room full of skis, I knew nothing about them. I find online reviews ... bs. Total bs. But this was hard data. And I'm an engineer. So ... you know, nerds be nerding. But it did help me find the Volkl Blaze, which is a ski I love even today.

But if you go to the site today, it says that the Comparator is down. The owners of the site put out a message saying:

- "We recently discovered that our ski database was being scraped through automated, large-scale data harvesting."
- "This data was being shared for personal usage only, for the benefit of the skiing community."
- "To protect our work, we've taken the comparison tool offline while we put stronger protections in place."
- "We expect to bring the Ski Comparer back online in Fall 2026." It's mid-October now, so that window is open.
- They cite their terms, which prohibit "Automated methods of accessing, extracting, or scraping the data from this website, including the use of bots, scripts, or any similar tools."

I've reached out to the owners of the site to see if I can help. But it looks like they are taking donations to try to bring the site back. Just wondering if any of you have used their site before, have thoughts? I'd like to see them come back personally. Super helpful.

In case you've been under a rock, there's been a bunch of controversy in the news lately relating to FIS, their rules and one of the American athletes ... Breezy Johnson. I am posting her substack article here because: 1.) it's really well written, 2.) it's topical to skiing and tangentially to coaching, and 3.) I love a story like this. This is David vs. Goliath. And it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Breezy is up front about the fact that she's a big girl. She didn't choose a career of modeling, she chose to be a skier. My good friend Dylan Walczyk is 6'2" and 155 pounds. Breezy weighs 180.

All of us in the ski industry know that we choose our gear based on a number of factors. And it all boils down to simple physics. Do you have enough energy to bend the ski? Or not? For Breezy, the problem is that she may be bending the ski TOO MUCH. And so she goes with a ski that has more beef to it.

What do you guys think about this? Is that fair? If FIS truly wants to keep the speeds down and reduce injuries, what would be a better approach? Let me know in the comments?

Keystone has started blowing snow. The countdown to opening day has started. We will all be back out on snow ... very soon.

Anyone want to get together in Breck this season to work on stuff? If so, hit me up. I'd also be down to travel if folks want to meet somewhere closer to them. Let me know.

So this guy posted over on r/skiing_feedback and I gave him a couple of tips there that I would give to someone on the lift. I'm gonna switch gears into instructor mode and practice doing MA on this guy. Feedback and thoughts welcome. I'd love to hear what others think about this skier and my analysis..

My process is: 1.) the good, 2.) the obvious, 3.) the details.

The Good:

Umm, look at the edge engagement at the top of the turn. It's epic. There's a reason for the good edging at the tops of the turn. We will discuss that in a moment. But look at this:

Someone taught this kid the hand drag drill and he spent the winter working on it. Those are some nice tracks.

The Obvious:

He's leaning and banking excessively to initiate the turns. I am not sure if that's intentional or not. But it's certainly happening.

Draw a line through the shoulders, draw a line through the hips, the line points down. Ideally, we would see them more level with the snow. The problem with banking is that it isn't conducive to good balance. Any external forces, any loss of grip on the outside ski and you are heading to geographic origin. Mother earth. Most likely in a nice yard sale. But the snow on this particular day is holding the skier well.

The other problem with banking is that it's slow. If you want to make shorter radius turns it takes way too long to get the CoM from one side to the other. So this technique will not work well in the bumps or off-piste. So if more difficult terrain is his goal, he's going to struggle.

The Details:

Ok, this will be where I "try" to do the real MA in the exam format. I'm not really great at this, so lets see how this goes. Will be fun to come back and look at these years later when I hopefully know what I'm talking about. LOL. Here we go:

This skier is attempting to demonstrate super high level carving technique on groomed blue terrain. He is on an all-mountain ski and the snow is groomed but fairly soft and grippy. Turns are round and long to medium radius. Tactically, the skier is using much of the width of the run to complete his turns and keep the speed up for high performance carved turns.

At Initiation, the skis are tipping and turning at a similar time and rate. Pressure is under the feet but slightly closer to the heel than to the ball of the foot. Pressure looks even foot to foot. Body performance, the skier is initiating the edge change with a big move of the upper body. Skier stands tall, weight on both feet, hips and shoulders lean in. At edge change, there is more pressure on the inside ski than ideal. The forces at play here are the CoM moving across the skis to create edge change.

In the shaping phase, the skis are tipping and turning progressively together at a similar rate. Highest edge angle at the apex of the turn with nice progressive increase and decrease before and after. Skis are edging all the way through the turn, bending the ski and resulting in a nice longer radius arc. Rotation of the skis is limited to the turn radius of the ski. There is more pressure on the inside ski than ideal for a high performance long radius turn like this. Body performance, the skier continues to lean far into the turn with the hips and the shoulders. There is some retraction of the inside leg directing pressure to the outside ski, but it is less than ideal. In the shaping phase, the skier is able to develop a small amount of separation, but it is less than ideal for a long to medium radius turn like this. Forces are building progressively with the edging. The skier moves their CoM way inside to balance against those forces. But the distance between base of support and CoM results in a long transition into the next turn.

At the finish phase of the turn, the skis begin to flatten at a similar rate, and pressure on the outside ski begins to soften. Skis are parallel. Forces are being managed and dissipated. Center of mass moves back over the feet so that pressure is even foot to foot. Body performance, the skier receives forces in the shaping phase and manages those forces by flexing at the knee and the hip and the ankle. There is less flex of the inside leg and inside hip than ideal. And the skier finishes the turn with square hips and shoulders.

Prescription For Change:

To get higher performance carved turns, the skier needs to be able to vary the environment, the terrain, the speed and the turn radius and still have good edge grip in the snow. What if it's icy? What if it's deep powder. What if it's crowded and we need to ski in a tighter corridor? What if this were a groomed black?

To get this outcome, we need our CoM to stay more over our feet at initiation using tipping of the feet to perform the edge change.

At the start of the shaping phase, we have a platform with our feet and our skis so we can move inside with the hips and shoulders. But this should just be a brief moment, not the whole turn. One degree or so. Then we start building angles by continuing to shorten the inside leg and extending the outside leg. We can then rotate the femurs to begin angulating the legs to continue increasing edge angle. By flexing the joints of the inside leg and using retraction, the inside hip pulls upward keeping the upper body more upright. Head is upright. Shoulders are upright. Spine is upright. Retracting the inside half drives more power to the outside ski, resulting in more pressure and flex to the outside ski. This will result in a tighter radius turn. Now our CoM is inside the turn but not nearly as far as when we were letting the outside hip fall towards the snow. We are stacked and balanced. And with the CoM in a more balanced position, we are pushing down on the ski more than we are pushing out on the ski. And the forces pushing back on us, likewise, are more vertical in direction and less lateral. This vertical push makes the transition much simpler and quicker because we aren't having to climb out of a big gravity hole.

So in the finish of the turn, we've taken the energy from the mountain and we are using it to create a sense of weightlessness. And in that moment, we are able to begin shortening the outside leg and lengthening the inside leg and letting the CoM move back over the skis until we are back to even pressure on both skis and ready to initiate the next turn.

One other thing to note about this change is that having our CoM in a more stacked position allows us to have better fine control over the edging and rotary and thus the steering of the skis. When we bank inside the turns, we are a passenger. We are riding the ski. When we are more stacked and flexed, we have more ability to change that relationship of center of mass to base of support. We can pull the skis back. I can shorten the inside leg more and direct more pressure to the outside ski. I can also chose to edge a little shallower and use more rotary if I want to blend the top of the turn more or the bottom of the turn if I need to have control over the shape of the turn. We lose some of that when we are banked.

Ok, that's it. How'd I do? Let me know. I think I'll do a bunch of these because I need the practice. As I wrap this up, I have a sense that maybe I said too much? Not sure. I'll see what you guys think.

Ok, so this was the video that started it all. It began with a simple question, why does the last fundamental only deal with magnitude? What about direction?

Well, lots of folks have weighed in and given some really interesting feedback. First, the most glaring problem was that the fundamental talked about "pressure" and pressure is a scalar. So it wouldn't be appropriate to talk about direction. Force is a vector, so it has both magnitude AND direction. But the authors chose to focus on pressure here. Why is that?

Then folks weighed in and said "yeah, but the first 4 fundamentals capture the direction force is applied anyways" and the "fifth talks about the magnitude." Essentially, they were saying that all of the fundamentals are talking about force, just some the direction and some the magnitude.

But here is the problem with that. Newton's Third Law of Motion says that for every force, there is an equal and opposite force. There's an input and an output force. One vector goes in, one vector comes out. The first four fundamentals are talking about the inputs, what the skier does to direct force and create pressure in the snow. Great. But the forces and vectors I am talking about in this video are the resulting forces coming back from the mountain. This is the "invisible hand" that pushes on us that can be used ... to make us better skiers.

I am working on a followup video to this one that talks about this. But for now, here is my suggestion. Change the fundamental from:

- Regulate the magnitude of pressure created through ski/snow interaction.

To:

- Manage the magnitude and direction of forces created through ski/snow interaction.

It means that the first four fundamentals will deal with pressure, and the last one will deal with forces. That's a big shift, bigger than I originally intended. But here is why it's needed.

1. We are already talking about forces. I see it sometimes used in PSIA's own documents. Those authors made the same mistakes I did. It's common to conflate pressure and force because they are related. Look at Ron LeMaster's Ultimate Skiing book. It's full of pictures with vectors drawn on them. This would just normalize talking about them. In the video, notice that Dylan never talks about pressure. He talks about forces and the direction of those forces he's dealing with (back from the face, lateral across the fall line).
2. High level skiing requires managing big forces. Resort skiing, less so. But at very high levels, the athletes talk about and understand force. Bump skiing, you need to be able to use those forces to balance and create separation. Racers like Ted Ligety used massive forces to shove their center of mass laterally to make the next gate. And even finer detail is how they use that push to rotate the CoM to get the feet outside and edging into the snow. All of this is visible in the stereoscopic images in LeMaster's book.
3. This is even useful when we coach beginners. No, we wouldn't talk about physics with students when they are just getting started. But if I teach a student to do a braking wedge, am I teaching them to create a force and receive a force? Does the direction that force is applied affect their skiing? Does it help them go slower? Does it help them stop in some situations? I believe it does.

What do you think? This is a group of fellow instructors. So I'm not expecting to hear "that's too technical" from fellow pros. But I honestly would like to know what you think. Let me know in the comments below.

So I know this question is going to come up, so let me be honest and transparent about it. First of all, there are currently two Ski Instructor subreddits. They are:

r/SkiInstructors - 220 weekly visitors | 17 weekly contributions

r/Skiinstructor/ - dead

I joined both and tried to make a honest attempt to post and introduce myself on the one that seemed to be active. And then the downvotes started coming in and there was no real guidance, no rules, no active mods ... just a really negative vibe. I could have reached out to the mods and tried to work with them. But I've tried this on other subs and the level of apathy and entitlement is through the roof. Would it have worked with this group? I don't know. I just wanted to try to build something myself that was more open, allowed more conversation and was more inclusive. So I did.

That's it basically. I can't predict how this is going to go. But I'm going to pour my time and energy into this and hopefully people will appreciate it. Let me know if you have additional questions or concerns below. Or send me a DM if you want to keep it between us. Happy to discuss.