Tips For Beginning Skiers

Find Your Balance

Stand in your boots so that the pressure from the tongue of the boot feels equally distributed from shin to calf. Most of your weight should be felt between the heel and the arch of the foot.

Straight Run

Next, go just a few feet up a gentle slope. Your shoulders and hands should face down the hill, while your skis are sideways. With small steps, point your skis downhill, while putting your weight on your poles. Now stand on parallel skis, with knees bent and leaning slightly forward while putting some weight on your poles.

Gliding wedge

It's now time to learn to control your speed. The usual way is called a "gliding wedge". This is a V-shaped position that is formed by sliding both skis tails apart an equal distance while keeping your ski tips together. This position creates resistance as you go downhill and slows you down.

Wedge turn to a stop

You need to realise that a turn can occur without any actual turning forces being applied to your body. That means no twisting or leaning the body in the direction you want to turn. Instead, white gliding straight down the hill in a wedge, simply apply slightly more pressure to your left ski. The pressure should be very subtle so that the left ski seems to magically steer you gradually to the right until you come to a stop.

Linking Wedge Turns

Once you have learned how to control your speed by turning across the hill, the next step is to link successive turns. Instead of continuing a turn until you stop, a new turn is initiated before you lose all the momentum from the current turn. This simply involves a subtle transference of pressure to the other ski, thereby causing it to instead become the "turning ski". When turning you will need to shift your weight to the inside edge of the previous outer ski and turn your body to face downhill again for a moment, before continuing across the slope.

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