Ski Instruction  DVD’s – a skier’s perspective

As Santa failed miserably to read my instructions to him for a suitable Xmas present, I ended up having to buy these for myself – but the upside of this was that the 3rd DVD was then available – “Advanced Balance” to go along with “Basic Balance” and “Basic Edging”. So having had a bit of time to watch them a couple of times and try putting some of the ideas into practice on the snow, it’s probably time for a review. I’ll just treat the balance discs here, and handle the edging one later.

Philosophy of the Ski DVD’s

First off, the philosophy. As indicated above, the discs are essentially lists of drills training you in progressively more challenging balance skills, with between 60 and 90 mins of drills on each disc. The idea is that as you master the increasing levels the foundations on which the rest of your skiing is built become stronger. This makes for a pretty heavy watch – there’s not a lot of relaxation, and some will consider it a bit dry. But it’s all gold – master what he shows you and you will be a better skier. The progressive organisation of the drills is clearly very carefully thought out – each drill is a natural progression from the previous one and leads naturally into the next one. The idea is to master one before moving onto the next: this is almost certainly the right way to approach it, but for those who doen’t get the opportunity to get onto the hill every day that could get a bit frustrating – and maybe even a bit demoralising as progress may be a bit too slow to retain interest. I’d suggest a slightly more flexible approach and iterate around selected drills – get the gist of one and then keep refining and practicing it while starting to get to grips with the next one.

Structure of the Drills

All the drills are also subdivided into a number of variants – a single turn starting facing down the hill (a J-turn), then starting in a traverse (C-turn) and then starting to link as series of turns. Some also have a static exercise to start with to get the basic idea without having to worry about turns at all. This is an excellent approach and really allows you to concentrate on getting the feel of the skill without worry about excessive speed, or committing to awkward slope angles. Where there’s a particular tip or trick you need to know that is key to getting the drill it’s explained, and on occasion a demo is given of getting it wrong. This last bit is magic, and I would actually have liked to see a bit more of it – and maybe they’re just a bit too extreme, examples of getting it mildly wrong would probably have been even more useful.

The First Ski DVD

The first disc starts off with the very basic – equipment alignment, balancing over your feet, and then to the front and to the rear/aft. There’re then a number of really excellent exercises on moving around on your skis in balance (front pumps, knee bends, front pumps) and moving your balance point fore and aft during the turn. We then move on fairly quickly to one foot skiing – first a range of exercises to get you to ski on just the outside ski, and then a number to get you skiing on the inside. Finally there’s a lot of exercises combining the one foot turns with differnt fore/aft positions (don’t woryy as this is the “basic” DVD you only have to ski on the outside ski) – introduced by skiing with the lifted ski touching at just tip or tail during the turn (i.e. a training wheel) and progressing to skiing with it completely lifted. By the end of this, as Rick says, you’ve got balance control better than the vast majority of recreational skiiers you’ll see on the mountain.

The Second DVD

The second disc continues from the first, starting with a bit of overlap: a bit of hopping, thousand steps turns and a recap of the outside ski balance stuff. Then we get more aggressive changes from ski to ski (jumps onto different edges), then more on the inside ski. Finally (the last half of the disc) we go through pretty much all the combinations of skiing on inside/outside ski and skiing fore/aft, changing the balance position during the turn at the beginning/end of each turn.

This is a great project and on the while fantastically clearly explained. The demos are all brilliantly done and it’s prefectly clear what is and is not expected. There are a few criticisms though – although pretty trivial. I think that there could have been a different split between the basic and advanced – the inside ski stuff is really too advanced for the basic DVD, but the thousand steps and hops stuff probably too basic for the advanced disc. Switching those two around would probably have made for more compatible skills aquisition. I think it’s also quite noticeable that Rick has got into the stride of the commentary by the Advanced Balance DVD (actually towards the end of the Basic Edging DVD), but in the Basic Balance I have to say his delivery is a bit on the wooden side – which makes the naturally dry subject matter even tougher. Do stick with it though because this is your introduction to some of the most fundamental stuff you’ll learn in skiing.

Who will benefit from Ski Instruction DVD’s

For those of us who’ve done a bit of drilling before it’s interesting to see how the progression matches the ground we’ve covered elsewhere – there is so much in these discs that there are naturally overlaps but also holes. There are various exercises throughout both these discs that I’ve been doing regularly for several years, and some I’ve never done before. Filling in those gaps has certainly made the stuff that I have been doing more natural, and they’re good ones to step back to when the ineviatable off-day comes alonge and you need a leg up to get things moving.

Do the Ski Instruction DVD’s Work?

But the $64,000 question – does it work? YOU BETCHA!

But that’s all good for posing on training slopes – does it do anything for real skiing? Once again, YOU BETCHA! By the afternoon there were no slopes that were not mogul fields, so I just had to do them (so much for my planned easy day!). After the morning practice, I ended up skiing these waaaaay better that I ever have before. I managed a couple of pretty effective runs just on one foot (although I gave up after one run on each as my ancient knees were starting to get a bit tweaked), black moguls with no poles, and even one zipper line run when I got to the bottom and felt like I’d just floated down it. And the ultimate high – part way through the afternoon, I realised that people were stopping at the side of the slope to watch me ski it!

Graham N

United Kingdom