16th June 2025

As my progress seems to have stalled, I took the opportunity to book a one hour private lesson today, as well as using my birthday lift pass which I get as part of my Snow Center membership.

I meet up with my instructor and go through my background and that I am struggling to get parallel. I feel I am behind the progression curve with my skiing. We start with a couple of warm up runs and am told “you are doing well considering you have on,y been skiing a year.” We then work on my stance and go through the importance of your stance being spot on to counter the natural forces of gravity, G forces and Inertia as well as getting you center of gravity over your feet. Now with that knowledge I head off on a run, I feel Iike am crouching down low, but on video play back it doesn’t look so sever.

The next exercise I am told to do is that during the traverse to move my skis backwards and forwards underneath me, a result of this is that you skis become closer together. I do this on a couple of runs.

The final part of the hour we discuss softening of the inside leg to aid our turns in parallel and not to focus so much on the outside ski, as it has done so many turns it knows what it is doing. We also discuss that to make a parallel turn we need to reconfigure the order in which we initiate the turn. In a snow plough you weight the ski, turn the ski and lastly edge the ski, with a parallel turn you need to weight the ski, edge the ski and then turn. We also cover that during the turn we need to have some flex in the legs to help counteract and deal with issues which may arise, if you are already extended the is no where for you to go. So the technique to help achieve this is to soften the inside leg which will automatically weight the new outside ski and allow you tilt your skis. I complete a run trying this out and I am surprised by the outcome, I have my Carv sensors on, but not my ear pods, forgetting that it will still call out, I have set it up this week to give me turn by turn feedback on Parallel skis. As I am going down and completing the exercises on my left turns I hear it calling out 68, 71, 72 a score I have rarely seen before. The instructor comments I have a weaker leg which is why my left turn is better than the right.

The last exercise I am given to do, is to place my head over my downhill ski and lift the back of the uphill ski up during the traverse and exercise to show my stance and balance is correct. The first run I manage one, I complete another run and manage a couple more this time. 

At the end of the lesson my feedback is to keep practicing what I have learned today and increase my speed, but I have done really well. After a 10 minute rest I hit the slope again for another hour to practice what I have learned.

Carv Review

As I had been learning new skills, I decided to review my metrics, on the majority of runs my SkiIQ was low, but this was due to me concentrating on one thing. I had for the first time ever the Transition Weight Release score in the target zone with a score of 42%, only for one segment, this has to be down my stance being off, but being corrected now. Highest parallel skis is 67% out of six turns, I achieve 49% on a fifteen turn segment. 

Best SkiIQ - 89

Minimum Video Length - 41 seconds

Reflection: Well I certainly achieved something today and made progress towards skiing parallel, I now need to keep practicing what I was taught today. I will have to come up with a drill plan moving forward to help nail these skills, rather than just skiing which is what I have been doing.