How to Ski Powder | 10 Tips for Beginners

g'day fellow skiers this video is for you have never been skiing powder and a couple of thoughts on how you can do it safely with little knowledge and how to improve your ability to steer the ski and adapt to the terrain let's get started [Music] [Music] [Music] skiing powder is one of the most amazing things you can do on skis but it's kind of unique in a way that it looks so peaceful with the snow just laying there it's hard to imagine how you could start sliding create an avalanche and possibly kill you avalanches can occur on slopes that are steeper than 30 degrees typically which isn't that steep the special situations it can happen at less than that so to be on flat slopes it's good you can use your phone's angle meter to learn how steep that is number one and the best place for you to start practicing is on a ski slope where we've received some powder that is a great even the perfect practicing scenario because you know it's going to be perfectly smooth underneath that powder so you can just practice steering the skis through powder which is tricky second place where you can try to ride some powder by yourself is on an avalanche controlled marked rum here in switzerland they're usually marked as a yellow rum and then you can ski safely a couple of meters on the right and the left side of these yellow markers the number one skill you have to learn in order to ski the powder is to rotate or steer the feet where you want your skis to take you you can lift your foot and try twisting it left and right and it's gonna feel like that force is coming from like your ankle but it really isn't it comes from the hip socket and with a strong hip socket you can really steer the skis where you want to go an excellent way to practice this is with a classic drill dracash or pivot slips to work like this you slide straight down the mountain try to keep the upper body down the hill as you're turning the skis 180 degrees from one side to the next in order to do this pivot slip arms far forward so you feel nice and balanced and see how my feet are gonna turn all the way that way the hip is maybe that way and then the chest as far as straight down the hill so for now release the edges and twist them the other way you'll see what's going to happen that's a little off camber here try again really feel also how the pressure shifts from one foot to the other to help aid this little drill if you're not comfortable learning all this by yourself or you just want to have an amazing trip to the alps join one of our ski technique camps free ride camps or freestyle accounts for adults where grownups get in a nice team environment improve their skills anyway back to the tutorial so the first important skill was to rotate the feet now we want to combine that with skiing in 3d meaning that the skies need to learn to go up and down the snowpack a great place to practice this is on a ridge on the side of the slope you need no powder at all to do this just like this so this one is a little bumpy but as you do the transition your bend and knee [Music] that the legs come up up out of the snow pack this is kind of simulating that feeling [Music] those two areas you can enjoy powder skiing safely even without so much knowledge but in order to explore the whole mountain and the whole beauty of free raid skiing i strongly urge you to check out any of their avalanche courses in the description i have no affiliation with it i just want to share their knowledge to you there's also an online course down there that i suggest you do while you can learn a lot at home over an online course please join our course in reality and learn more so that you can have more fun while staying safe now i ask you to have some imagination here because i couldn't find these conditions today but the perfect place to start practicing is a groom slope with some powder on it because that is the ideal practice situation so let's imagine we got that here this is what i want you to think about have a nice little pole plant and really remember to steer those feet just like in the pivot slip before you're gonna feel that the skis are harder to turn when they ski through powder which i sadly don't have here right now once you've felt the rotation of the feet i want you to start feeling a little bit of a float if you can feel the skis floating up the snow in between the turns that's a giant step forward to your first proper powder turns always check the avalanche bullet team in the beginning you're not really going to know what it all means but here's a rough understanding it's a scale from one to five and it's not like any other scale where it's like gradually gets more dangerous it gets exponentially more dangerous from a one a small avalanche to five massive we talk about destroying a village and actually on the avalanche level two and three eighty percent of all deaths in the backcountry happen so a two and a three are already serious especially the three like you gotta be very careful then back to it again do an avalanche course all right let's start skiing now as i mentioned in ridge riding when you ski powder you've got to learn to ski in 3d as you move up and down the snowpack so let's isolate that right now and try to straight line the sweet powder field below me and do some pumping when you pump in powder i want it to be smooth no jerky weird kind of bounces but like smoothly feel that when you pressure the snow and you compress the snow underneath your ski it's going to make you pop up part of that popping out of the snow is the whole body or the whole mass view coming up and some of it is just the legs coming up so let's give that a try let's try pumping in this powder here just straight line in some powder fires that find a nice rhythm just pump up and down you can look down on the ski see them emerge from the snow pack oh no i get stuck i should have planned ahead so under my jacket here every responsible free-range skier has one of these it's a transceiver it transmits a signal and it can receive a signal so if i would get buried below two meters of snow here my friends could find me while using this device so it's extremely important to know how to use this one the probe and the shovel in order to save someone [Music] next drill you can try is pump and steer so i'm going to do the same thing i have smooth pumps and i'm going to steer the skis a little bit to the right oh it's a little bit sketchy here a little bit to the left when you pump and steer it's important in the beginning you just steer like gently that you don't close the turn that you make it like a half circle if you just have a pretty short arc length like such then do the next one it's easier to do the turns because you need to steer less it's easy to have a control upper body that is pointing down the hill and as you get better you can close the turns more in order to reduce the speed you're traveling at speaking of speed you're gonna keep some while you're riding the powder speed really is your friend in the beginning kind of always [Music] you can start learning to ski powder on virtually any ski but the perfect ski has a bit of a rocker that means that it has a long nose helps the ski float and it's a little bit wider than a normal ski they're usually mounted a bit backwards or always to be honest helping the ski float up on the snow pack easier next thing in the equipment is the pole my freerider poles have a rather large basket helping yeah me to push myself forward even when the snow is deep and soft all right so that's the ski in the pole maybe you notice i'm wearing a backpack here and i always always wear a backpack when i ski powder it's because i keep some of the important safety equipment there let's have a look at that now got a dedicated pocket nice shovel and you can also make it a bit longer so you can shovel faster next part we got here is the probe now this one you stick into the snow to find where your friend is buried together with a transceiver every free rider should have this every time they go riding powder so another part of the safety equipment i have a little first aid kit when you're deep in the back country you might need something bigger and more useful than this one a spare mid layer in case i get a little cold puffer jacket i usually like to have a ski strap spare gloves you should put my helmet in this bag i get a spare lens for the goggles in case they fog up if i have lots of crashes and a spare buff similar to this one so when this one gets wet like it is wonderful to put a fresh one on this one has got a really wet half liter of water yeah glove liners and i like to have some sort of snacks in case they get like super hungry like a bar or some nuts the mono ski once you feel comfortable you feel the rhythm when you're pumping and turning you start to get some flowing you can imagine that your skis are a monastery they are these weird creations from the 80s they're like a snowboard but you stand forwards on them so it's kind of like a ski where they're attached together so you can just ski with the feet close together so they sometimes touch each other and then relax and it's going to make it easier to make the skis turn together you'll have more even pressure on both feet so that you don't over pressure the outside foot so it sinks down too much drop it okay let's see what the car data says oh nice to highlight the difference between doing short turns on the slope versus on the powder let's look at the data and what's going on inside of my ski boots as you can see here i got some more pressure on the outside skin and powder as well but less so than on the slope i have enough so that i if i hit a nice patch it's unlikely here that i wouldn't fall into the turn here i'm skiing on the slope and doing some short turns the line in blue here is the outside ski pressure see how it smoothly goes up as i ski through the turn and then quickly drops off and then the line in green is the inside ski pressure with a similar pattern but i have 66 percent pressure on this run it's a little bit too little to be a good short turn it wasn't my best day if we look at the graph for the powder tone here you can see that the shape of the blue line is more or less the same as on the slope but the inside skis graph in green goes up much higher so the pressure difference is much smaller here it's actually 52 percent outside ski pressure that's to illustrate the point of the mono ski to be honest i should have had a bit more angulation and you can afford to have a bit more outski pressure than that without the ski sinking in [Music] now as you get a bit more comfortable sliding through powder i suggest you play around with speed or actually increase the speed as you have more speed the snow is going to feel firmer that you can more easily float up on the snow so it's going to be easier for you to turn there's a little tactical change you can do to your turns to increase the speed and make it easy to turn that you have banana shaped turns rather than c-shaped because when they're more like that you're gonna increase the speed or like maintain the speed easier the more you close it the more you're gonna lose the speed so play around with that and your toes will be sick all right this is often an overlooked but super important skill when it comes to skiing the powder is the pole plant it's gonna help with so much it's gonna help you get rhythm in your turns so it's easier to get that pumping motion right and it's also going to help point the upper body down the hill a little bit if you do that pull plant down and a little bit forwards then you turn around the pole it is just great thank you guys for watching maybe you want to join one of our ski technique camps and you'll get an easy way into being able to ski the entire mountain then once you got that down we also started doing freeride camps for adults but that's more for you who can already ski the powder but want to get better at it and maybe more playful have a nice day and see in the next video [Music]

Channel: Stomp It Tutorials

Views: 221,971

Keywords: How to ski powder, ski powder, how to ski powder for beginners, 10 tips to ski powder, powder skiing, learn to ski powder, off piste skiing, how to ski offpiste, freeride skiing, powder ski lesson, powder skiing tips

Id: ad3_PwfzX5w

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 19 2021