Secret Ski Instructor Drill: FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTOR

SCRIPT

In today’s video we are going to demonstrate how skiing behind an instructor will instantly improve your skiing.
Hi, I’m Tom from TDK Skiracing combining ski instruction with race coaching here to help you become a better skier.

INTRO

Anybody that ever attended any of my lessons or watched me out on the slope teaching or coaching knows that I always at some point have my students ski behind me, either single persons attending private lessons or a bunch of them attending group lessons. We even do it with ski racers.
There is an old saying that goes something like this: talk less. It could not be more true than in ski instruction, because our best teacher is surprise surprise not the ski instructor by say, but the slope. The mountain. The interaction between the skis and the snow will teach you everything you need. The ski instructor is merely just the middle man, there to guide you literally in the right direction. The thing is, if you only pick the right line then everything else will start falling in place. It’s that simple. All the right movements in skiing will come naturally if you let that happen.

In this following footage shot at a ski instructor clinic we are going to see how ski instructor Kenneth skilfully manages to improve our fictional student Stef’s skiing by having her follow behind.

The lesson starts out by both skiing down the slope on their own as a warm-up. This gives the instructor the possibility to observe how his student skis and gives him ideas of how to progress with the lesson.
The ski instructor carves nice controlled turns down the slope and stays more in the fall line on the top flat part of the slope while he then goes more across, on the steeper part of the slope. This is a great way to control your speed, especially while carving. It is called skiing the SLOW LINE FAST.

Stef’s skiing on the other hand is unplanned, a bit sloppy and pretty much straight down in the fall line. As the slope gets steeper, instead of controlling her speed by turn shape and line selection as the ski instructor did, she accelerates rapidly. This is called skiing the FAST LINE SLOW.

Stef is now told by the ski instructor to go more across the slope in order to control her speed. Let’s see how that turns out. Not a huge difference. She is still accelerating down the slope close to the fall line. The instructor needs to figure out something different and asks her to follow him in his tracks. They go up with the lift and this happens.

In this first run the instructor is quite moderate with speed and the line he picks and makes sure Stef is able to follow in his tracks. We can see a significant improvement in Stef’s skiing. Speed control comes naturally, and she makes her turns round and even.

Two more runs were made. Each run the instructor is pushing the student a bit further by skiing faster and turning tighter. Note that the person skiing in front can also be a good friend or a spouse. Since there is no need for spoken instructions, anybody could be the one skiing in front of behind. It would still work.

That’s all folks. Hope you have enjoyed the show and please give it thumbs up if you liked the video. Please subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already done so. Most of our viewers are not subscribers but by doing so you will get notified every time we upload a new content to the channel, and it helps us grow our audience and create new content.
Ski safely and behind a ski instructor this winter and see you out on the slopes!