World of Skiing:

Lateral Balance

Wow, what a day. But before we jump into this untracked powder, we're just going to have a little technical moment here.

I want to review one thing, and that is, using the inside leg. Using the inside leg to get us drawn into the turn, so we establish our lateral balance. In other words, try to roll over the inside leg. You see, the mistake a lot of people make, is that they will go a long way around the turn, put all the weight on the outside ski, and they don't get their balance established to the inside of the turn.

Instead of that, look, come off the inside leg. I used that term, lateral balance, a moment ago. A fine piece of jargon if there ever was one. What do I mean by that? Well you've got to lean inside the turn, you've got to lean inward, and you want to lean inward early. The way to get that feeling is, come up off your inside leg. Look, I'm going to show you, it's this one right there. Come up in that direction.

I'm just going to take a moment and show you what I mean by this. Look here. I've finished a turn this way, I'm leaning in. (left top) I want to immediately start to lean in this way. So what I do is, here's the inside leg for that turn, I come up of that leg and I try to sort of dive inwards like that. (left bottom)

So give yourself a couple of runs on the nice groomers to get the feeling of that move, and then take your show on the road. On the broken snow like this, you want to achieve good solid lateral balance, there's that jargon again. What we really mean by that is you want to balance to the inside of the turn. And one way you can do that is by focusing on your inside leg when you extend to start the turn.

Give it a try, hope it works for you.