Sage Wisdom

There’s a lot of ski advice out there. Too much. It’s amazing to me, as someone who has devoted my career to teaching and coaching skiing that so much of the advice out there is so bad. Seriously, a lot of the things people consider to be good advice is incredibly outdated, amazingly misunderstood, or simply just plain awful. I’m not quite sure what it is about reading back issues of ski magazines, having skied in Jackson Hole, or having a child who is a ski racer that makes people think they are qualified to give ski advice but, alas, it’s the world I inhabit.

Beyond the ski advice and concepts discussed at suburban cocktail parties (which can be downright scary), instructors themselves often fall into the vortex of hyper-complication, a close cousin of bad ski advice. This can and often does lead to the dreaded condition known as ‘paralysis by analysis’ in our guests. Obsessing about what angle our inside ankle is at the top of a turn or some minute difference between a skier’s right and left turns may be interesting to discuss among ourselves, but burdening our guests with them without proper perspective can be incredibly counterproductive. To say nothing of being completely un-fun (there’s that pesky fun thing again).

The qualification about keeping details in proper perspective is critical – when we teach in a way that enhances our students understanding in the big picture, the details of technique fall into place in a coherent way that makes it easy to teach technically without muddying the waters. Not everyone we teach is a gifted athlete, but if we communicate well, if we explain concepts in a way that our guests understand, the ‘technique’ we are teaching never devolves into “because I said so”. Throwing the book at people, hammering them with the ‘proper’ technique, and drilling them without apparent purpose or sufficient understanding in laymen’s terms is a great recipe for impressing them with our knowledge and our skill, and it also ensures that skiing and taking ski lessons becomes a chore. If we’re out to impress our guests, to prove to them how not good they are in an effort to get them to work hard at their skiing, perfect. If we want to be their guides to a lifetime of better, stronger, more exuberant skiing full of discovery and joy, perhaps the lock-step hierarchical teaching of the past is not the way forward.

None of this is news to anyone who is familiar with modern teaching of any subject, and that’s certainly true for those of us well versed in the American Teaching System of the Professional Ski Instructors of America. Still, I think it bears reminding ourselves of where our priorities lie.

With that in mind, one of our instructors here at Okemo related to me recently the best advice about skiing and ski teaching he’d ever heard. This instructor has been a fully-certified instructor since the 1950’s, he’s been everywhere, skied with some of the true greats of the sport, and is the last person to get into a detailed conversation in the locker room about technique. He’s also a bit of an alter cocker (to throw a little Yiddish at you – think Stadler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show and you’ll understand). What was the advice? It came from a trainer he had a million years ago named Bruno Juli, and it was this: never move any equipment or body part that you don’t have to, and never move anything unless you know precisely why you’re moving it. Maybe my friend is simply old enough and has seen enough change to keep things solidly in the big picture. Maybe, but it’s far more likely that the old sonofabitch is simply right.