BASI Ski Instructor training: Day 9

We began the day with two short lessons from Katie and Neil. Katie’s was to demonstrate more ‘presence’ during her teaching and Neil’s was to show more active analysis and corrective advice. We started at the top of the triple chair above the gondola and then cut down towards the drag lifts. Once the lessons were out of the way we skied with the other groups, lapping on the drag lift and working on individual performance.

I worked with Chris on being more centred over the skis; I’m a little back, he’s a little forward. We spent most of the morning skiing with no poles, with our arms folded. At first we simply skied down and analysed each other’s body position and then we were told to syncho ski and each time around we had to do things slightly differently; first we simply followed each other, then we skied in synch and did a clockwise rotation about each other, next we varied the turn size, etc. All of these gave us other things to think about whilst we were skiing; some of the others were given other things to think about by having to remove items of clothing and put them back on whilst skiing; it was an amusing morning.

Just before lunch we did a couple of short teaching sessions wearing a rubber mask… The idea being to illustrate how difficult it is to communicate without facial expressions and how we automatically compensate with voice and gesture.

After lunch we had a lesson with Bengy on flatland freestyle; that is 180s and ollies etc without being in a park. The 180s went quite well and I managed to do much better than I had done in Esquel due to some advice that Bengy gave me after watching my first attempts; I was attempting to ‘wind up’ before jumping to aid my spin but I wasn’t following through enough and, to be honest, I needn’t bother winding up at all for something as small as a 180. Bengy advised me to simply look over my shoulder in the direction that I wanted to spin and then just jump my feet around to face the direction that I was looking. I managed around a 170 on my first attempt which was around 80 degrees better than I’d managed before…

We then moved over to Condor III and did a a bit more flatland freestyle, jumping over a series of poles that Julian laid on the snow. Next came a series of agility exercises, jumping over a line as many times as possible during a straight run (surprisingly difficult to land flat and not induce a slight turn by landing on an edge). Finally we did some carving, rolling the skis over as far as we could and touching the snow on the inside of the turn.