6 Simple Carving Tips For Every Level
Votes:
Learning to carve well is one of the biggest breakthroughs in an intermediate skiers' progression.
We asked two skiers, an Olympian and a top-level ski instructor to share their 3 tips to you to carve with more control and angulation. If you are an intermediate skier, comfortable with your parallel turns and are starting to edge your skis more, these tips will be perfect for you.
Kaylin took us right back to the basics with a few tips that she often see's both intermediates and advanced skiers getting wrong.
- If you're already a great carver, try these out on the first day back on skis to regain your control.
- If you're just starting out, focus on each of these tips alongside our 4 step progression: How to Carve on Skis.
Kaylin's 3 tips to improve your carving
- Take it back a notch to an easier piste - a blue or a green. Focus on your 'touch' on the snow, creating edge angles early in the turn. Build muscle memory and trust in your edges before developing your carving on anything steeper.
- Get into a forward stance so you can put pressure through your bindings. Many skiers will sit back, stick their arms out forwards and think they are pressuring the boot with forwards lean. Kaylin talks about lifting your balance upwards and forwards with your hips as you roll your ankles then knees into the turn.
- Build a stable platform with a shoulder-width stance. Let your skis do the work, but keep your base stable and ready to handle any terrain as you make those railroad track turns.
There's nothing like the feeling when are laying it over on some groomers.
Create a higher edge angle in the carve
Once you're confident engaging your edges rather than sliding on them, you can take things up a notch with this progression from top level PSIA instructor, Tomas Mical.
- Carving efficiently requires you to balance against the outside ski. Tomas shows you how to create a platform against the outside ski so you can start to develop more angulation.
- Take it to the slopes with some skating, to put the outside ski platform into practice - keeping your fore/aft balance nice and centered
- Build up your angle with Carv's edge angle monitor.
Tomas takes you through a progression to build your carving platform and increase your edge angle.
Carv Tip: Use the edge angle monitor to hear your angulation live on each turn.
If you're using Carv, the edge angle monitor will give you a live audio feed of your edge angle for every turn as you ski.
- Try to ramp this up from 20 to 50 degrees, turn by turn. You'll have to balance against the outside ski more, using Tomas' advice and more as you progress.
- Notice if you are finding it easier to control your angle turning left or right. Your post-run edging summary will certainly help you see this (shown on the right for a well-balanced skier). If you see one side of the turn heatmap with earlier and stronger edge initiation, you know to focus on the weaker side.
