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The Summit coaching team are all passionate about being in the mountains.
We have years of experience coaching and have a diverse range of skills. While we’re all ski instructors, you’ll also find BASI trainers, International Mountain Leaders, race coaches, photographers and kitesurf coaches. However, we each have a desire to keep learning, keep developing ourselves and to pass this on to our clients.
Over the years we have distilled our training thoughts and now love to keep things pretty simple as we pass on our expertise. The ideas below are written in relation to training for instructor exams but they stand true if you are simply looking to improve your ski technique too.
We believe the best way to get better is to start by improving your understanding and awareness of what is the right level and where you sit in relation to that. Until then, you will be yearning for someone at the bottom of every run you do to tell you if you are ‘doing it right’ or ‘at the level’ (sound familiar?).
Once you understand what you are trying to achieve, you no longer rely on the constant external feedback, and can start making use of all your skiing time to make technical changes and improvements.
By working together we will create your own individual pathway to being better. We break down skiing into simple movement patterns and then practice them across all strands. This helps to bed in skills and makes for more playful and technical skiing.
The rest of it is pretty simple. In a nutshell – go skiing! Get out there, whatever the weather, whatever the conditions and ski. Take your new understanding and input focus into all the challenging conditions to become a more rounded skier.
It’s too easy to be reliant on ‘perfect’ training conditions and blaming external factors when things don’t go right. Prepare yourself for anything that comes at you in an exam, by skiing bad snow, steep refrozen slush bumps, breakable crud, bullet proof icy pistes etc. Do this as well as skiing the fun stuff of course!
We strongly believe that skiing can’t be learnt from a book or YouTube! You have to make changes in your technique and then consolidate them by simply going skiing. Ski everything. Ski every day. Challenge yourself with snow, weather, terrain, equipment and arousal levels. This is the best way to make sure you can get to your next exam confidently skiing above the level and ready for anything.
In our experience as employers and examiners one thing many young aspiring ski instructors coming through BASI today miss is skiing mileage. Experience skiing ‘bad snow’ makes you a better skier on perfect pistes. The ability to ski a flowing fall line descent on a steep slope with trees, terrain changes and variable snow might not be examined, but it uses all the fundamentals and skills required to be a good skier. The challenge’s these runs present, help you a lot more than doing short turns down the same piste again and again and again.
To improve your skiing, we will ski a lot of short turns, bumps, central theme and all the other strands. But we will also go and ski every condition the mountain can throw at us to help you be the best skier you can be.
