Ski instructor Phil Smith explains why traditional turning techniques fail in tight trees and moguls. The real speed control comes from snow displacement: pushing snow with your skis to create resistance. It's a physical interaction, not a geometric one.
'Give me one thing where, wherever we are, whether we're skiing through the powder, skiing through the track, the bumpy sections, through the trees, off jumps, whatever happens to be one thing.' And everybody said, 'Well, we've got to control our speed.' Okay, so we've got to control our speed. So that became the defining thing. We've got to control our speed. So we started to discuss this. Well, how do we control our speed? And we know that in ski instructor terms, you know, when you're working on open areas, it was all about turn shape.
Round turn shape.
All about taking the curve and coming back round up the curve at the end. We can't, where we were, that just was not possible. So that ruled that out. Okay, so turn shape is out here. You know, we're narrow, we're chopped up, we've got trees. You know, you take a nice curve, you're going to end up one ski in the side of a tree. So the general concept of using turn shape was completely thrown out the window. Okay, well, what else? Well, skid. Well, there's nowhere to skid. You know, we're in soft snow, tracked snow. There isn't anywhere where we could create skid to control speed. There's nowhere. So then we started again, well, how are we actually controlling our speed? And we started to talk about snow. The actual, the one substance that we use to control our speed is snow. And that seems to be the missing link. Crazy, isn't it? Here we are. We need snow. It talks about it.
Yeah.
We talk about speed control as though it doesn't, that snow doesn't exist, you know, turn shape, skidding. Where's the snow in that? So we started to talk about snow and then we talked about moving snow. Yeah, we've got to move the snow. We've got to— because we all know that when people ski, snow sprays up. So there's obviously some kind of movement going on, a play between you and the mountain, you and the snow. So we started to talk about snow, and it, you know, we were coming off these jumps into thigh-deep snow. So we immediately got snow, you know, our thighs pushing through the snow, which controlled our speed. And there's other times where, you know, we'd have to shove it with our bases, um, and all sorts of things. So, and it was actually one person in the group that came up with the word snow displacement, you know. So, and I said, yeah, that is the word. We are moving or displacing snow.
It's like, okay, you got to interview Phil Smith. He's gonna be a really interesting character. Okay, sure. Who is this guy? So YouTube, Phil Smith, searching. Oh, there's some video. Oh, look, he's got some, some webinars. All right, let's hear about what he's got to say. And I think that was the first one I clicked on. And it was during COVID so you had all this time and you were chatting skiing and you brought this topic up. And I would say this, I just realized at that moment, I was like, right, I think I— that's when I sent the email to you. I was like, Phil, I need to— like, I gotta, I gotta interview you.
Most skiers overlook how they use their poles. Try these five pointers next time you’re skiing.
