Tom GellieBig Picture Skiing Pty Ltd · Coach/Director

I asked Olympic mogul skier Matt Graham for tips on my bump skiing.

26 Nov 2025 · 1 min

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In this coaching-style exchange, Olympic mogul skier Matt Graham provides Tom Gellie with three core pieces of advice to improve bump skiing. First, Graham emphasizes narrowing the skiing corridor by reducing edging and using flatter skis, likening the stance to standing on the edge of a balance beam to achieve tighter line control and higher speed. Second, he teaches an absorption technique that involves staying tall over each bump—letting the legs rise rather than dropping down—so the skier maintains forward momentum and avoids bottoming out early, which can cause loss of speed and ski release. Third, Graham stresses torso anchoring down the fall line and keeping the upper body (head, arms) as still as possible, with turn rotation generated primarily through foot inversion. He also encourages the skier to have the courage to push speed, using the anchored torso and absorption to stay on the line and handle modern mogul dynamics.

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If you're my coach, give me 3 things you think I could do to improve. Try and work on having that corridor a little bit more narrow. Okay. And so to do that, you'd probably want less edging, using your absorption and sort of steering a little bit more. Flatter, flatter ski. Flatter, yeah, flatter ski. Still the same sort of feelings and sensations that you would want to feel, but everything is much narrower underneath. Yeah, you almost want to think of like, you know, if there's a balance beam, like you're literally just right on the edge of that balance beam. Yeah, okay. Then you'll be able to really start to work your absorption and going faster.
One thing I have, I have worked on that's really helped with the absorption, really, when I hit a bump, not letting myself come down to it. It's all like trying to stay as tall and strong here, and the legs only come up, not me go down to my legs.
If you bottom out early, you can't like, like maintain forward momentum over the crest. You'll end up—
your skis will release off the front side, and you'll actually get a bit of air on a little bit of air.
Probably put in the back seat, your body like would naturally and instinctively do it. If you were to jump off this little couch here onto the floor, yeah, you could do it pretty stiff-legged. Yeah. But if that couch was 2 meters off the ground, you're naturally gonna— yes, that impact. Yes. And so put— being able to, I guess, have like the courage and the, and, and the will to push the speed a little bit. Generally, like, your torso is, is— you want it to be anchored, just anchored down the fall line. You're just pretty much pointing down the fall line the whole whole time. Yeah. And the rotation and the angulation comes from basically a little bit of like a foot inversion. But in modern-day moguls nowadays, it's like upper body, head completely still, arms as still as possible.
Tight turns. It's good, it's very good.