Practice won’t make you better. But deliberate practice will!

So I went up and did my best short turns, like as good as I could make them. And sure enough, you know, like 158, 159. And I would do this, okay, I'm gonna do it again, I can do better than that. But I couldn't break it. I couldn't break 160 no matter what I tried. Kind of tried this 4 or 5 runs on this, the exact same run. There was hardly anyone else up there. There was nothing to do. And I had to stop myself and I said, hey, I'm getting caught in the trap of going out and just trying harder. Like, just going and trying harder doesn't work. That night I basically got on Carv and went and looked at the top short turn people there. The biggest difference in mine and theirs was g-force. That was it. And I was like, okay. So I went out the next day. I'm bad at warming up, but basically I went straight in there and I was like, okay, I want more g-force, which I know is lateral acceleration. So what am I going to do? I'm going to make the ski bite harder at the end of the turn. What move am I going to do to make the ski do that? And I'm like, you know, I'm just going to drive my knees in more. I'm just going to kind of edge more aggressively. And sure enough, bang, second turn in, I'm throwing the beer cans. I'm squeezing my stomach to handle it. And I rode the Bronco all the way down the hill. But like when we jump into a zipper line, force yourself to stay in there. So I felt ugly, and I'm— thank goodness no one saw me because I'm sure it looked ugly. But I pulled up 164 because I had the earpieces in, and I was like, that's interesting. And as I thought, I processed that more, and I was like, that's awesome. Carv is just looking at the really important bit, and that's the performance at the ski-to-snow interface.

When you ski, do you practice or do you do deliberate practice? Now they sound very similar, but on today's podcast you'll find out, just like I did, that there's an actual difference between the two. Today's guest is Mark Sedgwick. He is one of the founders of the PSIC, the Canadian Ski Instructors Association, that's new over the last few years, and he's also, at the end of this season, the current 180 SkiIQ leader on the Carv SkiIQ leaderboard for short turns. But not only that, he's right up there pretty much in the top 10 top 5 even for pretty much all turn types, so he is a master at everything, and today we're going to find out exactly how he worked on his skiing, how he cracked carve, how he looked at the metrics and points out the mistakes most people are making for every turn type, and how you can change that if you really want to, number 1, improve your skiing, and then number 2, get your points SKIIQ higher up on that Carv leaderboard. It was a really fascinating episode, it goes for a long time because it was so, so interesting, so stick around, there's tons of takeaways in this one, we're making sure that there's a lot of value given. I'm excited, I've got the ski season in Australia coming up, I'm going to be working on improving some things that Mark has suggested. That's enough from me, let's get into the latest episode of the Big Picture Skiing Podcast. I'm Tom Gellie and you're hearing from Mark Sedgwick.

Hey Mark, I've been wanting to speak to you after this season because you've had a great winter with carve. Like, I'm sitting back here looking at my phone and the community leaderboard, and there's this, this, this friend of mine, Mark Sedgwick. At certain points of the season, you were number 1 for, for the highest SkiIQ in carving. You were, you ended up number 1 with 180 SkiIQ in short turns, so the highest that's been scored this, this winter. So I wanted to sit sit down with you and go, how did you do all this? Because I haven't, I haven't really spent as much time diving deep into Carv. Today I really want to dig into this, and you're going to give away— or maybe, yeah, you're going to help us figure out how to work on all the different turn types and maximize, get higher SkiIQ points. So we'll hear from you around that later, but to help people understand who you are Can you, can you answer that question? Who, who are you? Why are you, why are you like number one in short turns on with, with Carver Ski IQ?

Um, well, firstly, thanks for having me. Um, yeah, why am I number one on short turns? You know, I think I'm very fortunate. I get lots of time to ski and I use that time very wisely. You know, deliberate practice, which there's some science to that. The tool or the instrument panel which Carv provides facilitates a feedback loop, um, and it shortens the feedback loop. It gives me that, what do I need to correct? I can go and try something. Did it correct it? So that continuous improvement, um, just over and over and over. So kind of, who am I? Um, yeah, I don't do a lot of these, so I don't really even have social, so people don't know who I am.

When did you start skiing?

Yeah, I started skiing as a kid, a young kid in Australia. My aunties took me down to the snow at Perisher when I was about 10, and that was it. I loved it from that moment, and it basically, you know, here I am mid-50s, and I've never left the ski industry. I didn't always ski, you know. I went to— I was a skier Then I went into the business side, um, running ski resorts, and then I've come back to skiing. So that's a very short answer, but okay, well, where did you start out?

So your aunties took you skiing? Because I think there's an important message in here that's good for the everyday skier. You know, you're an Australian, you didn't grow up at a ski resort, you started skiing at 10, not 3 years old. You still, you're, you're, you're at your scoring in terms of the metrics on Carv higher than people that have, you know, competed at a high level. So there's— I want to dig a bit into that. So when did you start spending more time on snow? Was it becoming an instructor?

Yeah, other— as soon as I could drive myself, like at 16, I think I had my own car right away. Um, I would drive down. So I joined a traineeship, um, mechanical engineering traineeship at BHP, and I started that quite young. Um, so I had some enough to buy a car. And basically all, you know, university school holidays, I would, I would kind of go down to the snow, and I would drive down there Friday night, ski Saturday, Sunday, and drive back Sunday night. And I was in Wollongong, just north of Wollongong, so it was about 5 hours. So yeah, so that was, that was my passion coming through. And then, and then of course, I, yeah, spent all of even the holidays, um, in in Europe or in Canada doing different things. And I went through my, you know, instructor certifications very young. Um, yeah, APSI kind of level 4, or there was only 3 levels back then, of course, you know, CSIA kind of level 4. I went through the Austrian system because I used to go between Australia and Europe for 4 years. You know, I raced with the local race club there, SV Alschäffau, um, you know, and I, I did get to a fairly high level, you know, for a ski instructor, kind of into ski team and all of the like. So yeah, I, I skied a lot and had a lot of good coaching, and I had a lot of opportunity. So I was, I was pretty lucky.

Can you— are there any noteworthy mentions there, influences, maybe, you know, one from each country or something that you— that really had an impact, you think, even to this day? To your— on your skiing?

Yeah, totally. It was all Austrian. So back in my day, the, the most of the Aussie ski schools were run by Austrians. And I, you know, worked with Roland Werner and Christian Klotzner and a bunch of, you know, Manfred, and all the best skiers were Austrian back in those days. So I would watch them and imitate them. And then in the longer Northern Hemisphere, I would be in Schaffau in Austria, um, working my way through the Austrian system. So I looked like an Austrian skier. I was an Austrian skier, you wouldn't tell. And even at the end of kind of the winter in Schäffau, I would go to Stubai— the town was Neustift— to extend the season before I came back to Australia to get a longer season. So it was— and I know it's changed, um, it was all Austrian influence back then.

Okay, because I mean, I, I see a theme in you, knowing you a bit, of really liking figuring things out, problem solving. So I know sometimes some people have trouble switching between systems associations because of the language differences, uh, what, what they interpret this other person is trying to get them to achieve. Do you think you had a way, the way you think about things, that That didn't seem to be a problem because you went bam, tried that system, passed the top level, tried that system. And any insights around, do you get my question there? Because I think some people struggle with the problem I'm trying to help people with is people struggle with maybe not seeing things broadly enough to figure out, oh, it's the same. This is the slight difference.

Yeah, I'm not sure I have a hugely satisfying answer, but if I had a superpower in there, if you're observing that, it was actually just my love and passion for the sport. I would think about it 24/7, no matter where I was. You know, you're doing trail running and you're running down the trail, and, you know, I was skiing the bumps or all of that. So my mind was continually processing, you know. So it was— there was visualization going on there as well. Now listen, it wasn't like trained visualization where you had a, you know, a sports psychiatrist and you're working on this, which is which we now know actually works, right? You can— if you're good enough at it, the brain doesn't really even know the difference. But so I stumbled upon that just because of obsession. My obsession, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, that's funny because it makes me think of— I can remember maybe my third season in Canada in Silver Star. The day'd be over and I'd be in my little room that I'd rent. My laptop was there and I'd fall asleep watching Austrian ski technique videos, Japanese ski technique videos, Paul Lorenz, Riley Lorenz, Riley McGlashan videos on YouTube. Every single night. So similar to you, I was just always— and it— what I didn't want to watch anything else. That's what I wanted to watch. So I definitely relate to that. Can't stop thinking, thinking about skiing, really accelerating your ability to, to improve and notice things in the moment and, and realize you need to pivot and change and work on something different. Um, yeah, so that's just cool. I, I, I can totally, yeah, relate to that, to that obsession.

Yeah, something you mentioned in there is problem solving. You know, I think both as a programmer or a computer scientist and engineering, mechanical engineering, it's all around problem solving. So it wasn't a, you know, it wasn't a big stretch for me in something I was way more passionate about than those two things to continually be problem solving. And if you're doing the same thing and expecting a different result, you know, that will drive you insane. You know, Einstein or someone said that. So you need to realize that you actually need to change something to get a different result. And that can be subtle differences, kind of with timing and intensity even. So yeah, yeah, understanding. And maybe we can get into a little bit of, you know, the difference between play and purposeful practice and deliberate practice, because I think that— yes, we'll get into the CARV, but that will really help people. If they can kind of distill and understand there's differences in how we train and the effects that can have on performance.

Okay, well, let's go, go there right now because I'm sure people are wondering, okay, sure, this is— I think this is part of how you accelerated your CARV scores anyway. So let's, let's go there. So help us understand, if we're going to go out and ski this play, purposeful practice. Yeah, help us, help us out with your, uh, your, your sort of definitions around that.

Yeah, and there's no— there's not a good and a bad one here. So it's just they produce different things. Um, so just aligning what outcome you want with the type of training you're doing is efficient. So play, Play's the best. You go out there just to ski, you know, with your mates everywhere. The mountain is a white canvas, all of that. No better, you know, there's nothing better than coming in after a day skiing with friends, um, on the hill. So that's play, right? And do we slowly get better? Yeah, sure, the, you know, just through that. And then there's when you're going out, um, with a goal and you're actually training something. So you're getting repetitions and you're kind of paying attention to things. So that's not play, that's I'm training with some purpose. So purposeful practice. And then there's a difference between skiing with some goals and looking at some outcomes to deliberate practice. Now deliberate practice, there's a few things that are necessary. One is, one, it's not always fun. Because you're, you're close to the edge of your limit. You need to add that in. So it's not always pretty, and we can get to that in a minute, but you've got to push yourself. You're at the top of your challenge zone, per se. Another property is you need expert and timely feedback. So you can get that with an amazing coach. You can get that kind of through some video if it's timely enough. Or, surprise, surprise, what excites me about CARV, it supplied the mechanism to have me out there solo with deliberate practice. And that is incredibly powerful. So definitely, that's deliberate practice.

Yes, because being in, in the world, especially of online coaching, some of my students find the hardest thing is to how do I get that feedback? I don't want to ask someone to video me. Um, so there's been suggestions, you know, Insta360 camera held in your hand, but that has limitations. Um, but yes, utilizing Carv, which I'm going to admit I haven't used as much because of my habitual way of training has been more through ski, try something, video, ski, do it again, look at video, change. you know, based on feelings and, and a visual. So this is really cool to learn a little bit more about someone that's really used— probably, would you say, how much percentage-wise are you basing off CARV versus like video or anything else?

What we, we used to only have video, and video, listen, video is fantastic, um, but you can't do it yourself, you know what I mean? Yeah, you've got to have someone with you, and is it timely? Where it is— yeah, people get good at it and you can do it timely. Um, but yeah, carve is next level from, from that perspective.

Like, this season, do you think it was 90% carve feedback?

Yeah, sorry, that was the question. Um, yeah, yeah, listen, I, I have the really good fortune of skiing with amazing skiers all the time. So there is feedback there, but, and no offense to these amazing skiers that have certainly helped me, um, Carv tells you the truth, as in what the g-force is. Am I— how much edge similarity do I have? What is my edge angle? What is— how much lateral force is pushing on my ski? What is my turn shape? So, you know, there, there's certainly things an expert eye can tell you about about your skiing. And there's something amazing about following great skiers. And that's one of my favorite things to listen— I actually love following all skiers, not just amazing skiers. And I, you know, mirror neuron, I copy them often to figure out kind of what they're doing, if their timing's out or how the ski's reacting and things like that. But selfishly, it's really good to follow amazing skiers. We just finished, you know, my last time on skis was about 3 weeks ago. We had a, a PSOC Tech Festival here, and we had some amazing skiers from all around the world come. Some of them you've already mentioned on this pod, on, on, on, you know, as we were chatting earlier. Um, and I had the opportunity to follow them, and just the timing and when they get the snow to push on them and that force, um, it's really helpful. But all that to come back to answering your question cleanly and with clarity Um, because listen, this is only an n of 1, but the 1 is you and the 1 is me. And I know what I tried, my purpose. I know what movement pattern and timing and intensity I did. I have the instrument panel to give me a view into what actually happened, and then I can— that feedback mechanism, I can change it again. It's really hard to beat that. So 90% of my improvement this year— that's a good number— was directly through Carv, even though I am skiing with the top skiers or the top trainers in Canada and some of them around the world recently.

Yes.

Okay, there's a bit more fun sometimes in skiing with folks like that, but you, you were asking specifically on my improvement, and the clean answer is 90% was through utilizing carve as an instrument panel and a tool through deliberate practice.

Yes. And that morning, you're— in your mind, you said, I'm going out to work on this, and you stayed focused on that goal. That's kind of— would you summarize that in deliberate practice? Like a—

yeah, so controlling the environment. So, you know, I'm at Whistler, so I'm based in Whistler. So fortunately, I have Normally we have great snow and we have two big mountains, but the best groomers are in the morning. So that is a predictable surface layer, unpredictable pitches, and repeatability comes from controlling the environment as well on that deliberate practice side. So absolutely, I'm out there first thing training in that environment. So I'm controlling those variables as well. So, you know, Russ Wood, who, who, who you know and who's one of our senior trainers and actually is incredible. Skier and trainer and etc., extremely adept with Carv as well and Spearheads and puts together a lot of kind of the PSIC Carv programs. He, he's a bit jealous and he says you can use it like a laboratory because I'm not out there, you know, having to teach kind of the public or work every day. I do get to train most mornings. Now it's only in the mornings.

That's a really—

that's a luxury.

Yes. Like A lot of the time, like me living in Australia, traveling to places, it's often for a camp or to film some content. And so my time to really get that is sort of spread out in between. Oh, great. I know my, my students are on the right path. I can work on my own skiing for a little bit and then I've got to switch back over and check they're going okay. So I guess my point here is if you really are trying to improve your own sking, you do have to cut out that time just for you. Just like with, as you said, with the right environment, set that up right. But, but it definitely helps having focused your own time. Am I— is that what you're saying?

100%. If you, you know, kind of, you know, go to your best AI bot or whatever model and type in, you know, deliberate practice and what defines deliberate practice, and it'll set out a bunch of criteria, and you're like, oh, that's pretty serious training, you know what I mean? It's what— yeah, it's what, you know, the World Cup skiers are doing, or the, the top athletes in any, any sport, uh, a very specifically and precisely using deliberate practice to improve them as much as possible.

Yes. So at the end of this season, after coaching this group of skiers I coach— I take on about 40 people throughout the winter, like really intense sort of focused training, give them topics, things to work on, they send videos back. One of the main things that frustrated me as a coach, or just, or I noticed as something they needed, was constant reminder of, hey, I didn't say to go work on that thing that you've reported back you've worked on. I said go and work on this, this one skill or drill until you can see, like, edge rolls, for example, on a green run, until you can 2 clean lines, don't stop practicing that. And they would even get the video, send it in, it's like, are there 2 clean lines? No, they're not. Okay, go back out and do it. So what I developed now, I've been playing around with it with the age of AI, is, is on my app there's actually, uh, at the bottom here, an improve skiing button. Um, and so on there you can actually look at You click first of all, uh, are your skis sharp? So I start out with that, and then you can actually choose I'm not sure or no, they're not. And if you choose that, it'll give you only a certain number of things you can work on that don't require sharp, sharp ski edges. So if you don't, didn't have, haven't had a ride, it goes through this, and then, and then it basically narrows down what's your focus. And then you click through and you have to type it in, and then it goes, right, go and, go and work on it. And then you click the next thing and it goes, can you do it 75% of the time now? No. And it goes, go back and do more. So just, it's just this reminder. Instead of me having to at the end of the day do it, I wanted something that kind of stopped people being so distracted and just actually did this deliberate practice until, you know, they got a change or felt some differences.

So I can give you you know, a story at the— for me, at the start of this year that I think kind of captures it, you know, better than maybe me trying to unpack the esoteric academic side of it. And it's, you know, so I've been on K.A.R.V. for about 2 years and I got pretty serious with it. And by pretty serious, I mean really understanding the tool and using it last year. So it kind of came out of the blocks running this year and K.A.R.V. introduced all the different turn types this year. So, you know, last year they only had— or last season, Northern Hemisphere— they only had carve turns. And now they've got kind of the short turns and the, the bumps and parallel as well in there. And I think there's even snowplow, but, um, yeah, you don't often go out and train snowplow. So here we are, start of the season on Blackcomb. Uh, I, you know, oh, short turns. I love short turns. We all love short turns, right? Short turns are the gateway to the entire mountain skiing. They allow us to ski steeps, they allow us to ski bumps. So super important, the most versatile, you know, turn in skiing. And, you know, a drifted short turn or a steered or whatever, right, is the, the most versatile turn in skiing. But anyway, let's kind of get more on to the point. So I went up and did my best short turns, like as, as, as good as I could make them. And sure enough, you know, like 158 159, and I would do this. Okay, I'm going to do it again. I can do better than that. Like, but I couldn't break it. I couldn't break 160 no matter what I tried. Kind of tried this 4 or 5 runs on the, on this, the exact same run. There was hardly anyone else up there. There was nothing to do. And I had to stop myself and I said, hey, I'm getting caught in the trap of going out and just trying harder. Like, just going and trying harder doesn't work. So I was like, that night I basically got on Carv and went and looked at the top short-term people that were on there. And the biggest difference in their metrics, because it's not really about SkiIQ, it's the metrics that drive the SkiIQ and it's the metrics that drive improvement. So spend your time there and the SkiIQ will follow. There's a tidbit in the story. So basically the biggest factor there, the biggest difference in mine and theirs was G-force. That was it. And I was like, okay. So I went out the next day. I'm bad at warming up, but basically I went straight in there and I was like, okay, I want more G-force, which I know is lateral acceleration. So what am I going to do? I'm going to make the ski bite harder at the end of the turn. What move am I going to do to make the ski do that? And I'm like, you know, I'm just going to drive my knees in more. I'm just going to kind of edge more aggressively. And sure enough, Bang, second turn in, I'm throwing the beer cans, I'm squeezing my stomach to handle it, and I rode kind of the, you know, that, that the, the, the Bronco all the way down the hill. But like when we jump into a zipline, force yourself to stay in there. So I felt ugly, and I'm— thank goodness no one saw me because I'm sure it looked ugly. But I pulled up 164 because I had the earpieces in, and I was like, that's interesting. And as I thought, I processed that more, and I was That's awesome. Carv is just looking at the really important bit, and that's the performance at the ski-to-snow interface, right? So that ski-to-snow interaction, it had picked up all of that extra lateral force. Now, I didn't have the timing to deal with that, or my movement pattern in my timing, but I forced myself to stay in there, and just through that I got a much higher score, and there it is. So I coined my phrase that, that I've used ever since: you first have to make something exist before you can make it better, right? So I had to make the g-force go up by hook or by crook, and I did. But I didn't look very good. But then I tidied that up. I got, you know, when I'm kind of absorbing a little bit of that pressure, my timing moving into the new turn a little a little bit more proximal stiffness. So, you know, holding my, my, my, my core stiffer, a little bit stronger pole plant. And then all of a sudden you get into where you can make low 160s consistently without getting thrown around. So what do you do next? You do the same thing. You get— you make yourself get ugly again. And sure enough, over and over and over, those stepping stones, you end up all the way through. And in my case, kind of right through to, to 180. And yes, it wasn't just about g-force, but I will give you one thing. G-force in short turns, g-force and edge similarity are the two biggest things you can do, bar none. Okay, that would— that will drive— if you're out there wondering what is the most, the biggest effect I can have on my short turns SkiIQ, it is drive the metrics of g-force and edge similarity. And, you know, if I was to sprinkle some other things in there, almost throw out everything else other than weight release, edge angle, early edge, and turn shape.

So they then— they kind of— you put them as the next ones underneath the, what'd you say, G-force, edge similarity.

Yeah, there you go.

Yeah.

So you need to continually drive more and more lateral acceleration, G-force. Yeah. But you can't let or dilute edge sim. You know, there's one thing I do think I think we can, you know, if I was to give Carv a recommendation, even though it might bite my own scores, is I think we can relax EdgeSim to the degree that they have it. But, um, but anyway, let's, uh, back to you.

We could come back to that. Okay, before we get onto that, because that's where I want to go next, I want, uh, you to help us improve the different turn types with your— what you've figured out. I want to go back to, I, wouldn't you say most people when you give them this, hey, ramp up G-force and try just pressing harder and roll your knees harder, and they end up on the bucking bronco, throw arms everywhere out of control. And maybe even they're in a group environment too with other people that they look up to. Probably a common mistake here is they go, oh, that was bad. And they, then they wind it all back to where their comfort zone is.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

That happens. So it's like, now you got to remember Mark's story. If you do that now, you don't do the exist thing and then refine it. You're still— you're just going to live in this world with a ceiling, like where you were, where you were like 159, 159. You just try harder, you know, kind of, but within your zone of skill, sort of like, yeah, ceiling of the skill. You have to get ugly and push it and you have to be okay with that. Let your ego go perhaps, and just, and just trust the process. Humans get better. Like, kids can't walk when they come out of the womb. They fall over, they fall over, and then they've, you know, but, but they don't have that, that worry of looking silly. Skiers need to take that same approach.

And, you know, listen, because we are one of them, ski instructors are the worst. They don't want to look not tucked in. You know, this, this, this, you know, function before form. You need to get something to exist before you can make it better. And getting something to exist requires often a change and being uncomfortable and not looking like you were. We revert back to what we think, where we're comfortable right away, particularly with an audience. So that, you know, they're, they're there's the beauty in Carv. It doesn't— it can't see what anything else is doing other than down with what the most important thing is, kind of the skis in the boots, the skis in the boots, that ski-to-snow interface, what is happening down there. Because yeah, and we, you know, I found that this year there's this— when— and even we have We utilize CARV in our level— I'll just, I need to dilute a story a little bit here because people listen to this, they, they might put a few things together. But we, so we utilize CARV in our level 4, not for, not for participants teaching each other.

I just got to jump in here for context because I didn't really introduce this. Mark is one of the, the people involved in the Professional Ski Instructors of Canada, which is an association that certifies ski instructors to, to go out and teach anyway. So there are levels 1, 2, 3, 4, 4 being the highest one. And so what Mark is talking about is they're now beginning to use Carv metrics and scores, I believe, with that process of, of examining, assessing people. Is that where you're going with this?

Yeah, so we use Carv in a number of ways within our organization. One of those ways is we have put it into our Level 4 program, and 2 out of 7 of the skiing objectives, learning objectives, evaluated objectives are purely— so carve turns and short turns, we do use the SkiIQ. So through that process, so I'm talking about instructors and great trainers, and we've all been conditioned to a certain degree to have this picture in our head of form. And where I'm saying I'm flipping that, function precedes form or function leads form. You know, we have some individuals that have really grasped driving their metrics, which in turn drives their SkiIQ, but didn't quite have the look potential some of our trainers are expecting, and they would be a little harsh on it. So, you know, really opening ourselves up to utilizing the tool kind of properly and with its power, there's a bit of cultural resistance there. And we, we as a species, you know, the, the instructor and the demo team need to move a little bit more towards the performance lens, not just the form lens and the function lens. Because you look at, you know, you look at some people that have, you know, never taught or never been in ski schools, and they've been great racers, and they've gone through kind of the racing programs, and many of them are extremely powerful and very talented skier. But you will hear comments about, oh yeah, but they rotate, and yeah, they don't angulate that well. And it's at times it's very hard not to to, you know, be harsh to that and say, look at the performance they're getting. Like, there's no— and don't get me wrong, we all like to look tucked in and pretty, but if you don't push, you know, if you don't flip that script and, you know, function first, you might never get— you won't get the performance that you're capable of. So let the form thing go a little bit. So we're now— to come back full circle, in our Level 4 training program, we had some of our trainers that still needed to not be so harsh with their eye and trust the process that the metrics and the SkiIQ was driving. And it played out really well at the end. So that whole make something exist before you make it better or clean it up really did work. So all of a sudden, you know, there's one individual I'm thinking of, super high ski IQ short turns, not everyone's cup of tea with the, the form side of it. We took that individual, put him behind one of our trainers that is incredible at short turns. He took, you know, the, the participant took what he's been doing with his performance, just mirrored the trainer in front of him, and everyone was just blown away at that. That as soon as he tweaked that look into look because he already had the performance. It was an easy stepping stone. And that to me, and I probably didn't explain it as, as powerful as the visual effect was or that experience, but it was incredibly telling and incredibly powerful that we'll take into kind of next year. So yeah, we, we can jump into other ways that we actually carve in the organization too.

But yeah, because I think this is, this is a really, for me, and maybe I'm going to bring some of my own background and bias on things. But I think there's that function side, and then there's the— I don't know if maybe I'd categorize it as form, but, but style and, and, and look and visual appeal, uh, I weight really highly in my own skiing. And I'll try and explain that part too, because I get where you're coming from. But then, and I think also what you mentioned there, there was this change after function was worked on, and then maybe a flow form style was added. But anyway, if I go and watch— if I— when I'm watching Instagram and I'm watching all the races, freeskiing, I have skiers that I want to ski like, even though they're not always on the podium and winning. Sometimes they do, but, but I'm there looking, and I like— for whatever reason, I'm drawn to that. And I think that comes back to dancing like dancing, for example. You can get someone who's very attractive doing a slow sort of style of dance versus a fast, all these different ones. And it's not just what their feet are doing or even just their hips, it's everything, like their head, their hands, posture. And I think evolutionary speaking, like, we've always had that in, in human culture, like dance and expression of, of through, through the body. So I guess I totally get where you're coming from, and I do see that part. And I kind of wonder, like, when Kav brings in the senses for the hands and, and the spine and the head or something, you get like— I don't know if that's going to be detrimental or not, but it would bring about feedback on expression and use there. I hope I get— I hope I'm making my point here, because that part of skiing I love. I love it when someone looks amazing. Like you said, this guy, Carv scoring him higher maybe even than some of the examiners, and then they follow someone that has a certain look or style or timing difference that's different to perhaps also what Carv likes or is trained on as well, because that's another thing I think you've got to consider is Carve have composed their metrics around a sort of an ideal. They don't have a range of, well, here's the— here's American style, here's an Italian style. It's just like, this is the top based only on performance. So anyway, what, uh, yeah, thoughts on that? Because that always comes to my mind.

This— no, no, it's so— yeah, let me add some clarity here. So we've been very focused kind of through your questioning on Carv. But Carv is just a single lens, and the lens is a performance lens. So the, the style— and I think that's a great word— and expression, you know, it doesn't invalidate them. It's, you know, the right tool for the right job. So if you're going after, you know, on a predictable snow surface, performance short turns and, and carve turns. There's some clear metrics in there that we can agree drive performance. Now, how you get into the art of skiing and how people look and their style, I think, is just as valid, but it's a different thing, um, and it can be appreciated, you know, as much or more. And I do think I think that having, you know, only thinking about it one way or the other, you're missing out because, you know, Carv is not a skiing panacea. It's just an instrument panel into some forces and what the ski is actually doing on the snow. The rest of it, the expression side, is up to us. Listen, and let's be clear on this, you know, you can't go over your— go after your PB, your personal best scores on Carv every day. That is, you're delusional. You need the right snow, the right light. You need to be in the right space, the right slope preparation to get it, because that— the integrity of the surface is material in how that plays out. Because Carr's very sensitive to forces and noise at the ski, which is a great thing. But on, you know, on the flip side of that, You know, having someone, you know, pick your favorite racer. Hell, you watch, we, you know, if you watch a lot of World Cup, both slalom and certainly GS, they're all coming down within tenths of seconds, even closer sometimes. But there's differences in timing and style and looks. The performance is all there across them all, right? But style is different. And humans, from an aesthetic perspective, from a style perspective, we're very drawn to that. So don't let our discussion on Carve negate anything on the other side. Both are very valid. The same way, listen to every— everyone, take what you want, because the Italians have a bit of a different style than the Austrians, as do, you know, more the countries from Asia and things like that. And that is subjective as well, that, that look or that form or that style. So that, that's some of the clarity that I love about Carve. It's consistent, it's objective all the time, it's repeatable. Where these other things, there's— it's more open.

Yes. Yeah. And I think that comes back to— I mean, the two things I was thinking of, my— some of my favorite sports to watch have style involved. So I love watching like freestyle skiing, for example, even, uh, freeride mountain biking like the Crankworx, where there is, you know, someone could do a 360 instead of a 720, but the 360 has this tweaked out style, slow, maybe, you know, it hasn't got the, the more is better type aspect to it. It's got, got this visual appeal that like the crowd might get up and go, go crazy for. So I, so I think you're absolutely right. There's like where you want to take your skiing, and Carv is a tool that can help push you and constrain you down this road and not get distracted by your— the visual look of things. You can always come back, as you mentioned, put that on, put that cherry on top, add that, that other part to it. Um, so there's that part. And then, and then the other thing too is like where Carv is measuring your skiing from, you always have to remember it, it, it's, it's just— it can't see anything more than what you basically— your boots are doing attached to your skis. You can't even really tell, like, so much what, what your skis are doing because your boots can kind of move almost a bit independent to some degree.

There's some compliance in there. Yes, for sure.

Yes, vibrations is going to be felt differently. So yeah, just maybe think of, you know, the day when there's just 100 sensors on your entire body and your ski, and then what that system might look like.

Yeah, yeah. And that's interesting. I'm, I don't have an opinion on that yet. I haven't thought through it. I almost, you know, instinctively like, I want Carve to stay in the lane of it's a performance tool only because you get down, that is objective. And then you get kind of like we touched on before, who's to say you train the models on an Italian style or a certain style? That's not necessarily better. Better than another style. It's just different. Whereas if you stick to the performance lane, it's very defensible. You start to get into the other side of it, and it's not— but I will say this, and, and listen, I'm all with you on, on style. You know, I've been a member of a couple of demo teams and everything like that. Don't get me wrong, I want to look good out there as well, but it's very hard to work on your style in a carve turn when you can't carve a turn. Learn to carve a turn first. When you get very comfortable with what you're doing with the skis, the feeling, the push of the snow, then you can start to play around with things around that. So first make it exist, then clean it up, then express yourself.

Yes.

You know, he— the, the mountain— this is a little bit esoteric, but in— this is how I think about it. The— we, we're in a continual dance with the It is a wonderful force problem. And we solve that problem by having options. And the majority of those options are solved by just manipulating the ski in a few primary ways, whether that's we twist it a bit, we edge it a bit, or we manage pressure. And the blending of those three things gives us almost infinite options out there. The super complicated bit is it comes in with movement. The body is a system and how we move, and that's where we need to be very careful jumping to movements, if that makes sense. Understand how skiing works, that ski-to-snow interaction, getting the snow to push on us in useful ways.

Yes. So I was— yeah, so then my wish for Carv and staying within Performance Lane is I wish you could just tweak, say, within carving, they broke that down into 4 different carve— carving types. So for example, this would be— if I relate to the racing world, this would be me as the coach setting a GS course that is very direct and straight and seeing and spending 2 weeks skiing that until you get very good at being able to do it, and then compressing the gates vertically and stretching them horizontally, and then forcing people to ski that. And who can ski that fastest? Because it's going to take a different set of skills. Like, at the moment, the carving score is only based on, at the moment, a particular basically race course setup only, not, not of a, not a varied one. And I think we all know that you have to train that varied one, because if you do get out in a real mountain, the slope changes, the snow changes, uh, maybe the direction where you need to go, more left, more right, changes. And if you have an inbuilt pattern of just one style, then you're going to be stuck there. So I wish it would— I hope it would change, like the Italian long turn, just to put a name on it, the, the Canadian long turn, the Aussie one, the Japanese one, and and you could go and— what would be cool with CARV is it's like, if you're doing the Japanese one, these are the constraints and your metrics need to change to, to here. And that would be so cool because then it would force you to not just work on one style of metric. It would, it would then push you into working on another one.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm smart, you know, obviously this is a podcast, but I'm smiling. And the reason I'm smiling is humans are awesome, right? Here we are Basically, yes, Carv's been around for a while, but really they only Carv 2 for the last kind of few years. They started with one turn type only, and we were stoked because it, you know, it exposed something in skiing that we'd never had before. Then last year, or just this year, this season, they came out with kind of the 5 turn types. So let's just say 4, um, you know, they don't even have steeps in there yet, and all of a sudden you want all of these other things, and I'm with you. So all I can say is, you know, give them time, you know what I mean? Like, they're all ready, they're doing such a great job. But I agree, I would, I would love to see, first of all, um, you know, you know, living at Whistler, and, and we have, you know, as part of the kind of PSAC, we have a whole big mountain pathway. So it's, it's teaching professionals to teach and keep people safe in the off-piste. So, you know, the Whistler Freeride club, arguably the most successful freeride club on the planet. You know, like 160, 70 kids are in there, numerous world champions. Kind of Marcus from last year, Freeride World Tour, came through that club. There's always Whistler freeride, uh, um, you know, kids right at the top. So that— it's a big thing, the off-piste and the steeps at Whistler. And I understand it's a little bit different from Europe because it's all controlled here, um, whereas in Europe, you know, you get your yellow runs and it's not always controlled, so there's a bit more consequence to it. But just that, having a turn type that realizes you're in super steep terrain and that side of things. So let's come back to the carving bit. It would be great to have some analog. So we do some different types of carving in analog, like copy my signature, go out there with, you know, 3 or 4 of our best trainers, look at the signature that develops. So how it drives these metrics, you know, we've got AI models to get rid of the noise and bring it in. And you can pick, you know, you can pick your baseline carve turn, all these other types. And it might even be the Italian organization or the, you know, the Canadian PSIC organization or the APSI or the BASI or whatever in there, right? And you could do that. But I will say this, let's come back to, let's use the centerline on carve Carving, and I'm very confident with the metrics that I'm going to throw out here because I've been all over them, kind of training these and running it through models and recording it and part of my journey. So carving, the biggest driver you can have on your car, the, the biggest metric you can propel to give you a higher Ski IQ is g-force. Again, you know, and it's an easy way when you go and compare the top of the leaderboards board people to where your scores are and see the biggest delta because you can actually see their run. So G-force is kind of worth twice as much as anything else. And then there's 4 or 5 different things that are all around the same. But don't worry about doing anything other than focus on G-force, which is purely performance. And we can break down what the ski needs to do to create a bunch of G-force, and it's everyone, when you watch the higher G-force turns that really understand skiing, will realize that's a powerful turn. Um, if you can do that over and over and over, right? When one turn lands into the other, turn shape and turn closure. So it rewards pitch. So if you can get a bunch of G-force, um, on pitch, because if, if it's not very steep you can't close your turn off or you'll lose all your momentum. So both turn shape and turn closure are a little bit driven from pitch, which is fair. A higher— it's harder to carve, or pure carve depending on where you're from, um, on a steeper pitch than it is. You can take almost— bear with me for the broad analogy— anyone can carve on pretty flat terrain. You ramp that up to about 25 degrees big difference. You, you know, you go down to about a quarter of those people. You ramp that up to over 30 degrees, you go down to a handful of people.

You know what I mean?

That's very few. And we have a run exactly like that at Whistler, the Saddle, right? We take people training all the time and carve, and you— and you— and there's only a handful of people that can really carve a turn top to bottom on the saddle. It takes a lot of commitment. There's a lot of g-force. So carving metrics: g-force is your number one, turn shape and turn closure, pitch drive, that edge angle and early edging. So you need a lot of edge angle, and of course all of these metrics work together. It's very hard to get g-force, turn shape, turn closure without a lot of edge angle. You need to progressively edge the ski, do you know what I mean? When you progressively edge the ski on a steep pitch, as long as you're carving, you're going to get a lot of lateral acceleration. You're going to put your hip to the snow, then you've got to do it again. So there's the center line. So if we're looking at carving, they're the only metrics you need to be worried about. Now, yes, you have to figure out the right movements, timing, and intensity to, you know, so you can keep doing that over and over. But they're, they're the ones on the carving side.

So we've had carving and short That's, that's what I would like to go to next, is if we can go through the different turn types that you've figured out the, the kind of importance, like you're, you're telling us here, of which ones, which ones make the biggest difference to move the needle. But, uh, I guess I just wanted to clarify, I guess I was just playing like the other side of the table, just so people listening and watching understand that we both get that Carve is looking at things through, through a single lens. And me saying I wish you could tweak it to these maybe different country styles or whatever is just me expressing— I know, and you know, that versatility, being able to— like, like, if, if next season you'd probably be so stoked if carving turned into two different styles and you had to then go figure out what it was. It's like, oh, it's, it's still G-forces high, but maybe rotation rate has to change in the top of the turn versus the bottom. And so you'd love that problem-solving part, and you'd probably figure out a whole bunch of new things in your skiing to push the level. So we understand that Carv is like constraining you, but the positive thing is that we're going to get into now is that is a very good thing thing because it, it forces you to push the skill level up within that kind of constraint, just like a drill does, or a racecourse of a certain like length and pitch and whatever does. That constraint is so important instead of giving you too much freedom to, to express everything.

I couldn't agree more, and I've got an example. Not only are the turn types But, well, I'll give you an actual example. So one of our learning outcomes on the ski side at our Level 4 is more around, you know, a World Cup GS, a stivet. So we go to a super steep hill and we want you to carve down here, but it's too steep for you to carve. So what do you do? You cheat the top of the turn. And it's at a very high level. But carve, we can't use carve for that because it doesn't it doesn't reward or understand the stivet that happened. So it would be great to go and do a bunch of great stivets, um, get a bunch of data, have that signature be an option you can utilize and go, okay, I'm going to work on my stivets. And yes, of course, then you could go, well, what type of stivet? But let's not get too detailed. The same as maybe a white pass turn, you know, the same as one— you know what I do tons of, and we should get into this later, is one ski scheme because because I love connecting. You know, I think the best skiers are always connected to their inside ski no matter what, and it has a bunch of benefits. And yes, we've been taught forever, and it is practical that we ski on the outside ski, but there's a place in your competency journey where you need to use the inside ski all the time.

100%.

And you know, all of those little things, whether it's a white pass turn, whether it's a stivet, whether it's one-ski skiing, if we can capture those signatures and have that as an option in Carv, then all the better. So you can go and train that versatility and adaptability you're talking about, but it's just not there yet. But what is there is incredibly exciting, incredibly useful, and incredibly powerful, but it's only a tool right now.

Let's, let's get into that right now. So if you're a Carv user or you're keen to maybe use it and use it next season as a training tool because you you don't necessarily need video. You just hook it to your boots and measure it. Can we— can you go through— is it worth going into the parallel skis one? Because we've got— because we've got parallel skis, carving, short turns, and moguls. And Mark has scored extremely high in all of these, and he's used AI chatbots, agents, to help him figure out where the weighting should be. So we want to pass on And I think Mark said to me earlier, he's pretty confident, almost bet his house on the fact that he could get your— each of these turn types moved, moved up, scoring higher. So how do we do it? Can we start with parallel, parallel skis? Where should people focus on? And, and maybe if you can just remember that some of the metrics, if people don't know them, like, what is it exactly measuring in, in the simplest way? So So over to you.

Yeah, so, you know, I don't have my phone and Carve opened here to remind me, but it's interesting that you started at parallel and my understanding, and I will say yes, I am very confident in the turn types and the metrics or the most important or weighted metrics that drive SkiIQ, and you don't have to— there's a bunch there you don't even need to focus on if you really want to just drive your SkiIQ. But Parallel is an interesting one to start at because— and this is a poor framing of it, but it's a little bit the garbage collector. When Carv can't figure out if, you know, if you haven't checked off enough boxes that it knows you're carving, or you haven't checked off the parameters around short turns, or it knows you're not in bumps or powder, it will go— it will categorize you as parallel. Okay, parallel turn. So I think there's some work to do here by giving parallel more love. And this is one area, you know, I'm— I would love to work with CarvOn because if we think about good parallel skiing You know, in at least in my experience, we have a good parallel. Most recreational skiers have that tiny little bit of a fudge, whether it's a downstem or a little stem at the top of the turn. And eliminating that can take years of fine-tuning with people, especially when they're only there one week a year. And you know, that, that and and getting to be able to ski steeper and steeper pitches while maintaining parallel skis. But that's not really how parallel is set up, in my opinion, which I'm fairly confident of, in the Carv ecosystem right now. So it's the least interesting turn type for me, and I do think that's the lowest hanging fruit where we can make it more relative to those— to the folks folks that can't carve or short turns or pound moguls because that's what their turn types will end up in. But what is driving predominantly parallel scores? Uh, g-force. So there again, often when we're making nice parallel turns, one of the beauties of parallel turns is you can try and do it with a very little force and very little edge and embrace the steer, embrace the drift, if that makes sense. So yes, you know, to throw a huge lateral acceleration in there as probably the biggest driver of a parallel turn. Um, I don't know, I don't know if I completely am on board with that, but G-force, edge sim, weight release, turn shape, and pitch. So pitch is in there. They're, they're the ones that, you know, and I, I'm pretty sure I'm over 170 on my parallel turns.

Yeah, you are.

And it's from driving, driving those things. And yeah, for me, the hardest thing for me when I'm playing around with my parallel turns is for Carv not to pick it up as a carve turn because there's quite a bit of give or tolerance to a carve turn. I actually wouldn't call it— okay, Carv will pick up a non-pure carve turn as carving. So it's all around your parameters, you know, which is their roots and where they came from, and people love it. So if it's a motivational tool, who am I to say, you know, if I don't see too lines in the snow, it's not a carve turn. Where is the gray area before it's parallel? But certainly there's, there's quite a bit of forgiveness on the carve turn side of things, which might be just fine. But anyway, that's what's driving— if you're out there and you want higher parallel turns, go after G-force, EdgeSim, weight release, pitch, and turn shape.

And is there anything anything you have to kind of change? Because that's, that's very similar to, to carving. Like, would you— would a simple thing— would you narrow the corridor? Like, would there be a simple thing to be—

yes. So the difficulty there is if you go less than 3-meter corridor, it will classify you as a short turn.

Okay.

So it acts to— or if you pick up your tempo to greater than around 45 turns per minute, it will classify classified as a short turn. So hence, parallel skiing, or turn type, is when you don't check off these other things. So I won't go as far to say there's a bit of fudging involved to get to parallel turns, but certainly you have to stay out of the carving bucket, the short turns bucket, the moguls bucket, the powder bucket, and then you get to parallel turns.

The garbage collector, I like that.

All right, well, yeah, let's move on because it sounds like that one it's my least interesting turn, which I think we have the most room for improvement, which I would love to help with.

Yes. Yeah, I would agree, because if I also think, just before we move on to carving, your, your tips for getting the best carve, SkiIQ, the parallel turn, I'll often teach that to someone. Maybe they're good at carving, but all they do is go really fast down the hill, um, and, and they need a speed control type turn or a cruising type turn. Like, I'm thinking of— this is, this is the turn type that I imagine when I'm 90 years old and still skiing. That's what I'm doing because it feels wonderful. It's not hard on my body. It's, it's got a beautiful look to it, lovely turn shape. But, but in my mind, it's, it's how I stay in control even on the steepest run possible. And it's not hard, like heart rate intensive, because it's a short turn?

You know, in my opinion, the most difficult turn in skiing is a high-performance steered turn where you— it's really easy to what I call, you know, you adjust the platform angle to that catch point where you carve a turn. Staying just on the drifted side of that catch point is really difficult, and that, that is a beautiful turn. And that's the turn you're talking about, because you can get rid of a bunch of forces because the ski doesn't lock up, but it's still grippy and you can manipulate that, that grip and how the snow's pushing back on you continually. Where to adjust how the snow pushes back on you in a carve turn, it is very limited. You need to use ski design only to do that, right?

Yeah.

In the turn you're talking about, That is not just the— I think the most beautiful turn in skiing. It is probably, to execute precisely, the most difficult. But on the way to getting there, it's the most versatile as well. Other than, you know, you throw kind of— you need to get that short turn into that, you know, steered short turn.

Yeah.

So anyway, I agree with you.

Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. It made me just think I think of back to me, you know, at night on YouTube watching videos to fall asleep to the Austrian demonstrators like Martin Guggenig and his basic parallel and Richie Berger. And if you look these people up and look at some of their old videos, and you'll see them not leaving pure lines or putting their hip to the snow, maybe 45 degrees of edge angle, but it is just like this mesmerizing touch on the snow, incredible skiing.

Tom, that, that is my That is the straight ski era. And we didn't have the sidecut to play with. So that was the, you know, how we, the attitude that we placed the ski against our line of momentum or line of travel is how we got that, right? Like, and you can't get the edge angles on those skis that we do on the modern high radius skis because the ski doesn't come around fast enough to catch you from falling over. Over if you put your hip to the snow. You won't see any of those, those skiers on those skis with their hip to the snow like the Hollywood Instagram folks we see out there all the time right now. But there lies the beauty in manipulating that tool just right on the turn type you're talking about. Yeah, that was my era. This is my second time around learning to ski with shape skis. So the contrast for is like yesterday.

I, I just want to say to the people out there listening and watching that, you know, maybe you're, you're, you're 40s, over 40s, 50, 60-year-old, like chasing the hip-to-snow high-intensity carve turn is quite demanding on your body. But if you listen to what Mark and I saying and you trust in that chasing this like beautiful parallel turn is also a goal, it's not out there on on Instagram and YouTube as the sexy thing to do. So you might not even be aware of it, right, Mark? Yeah, this is— I'm, I'm encouraging now. We would both go out, like, I would be happy, Mark, to go and spend an entire day, and I would have a great time trying to work on this. Would you agree? Even though we can both do hip-to-snow crank and turns, it still is rewarding. And so for those people, you don't have to break your back, you don't have to hurt your knees, you don't have scary fast to find enjoyment in, in refinement of your skiing if you sort of choose this, this parallel, basic parallel turn.

And we'll come back to the different turn types because I know we're still on the first one, but I just want to touch on that for, you know, the audience and agree with you, Tom. The— just, you know, broadening our lens kind of away from carve and away from the performance thing for a minute, you know, I've I've had the really, really good fortune, and I actually should have brought it up earlier with that deliberate practice. Within our, you know, the PSIC, our training organization, we have the luxury and good fortune of working with Dr. Edward Cambridge. He's a biomechanist, so PhD in biomechanics, is a movement specialist, has his own spine lab in Toronto, flies around the world lecturing to surgeons and, um, you know, physios on movement and all of that— neck, spine, pelvis, you should— now this is going to be quite technical— have him on your podcast to talk through movement and all of the opinions which aren't necessarily first principles around movement in skiing. So why did I kind of frame and introduce him up? Because, you know, within our technical stack— now this is kind of behind the scenes— we've come up, or he's come up with a bunch of movement principles that help us as trainers and coaches understand how the body moves to create better movement choices at the ski-to-snow interaction. So get beyond kind of the form-based coaching. And one of them is dynamic balance, you know, another one is regional independence, another one is conservation of energy, and the other one is, you know, organized tension or proximal stiffness for distal athleticism. But these are all, you know, technical words, but in there, that conservation of energy is before you train someone to do something, the most powerful or performance-based turn might not be the best choice. And why? Because of all the things you broke, you know, you brought up. Um, you, you know, you might be able to kind of get better, but you'll be done by 10 o'clock. If you're doing your one week a year ski holiday and you've traveled to Europe, don't you want to ski the whole day and enjoy a great lunch and ski all afternoon? So how we coach people you, or how we coach people to move and their posture, you need a broader understanding and the performance lens needs to be taken into consideration. And I don't mean to get more performance, I'm meaning sometimes to get less performance. So here's this movement principle is around conservation of energy. And it's been delightful kind of working, having that resource available ball to throw your ideas out to and then bring it back. So anyway, there's a— there's something for you maybe to follow up on. I think he'd do good. Back to, uh, back to our turn.

Yeah, I will— I'll reach out to him because I think that would be— that'd be really good. Um, and I just say that because I know a lot of people that are interested in, in improving maybe need to hear that, that they don't have to be chasing it. Because yeah, you don't want to be done after 2 hours or, or be injuring yourself. If there's another turn type of way of where you can focus your attention and still get the love of improvement and challenge through, through a, like, a refined parallel style turn.

Um, anyway, so yeah, just, well, just, I was just gonna say, one of the biggest, most impactful takeaways for me as someone that had an opinion and has a mechanics background and, you know, skied for a long time and coached for a long time was is that we're not a collection of parts. The body works as a system. So sometimes we break things down into one little thing and it might necessarily get us to where we want to go because the body is a system. Regional Independence, and he can talk through that with you, and it's been very powerful in my own understanding and in my own progression. So there's some really cool things around Regional Independence. Tendence.

Excellent. Okay, so now people, let's get into carving because that's probably the one that the most amount of carv users want to know the secret to, like busting through from 140 to 150, 150 to 160, and, you know, get up there because it could— is a really fun video game-like challenge. I'm not gonna lie, I'm, I'm on board. I want to know it. So, so help us understand what we got to focus on. Here.

Okay, so this is going to play a little bit opposite to some of our previous conversation with, with the steered turn and conservation of energy and enjoying the whole day and having a very versatile turn, right? So now we're being versatile and adaptable and jumping into a performance mindset and a performance movement pattern and performance outcomes. So on the metric side, g-force is the— your gold star. Go after g-force. So I'll ask you, Tom, lateral acceleration. How do you, how do you think you get a ski to move you sideways, laterally across the hill in a carve turn?

Uh, I need to edge it and I need to, to pressure it, and I need to make sure that I'm, I'm maintaining— I'm not losing speed as I'm doing that. The ski's got to be running fast because it's going to be slowing down as it's coming around the corner. So I'm trying to do that, but still let it run really fast.

Yeah. And we'll, you know, maybe we can even kind of touch on some centerline movements around this, but let's talk from the lens of metric and let's talk from the lens of what the ski has to do. So don't even, let's not even worry about the person yet. So you bang on. So to get the ski to move laterally in a carve turn, because the tail has to follow the tip. So the forebody of the ski cuts a bit of a trench into the snow, and the rest of the ski underfoot and the tail follows around through that trench. So it's a radius. So one of the bits in Carv that we use all the time in our programs is often a bunch of the stuff on that home screen that's around tempo, corridor, and radius. And we're always working with people to look— check this all the time, not even getting into metrics. Whatever radius your ski is and you're doing a carve turn, make sure the radius that Carv's recording is smaller or a tighter radius than your ski. And then people start to understand skiing because, again, maybe I'll make this a bit more interactive, and I'm pretty confident that you'll know the answer. So if I have, whatever, my 15-meter in-betweeny radius ski and I get, you know, I move into the turn and pick up a clean edge, how do I make that ski tighten its radius?

I need to keep tipping it over.

Correct. So we progressively edge the ski so that there's a design characteristic of the ski that allows the ski to bend more, which physically tightens its radius. What's that design characteristic? Characteristic?

Uh, oh, the, the elliptical shape.

Yeah, well, yes, the sidecut, and it's, it's sidecut, right? Because the more you tip a ski over, that sidecut allows the ski to bend more. So there's my g-force. I need to— g-force, we'll come back to the metric— is the biggest, uh, driver that we have. And of course, you know, if we listen, if we look at such, you know, um, centripetal acceleration, and we want to get to the math, we know it's, you know, mass times velocity squared. And your mass won't change, right? You know, unless someone's throwing hamburgers down your throat as you're skiing around the arc, it's not going to change. Um, velocity squared, so speed is, you know, 4 times the most powerful thing you can do, and divided by your radius. So I can only manipulate 2 things: velocity or radius. So So velocity, speed is a really big one, but yeah, there's only so fast you can go safely, or we can all go. So yes, go faster within your limits, but the biggest driver there and the lateral acceleration is shortening the radius. So that just means pick up an edge, feel the snow push back, and increase that edge. Let's, let's not worry about movements yet. We're just talking about the ski. So that there there will give us the lateral acceleration, which is the g-force, which is your biggest driver. What else are some pieces there that that's related to? Turn shape and turn closure. So on a pitch that's steep enough— so pick a pitch that's steep enough, which is harder to carve on, you know, you keep going with that progressive edging or rolling of the ski, and it'll keep whipping around more and more and more. So you will get that turn closure bit and that turn shape, and you'll even get— it's not going to— people think it's a nice, you know, round one turn. It's not. It has a bit more of a comma at the end, or a tightening, and that's really important. And by that stage, on a steep enough hill, you're hit— you have 80-degree edge angles, you know what I mean? It, it, it's very much— so there's your g-force, and you're all getting ready, getting just through edge angle. You're getting your turn shape and your turn closure. Early edging is just— not just, it's hugely important. The difference between between great skiers and elite skiers is transitions. You know, going from someone that doesn't restart a turn every time, you know, you go from— you manage momentum and flow all the way down the hill from one turn to the other. There lies early edging and understanding transitions, and the pitch is rewarded in there as well. But you think about that pitch, it's giving it's accentuating all of the other things, it's exacerbating it. So, you know, if I'm getting high G-force, a steeper hill helps me do that. It helps me get higher edge angles because it's pushing back harder. I need to transition fairly quickly, so it's giving me that early edge, etc., etc. So these things are all related and they play together. So if we just go back to the metrics and what the ski is doing, G-force course, turn shape, turn closure, edge angle, early edging, and pitch, right?

Yes.

And now we can talk about movements, but that will get really complex because it's situational, it's individualized, and what one per— what you feel mightn't be what someone else feels with different anatomy, different equipment, different timing, just the awareness that you might have over them, if that makes So there's carving.

Yeah, so maybe some good takeaways there are— I think a big one is the pitch. If you're not playing around or adjusting that, that would be one first thing. If you're not too bad at carving, you've got to, you've got to do that because otherwise you're not going to feed in more of the velocity. You're not going to then need to close the turn off, move the turn closure metric. You're not going get the fact that Carv knows it's harder on a steeper pitch to score, and so it puts a ceiling on your SkiIQ if you are only skiing on 15-degree slopes. Even if you do it perfectly, you have to be pushing that, that pitch. Like, that's a really big one. And then I think I love the other one you said, which is look at the radius on your ski.

That's a huge— it's huge.

Just, just straight. Yeah, yeah. And it's an easy one, and I don't think you need to necessarily necessarily have— like, if you have the approach of like, oh, I'm getting an 18-meter radius, I'm on a 12-meter radius ski, you don't have to then go and look for me or you necessarily to go, how do I fix that? Just go and try some things and see if you can get it to go down, and you'll start figuring out yourself. You know, it's not, not that hard. Just like, try it, try and like tip it over more, tighten the turn, start the next turn earlier.

Um, yeah, and okay, it would, um, I'd like to give people a tip. And again, you know, this, this might cause some debate for people listening to this, but you know, speed is a thing. And when we start going faster, kind of, there's more forces at play and, and, and, and, and it's harder. Um, I think a cheat code for someone that is in the realm of, you know, decent ski IQs on carving and you're getting onto a pitch, get yourself a slalom ski, 13-meter radius. And here's why. You can get edge angles or the great edge angles at slower speeds, if that makes sense. So you've got a little bit more time to feel everything. The ski catches you quicker. So there's more fidelity in there. You have something to work against. So I'm not saying that you can get higher SkiIQs on a slalom ski because the, you know, there's great skiers out there that are getting super high SkiIQs on not slalom skis. But if you want to improve yourself from a 150 to a 160 and you need to go on steeper hills and you're just like, I can't carve on these hills, they're too steep. Change the tool. Go to a shorter radius ski, a slalom ski that's got pretty good torsional stiffness. It will allow you to move inside, the ski will push back, and you can continue to move down. Okay. And as you— and that increases your edge angle, which checks all the boxes for the metrics which will drive your ski IQ.

Yeah, yeah, versatility.

Yeah, come back and see another skis.

But yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. Because I know I've shifted to more skiing at Cross Carver over the last few years and I've hit a ceiling there. And then I, uh, you know, Sebastian said— Baraboo and I, he was in Sun Peaks and we were on a pitch that wasn't like— it's just the main one there that has a ceiling point because it's not that steep. Pretty doing similar turns, and he had his brand new slalom ski, and he was always just scoring, scoring higher. I was like, I'm, I'm pushing as hard, I'm trying to be as clean as possible, but if I don't, if I'm not getting that, that acceleration around— because he, he just, like you said, the, the centripetal force formula, he just changed that R to a lower number, the, the result is, is a higher output. So yeah, that, that slalom ski shorter radius tip is, is, is a good one.

Yeah, and listen, don't misinterpret my tip. This— it's a specific tip for a specific outcome for a training purpose. I'm not saying a World Cup slalom ski is the best ski for everything. It certainly isn't. But understand equipment and how it can help you. And listen, it's no you know, it, it, it's no slight on your skiing that, that Seb was getting great scores. He's a great skier. But again, I know Seb trains here at Whistler too. He's from Whistler and he is on the saddle. So the saddle is 33, 34 degrees at the very top. It settles into 30 degrees and then bottoms out at about 25, and you'll get about 15 turns down there. And over the last few years, and you know, I've been a bit of a a, uh, a driver on this. You see more and more people getting up there early when it's safe to do so, pushing themselves with deliberate practice on the right equipment. It's very hard to carve down a slope that steep with a larger radius ski without throwing a stivet at the top of the turn, which is super fun. But if you want to drive your metrics, which drive your SkiIQ, it doesn't reward stiff it. So you've got to be clean at the top of the turn. And on a, on a slope 30-plus degrees, you, you need to get down before the fall line. Like, your hip is pretty much on the snow at the fall line, before the fall line, because it's— that's what's tightening your radius enough that it gives you your speed control. Your speed control in a carve turn is through turn shape. So that shape can't be a big radius or it's just way too fast at that pitch. So there is a little bit of academic-ness in understanding this and in your training. And it's not just understanding the instrument panel of Carv and what drives the SkiIQ, it's understanding your own capabilities, your movement patterns, and most certainly the equipment. And you touched on sharp skis before. If anyone out there is trying to go go and, you know, short turns or carve turns on, you know, any sort of firm snow and you don't have sharp edges, go back and tune your skis.

Yeah, I remember the carve guys telling me that, that like a few years back, they're like, what, we just need to come up like with some good tips for people. And, you know, one of the guys is like, we should like, every time someone sharpens their skis, their ski IQ goes, goes up. Like, it's the easiest one. Just get, get, get a sharp tune, uh, pair of slalom skis and it'll go up. But, but then you'll hit a ceiling where that's— you've, you know, it's going to stop there and you need to actually—

yeah, yeah, you've exhausted that variable and, and it's a massive variable until you tune it in. You know the other one, and this is going to be another one of those debatable, very unsatisfying answers, getting away from the carving turn type for a moment but back into one of the biggest tips, or what I find one of the most successful coaching tips or tools out there with instructors and, and recreational skiers alike, as I call it, Pole Perfect. The most underutilized piece of equipment other than skis and boots, obviously, it's poles. And having, you know, using your poles correctly, whether you're dragging that inside pole, uh, on inconsequential terrain, on a super steep traverse, or through downside slipping through an entrance or, you know, try and ski bumps, put your poles away and go down and ski bumps and see what it's doing to your stability, you know what I mean? You need a pole plant there. And even with carving, having that proprioception and that lever that creates stability in the torso and even the pelvis is incredible. So the pole plant, if we're talking about these low-hanging fruit like sharpening your edges, understand how the pole can work for us with proprioception, with creating a moment arm for stability, with timing, with rhythm, with all of these specifics of steeps, with bumps, with entrances, with high consequential traversing. Oh my God, we could do a whole podcast, Tom, on pole planting.

I know. Yep, that's— yeah, I would 100% agree. I've got a section of videos that go into that. I mean, I've got a podcast with Paul Lorenz just on poles. People are surprised, how did you talk over an hour on just pole planting? But it's, it's so true. And I think your point— I think this is the best way for people to understand it— is like, how important is it? Well, go take it away first, and then you come back and tell me if you're missing your poles. Like, let's all go ski down, you know, next to the saddle in the off-piste there without our poles. See if you can do it as confidently as with them. Then you'll go, oh, okay, if they're doing that much, then if I made my use of my pole plant better, how much would that bring it up even further?

Yeah, and it's great training to ski without poles, but it highlights how much they give you, and you kind of get things better and then go back to using them, and it's a superpower. And And, you know, I've— unfortunately, I've broken 3 pairs of poles just this year skiing. And I don't mean falling over and snapping them. I mean pounding through bumps, um, a bunch of the short turns, and kind of different things like that. So the force that I'm putting through my poles, I am completely using it as a cheat code. So we can't unpack all of that here, but if you're someone out there listening that's thinking, what's he talking about with proprioception? What's he talking about with a lever arm or a moment arm? What's he talking about with pelvis and torso, torso stability? Um, you need to look into it. You are missing a huge low-hanging fruit in skiing. So that's enough on poles. That was an aside, and we were just wrapping up carving.

Yeah, that's a very good one. I would, I would 100% agree. So, okay, so short term turns. How do we get short turns up? Because this is one I have hit a ceiling on, and yeah, I need some help with it.

Okay, and I would love to look at your metrics. And, and this is— if we were to go out, Tom, yeah, um, yeah, I would love to look at your— well, okay, we can—

let's use that—

can do it now. But yeah, I would— in a coaching sense, we would do turns. I would use my eye, and then I would confirm from the metric of what's actually going on. And then we would pick, you know, the, the two biggest— the two biggest— okay, let's go through. Let's use— this is great. Let's use this as a use case. So what— tell me, go to your highest. Sure.

My highest. Yep, it's a 155.

Okay, so here I'm going to tell you, I bet you you are not up I can guarantee you— now this is, this would be funny if you call me out here. God, I'm putting myself out there. You do not have a lot, you know, you're not over 3G's, you're not, you're not at 2.3.2, there you go. And you're not, you're probably, you're probably not at 100%, uh, EdgeSim.

Nope, 85.

Yeah, so right there you have leaked a huge amount. So you need to— the, the— at— sorry, 2.4.

Yep.

Yeah. So you know what I would do? I would, I would actually just make this super simple. I would go back and do with you what I did, um, and I would just working on you accelerating your feet at the end of the turn by pulling or whipping your feet across and under you. So we would go— I've jumped right to a movement pattern there because I've already established a few things that you're missing in your metrics to drive your SkiIQ. Predominantly there is g-force. So we can get more lateral acceleration from you just in the exact turn you're doing, just by pulling your— or accelerating your feet across, uh, through the arc.

Just like trying to, yeah, help it. They're already going, but accelerate, like make them move faster.

Totally. And yeah, and that— and I work with, um, you know, I have a concept in great skiers, the 3 things I always ski, and I'll try not to make this another aside. Um, one is organized tension, and that's just my word for making sure you— we are quite strong through the whole kinetic chain, and we have to be almost stiff. In fact, in biomechanics they call it stiffness, where, you know, you need ankle tension and you need quite a bit of tension in your core so you can be precise at the ski. You know, the other thing there is foot placement, moving your foot around or your feet around, predominantly the outside ski, to get the force where you want it or to align against the force. And the third thing is how we go from one turn to the next, and that's transitions. And you— we want to have momentum and flow. So the whole thing is, you know, force and balance. But coming back to you with that foot placement, we can get more— you can get more out of your lateral acceleration or your g-force quite easily at the same speed speed that you're going down the hill and almost at exactly the same tempo just by moving your feet across you quickly at the end of the turn. You need to make them grip and bite at the end of the turn. Now, a lot of people coach this movement by, I want you to move, push the foot ahead, or put, you know, sometimes you hear pull the inside foot back. I'm quite against pushing that outside ski forward. It puts it puts people in the back seat and they lose connection with the forebody of the ski. We don't want to push the ski away from us. We want to pull it through the arc, and that pulling it through the arc or accelerating it through the arc at the end of your short turn will do what you need to do. Now, what's going to happen is it's going to bite and you're going to throw the beer can because it's going to accelerate across the hill. Will. What you're going to then have to learn to do is some pressure management with your timing, but all of a sudden you will jump 3 or 4 points in one go because your lateral acceleration, or your g-force in shorts, is 2 times anything else other than edge sim— edge similarity.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, okay, awesome. Yeah, there's a couple— I looked at it because you can look at, you know, how you can click on g-force and then see You know, so there was like 45 turns or something, and there's some in there where I'm hitting 3 G's. It's just 2.933, but then it drops down to that 2, you know, 1.7 at one point. And so the consistency— and, and same with— so the other one then is the edge similarity. And, uh, yeah, this one is like sometimes I hit 100 and then it's down to like 75. And then it's like 82, 90, 100, and then 60.

And yeah, and this is just my opinion, and this opinion will actually play against me because I have very good EdgeSim. Um, yeah, nice. Yeah, the EdgeSim, in my opinion, is too sensitive. There is a huge drop-off in points because I run it through my model, even between 100% and 98, and then 96, and then, you know, 94. Like, wow, huge, like, points. Like, yeah, yeah, 3 or 4 points per, per point, which, you know, obviously I've got your 180 short turn here.

I mean, look, there's just 100, like, there's not a single drop. Like, that's incredible.

Yeah, you're cherry-picking my best one though, so yeah, yeah, so yeah.

You're like, you were obviously stoked when that happened, but that there was what, hundreds of attempts of turns?

Yes. Okay, yeah, totally. And, and listen, that my highest score in short turns do not feel like my best turns at all. And it's because, take a racer, you know, they are at the edge of their limit to win that race. I'm at the edge of my limit with, uh, G-Force, trying to crank it. Yeah, yep, exactly.

Yeah, so I've just got your G-Force here on this one so people can see. So you can click into it. So there's, there's a 3.9, um, but then there's just like 3.1, 3.5, 3.8, 2.7, 3.93. And because it takes, it takes you 10 Um, 1, 2, 3, 4.

Yeah, it's a medium, a medium over 8 turns. Yeah, that one I actually is a little bit lower on my— I excelled at other metrics because I have a couple of other short turns runs at 180, but it will only show you that. And it— that is the lower— that one you're looking at is my lowest G-force run of all of my 180s. I think my—

got it—

the one that I'm most impressed with himself was, you know, 3.6g on average. So it's right up at— I think it tops out at 4g. Um, but there's consequence to that as well. Like, that, that's very— that's, that's hard on your back, it's hard on your pelvis, that over and over and over. It's like, you know, again, back to ski racing, Mikaela Shiffrin doesn't go out and run 50 slalom training runs in a row at high intensity. It's too hard on the body, and it— diminishing returns after 4 or 5. Right? So same there, you, you, that's where deliberate practice sometimes isn't all that fun, but then you can get results. But anyway, back, sorry, back to the short turns and using you as the use case. Yeah, gee, yeah, like, and I called it even at your SkiIQ, the metrics, uh, G-Force and EdgeSim that we would work, work on. And the movement, because I've seen you ski obviously, is we would just, I would just get you to accelerate accelerate your feet across and under you at the end of the turn. And it would be more of a cross-under move because as you're, you're decoupling your upper body and your lower body right at the hips. So as the skis and feet and legs continue to accelerate across the turn, you're moving your pelvis and your torso into the new turn. Does that make sense?

Question there then, because, because I guess the style of short turn been having fun with and playing is, is a little bit more dolphin-y. And is— am I kind of gonna punish myself there because I am trying to kind of rebound a little bit in the air for playfulness? Like, you know, we both appreciate Benny Walsh. Yeah, like, is that gonna score, score high or not?

No, uh, yes, you, you, you'll certainly get into mid- 60s with, with that type of turn. But because you're— I'll exaggerate a little bit— you're doing quite a bit of a dolphin move to start with, that big float at the start of the turn, you're going to dilute or bleed Ed Sim in there because of it, if that makes sense. Now it's super—

that's the main one that's going to probably affect— it's not that I'm also going to— because I'm going using energy to kind of get up, I'm not going to have that energy to also get g-force across. It's probably more I might, because I'm not on the snow, my feet might start now doing different things and it'll punish me on that.

Here's back to the center line, the base representation, if we use that, of the short turn. You know what, Scott? And it would be great if we could go, you know, we could have analog Benny.

Yeah.

And the dolphin type short turns, and you mimic that for training. Or, you know, maybe we go back to a little bit more of an Austrian up unweighted turn as opposed to that cross under, you know, you're going to— it's going to be slower, you know, for your hips to come up and over. It's actually slower than moving your hips straight across the back of your skis as you're entering the new turn and you're flipping, you know, your— as you're— this is an interesting point and maybe a little bit too precise on the movement, but as you're finishing your turn, you're still allowing allowing your, you know, skis and boots and legs to continue on the turn, the previous turn, as you're starting to move into your new turn. But the same time, you're de-edging your feet and skis, if that makes sense. So you're moving your pelvis across your skis, but you're still continuing to make them— skis turn in the old turn, but with lower— and because your skis are moving across the back of your skis, you've got a bit more bend in your knee and hip, you can actually get a bit of lower leg turning in there, and it flattens the ski and runs it onto the new set of edges. Now, that is a very precise movement pattern that we can work on, but, you know, that's something that I don't think Carv really picks up. You're going to need yourself to understand what you're doing and, and drive it. But yeah, yeah, that was a little bit too into the mechanics.

And Cambridge as well, sort of like, do you have to weigh up like, how, how well have I slept? Am I gonna have the energy, um, like the ability to pump out these turns? Because that, that different style turn where there's maybe more up gives a chance for you to flush a bit of lactic acid and all those positives. The retraction style one, totally movement Yeah, conservation of energy, conservation of energy.

Exactly.

Yeah, yep. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, uh, finish on that. That— there's my excuse for the 1:55 is I was conserving my energy for the, for the day and just, just trying to go for— yeah, yeah, as much performance without knackered myself.

Tom, I have no doubt knowing you and, and have skied with you and watching scheme, in 2 days we would have you into the 160s, no problem. Well into the 160s on your short turns. It, it is really just that feedback loop, and you're quite analytical in movement.

That's my goal. I'm going to text you with a screenshot this season in Australia when that day happens, because now I'd like— I've— you've set me a challenge I wanna, I wanna try and do it. I know now where I need to point myself and put my deliberate practice into, and that's exactly why I wanted this podcast chat, because selfishly, such a simple thing with coaching, like, you just— why coaches are great, even with the carving, you just need to be pointed somewhere. And, and sort of like my— I think my son Archie, he's like, tries to go off and gets distracted by the other thing. No, no, just get back to, you know, practicing. Sing, whatever you're doing, and you just need that focus, and, and you will get better. You will get better.

Um, yeah, and, and just back on the, the Carve thing, use it as that instrument panel, you know. So it, it's the instrument panel, it's not the pilot, you know. You go to a doctor and he does the diagnosis, but he takes your blood pressure and your blood work and your, your heart rate as these instrument, you know, these properties, metrics, exactly, to come up with that diagnosis. So it's no different in exactly what we're doing.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. Any other ones you'd say? Any like tip then with the short turns, how Carvski IQ on short terms is currently going out? So say I worked on G-Force and I'm getting bucked around, but I'm kind of controlling it a bit better. Where would I go to next? Is it the edge sim, you said?

Yeah, you know, and so this is an interesting one here to a certain degree. And, and in my short turns— and this is just an N of 1 again, but we're having the chat and it's meaningful to me because that's, that's, you know, you work with yourself with the metrics— same within carve turns. I ended up popping my carve turns up a little bit by narrowing my corridor, um, and upping my tempo a little bit. And okay, doesn't reward that for a 1:1, but by doing that, I was driving a little bit more G-force because I was hitting the turn a little bit faster. Does that make sense? I was getting into my new turn.

So, so I'm just going to look up that for people for context. So we got tempo at 83 turns per minute.

Oh, and that's great.

I—

this is, this is another amazing realization for me. And you know, Russ Wood, he— we used to— we, we played a bunch of games with Carv where he would show me, send me a video of someone, and it would be an instructor, of course, instructor training one of the courses, and says, pick the Ski IQ. And without getting a long story, we would get very good, accurate enough that we were within 2 or 3 max, either way, no matter what the skier. The same way is I can pick— I can now pick a skier's tempo only because I've had this tool and I've been training it within 2 or 3. And that's incredible where we come from, a world of having really no idea what our tempo is. You know, when we go down, I want you to have kind of like a, you know, World Cup slalom. It's a little quicker than, you know, a, a gate, a gate a second, but that's 60 turns per minute. So coming back to that tempo, 83 or 84, I'm always around that on a given pitch on personal best. It might go a little bit higher, up to 90, but yeah, you— so driving kind of full circle back to a tip that's actually not a metric that has helped me is picking up that tempo a bit. And it's not because it rewards that as a metric, it's because it made me get a little bit more lateral acceleration in there, or G-forces, Carv calls it, because it made me hit that turn a little bit quicker.

Have you seen this one of Joe Dunn's, his tempo? 120.

Oh yeah, okay. I know who Joe Dunn is and he's great. I watch his YouTube stuff.

Yeah, yeah, no, Joe's awesome. But like, that's, that's what Matt Graham, like the mogul, you know, the guy from Australia. Yeah, that's what he's kind of— well, that's what he would say is probably mid is slower to medium for him in the bump. That's like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

Bring— I don't know, bring up my kind of my bump run on there. And I— because I can't remember. So in moguls, tempo is king. Tempo, weight release, g-force, and edge sim. But tempo is king. And I found it hard to get my tempo up with Whistler moguls without being able to jump in a real mogul line, like a zipper line.

Yeah, that's right.

And, and I had, I had the opportunity very late in the season to quickly jump in one, and it was one run, and it was my best run of the season. And I think I was at 120 or 130 turns per minute in there.

Let's see that.

You can call me out on that.

Uh, let's see, we've got 130.

130. So there, so that it really drives important metrics in moguls are tempo, and you need to be in a rut line or a manufactured course to get that. And I actually think that carves should increase it from 8 turns to at least 12. Too many people can bluff their way through 8 turns and they're going to blow out. And then blow out. Like, we want, you know, I think, you know, on a, on a carving turn, you take up lot of the hill. But a short turn or moguls, I think they should push it to 12 turns.

So another funny story, can I just tell you, you know what, so Matt Graham, so Olympian level, yeah, yeah, gold medal, yeah, yep, yep. Uh, he, guess his turn tempo, 170, 180? Very close, 169. That was it. I saw him, I was there, Hintertux, Hintertux, the, the mogul slope there, and that's not even the steepest one, but it was on a section that I remember. It's where I got my highest Ski IQ for moguls as well. The bumps were compressed closer, so you had to go turn, turn, turn, so it helped you. The environment was there, and you— but if you go to like Whistler freeride kind of bumps on a double black, they're big, long. You're going to be doing like, yeah, probably like totally 60 turns per minute. So if you because you— yeah, the bumps are spread out.

It's a really, really variable— it's not, uh, it's not rhythmic. So a funny story, and again, I'll just go back to 3 weeks ago, and you already mentioned his name, Riley, Riley McGlashan. So we were, uh, he was one of the coaches here, and we were doing some skiing together. And this is a fun story because it shows the fun in skiing. We're up there kind of training early one morning before we're meeting the groups, and basically we're talking about boot skiing, and we are like, oh, we both do that, we both like that. And I don't know if you boot ski, or people out there, but it's great fun. So we got to the top of the Jersey Cream lift, and he had, um, Nina there and asked Nina to take his ski so we could boot ski all the way back. Wasn't that far, but back to the restaurant. And I was kind of feeling left out, but fortunately one of the guys on the chairlift, Paul, took my skis, so Riley and I boot skied down to the restaurant. My point is that, you know, that is where Carv thinks you're— we were doing short turns, if that makes sense, because our feet were. But the tempo, you know, was between 130, or my fastest was— and I'll have to pull this up, but, um, I don't know where my phone is— but it was 190. And of course, you don't have the swing weight of the ski, so it's just the boots.

But—

and you only need 8 of them, so you get the poles going really quick and you do that. But super fun, right? Like, there's something else wouldn't.

So I wonder if you got those Snowblades, you could probably go hack this, the short turn thing.

You wouldn't get the G-force because it wasn't— we, the, the, we— yeah, so even though I was at 120, uh, it was between 116 and 125, and he was the same, uh, SkiIQ, because you, you, you don't get all of the other—

yeah, jangle.

And yeah, but yeah, and if you had Snowblades in the bumps, would that help? Well, I think you could turn your feet really quickly, but you haven't got this big lever out front of you for your fore-aft balance either. It's just gaming it. And my whole point there was, you know, tempo— go and do some boot skiing, and all of a sudden you'll easily be able to do 100 turns per minute and go, okay, all I need to do is kind of do that with skis on my feet. Yeah, if that makes sense. And again, SkiIQ in short turns isn't rewarded at all by tempo, but it's just ways we can manipulate the tool to get different outcomes on the snow, which helps out versatility and adaptability.

Yeah. So anyway, that we were on short turns, that 83, your average is that, that turn tempo. If you know you're in there, you're going to have to be turning your feet fast enough. You're going to have to set the edge.

Yep.

And it holds. So then you can get it across and do it again on the other side. If it's not grabbing, then your turn tempo won't stay up there.

I think I sent you a shitty phone video. Sorry if I'm allowed to use that word. Um, on, uh, to you, of, of one of, you know, a pretty high, uh, scoring run. And that tempo would have been around 83 or 84. And I'll tell you why I know, because I was skiing on a pitch where you would be surprised at how tuned into you are, um, on your tempo on given pitches on a consistent snow surface. It's incredible how repeatable your tempo is when you do a lot of training.

Yep. So we've sort of covered the short turns. We sort of went into the mogul tips a little bit there. Uh, basically that one is, if you don't have a zipline course, you're, you're kind of, you're going to be a little bit, um, yeah, you're going to be blocked a little bit on, on how well you can do, do there. But you need absorption, uh, so you need the bumps to actually kind of push up and down on you a little bit. Any— would you, would you agree with that?

Yeah, yeah. So it's all driven by tempo, weight release, g-force, and edge sim, right? So yeah, you put your feet pretty close together and you don't get a— you don't get— you get hardly any edge angle in bumps. Don't even worry about anything like that. It's about tempo.

It's being a World Cup bump skier like—

yes, that's it. That's the secret. Listen, Carv hadn't told me this, but looking at my own scores and then jumping into a rut line, um, and a, and a manufactured professional mogul course, and all of a sudden bang, straight over 170. It's all tempo-driven. Weight release is in there, which is pressure. Um, g-force is in there and edge sims in there. So really, tempo, you got to be good. You just got to go fast and stay in your line, and that's going to drive your best results in bumps. Now, of course, the can— there's a lot of improve. I like that that is the center line because, you know, broad brush here, and I've been out of Australia for a while, but many countries around the world, including Australia, you know, we learn to get in the bumps, stick into a rut line and do the rut line. And it's really good for your skiing because it comes more down around athleticism and foot speed without fancy. You know, my time in Canada in Canada, they bias towards this rounder, rounder bump line. And, you know, there's pros and cons to both. And in my opinion, having 3 or 4 different ways to have options down the bumps is the right way to go. But what you lose by having a round line all the time is foot speed, right? And, and tempo and that natural athleticism. So it's good that the, the Carv has it set on Matt Graham or whoever it was, which is a World Cup skier. Is there opportunity to select a different non-World Cup mogul line and push around some signatures and drive some things in there? Probably. But you know, if you're going to start somewhere with moguls, I think that's a pretty good one. How fast can you ski through these bumps and keep it together?

Yep, exactly. I, I agree. I think, uh, again, and then Yeah, it'll be cool the day when Carv then recognizes zipline, like you're doing, we're scoring you as a zipline style and we're scoring you as a freestyle, freeride, mogul run differently. Yeah, look forward to that day. We've talked for a long time here, but it hasn't felt long for me anyway. Anyway, I've really wanted to have this chat with you for a while, Mark. You're a wealth of knowledge. I really hope there's some great takeaways for people. I know there's a bunch for me already. Is there anything you wanted to close out this chat with or any reminders or, you know, we're both into our teaching. Is there, would you, if you wrap this up, would you, would you have a summary message for the Listener, well, I think that's a great way to ask me to finish.

So I obviously didn't have anything prepared for that, but I would step back from a lot of what we've been talking about and remember that what we're trying to do out there when we're with others, or certainly when we're teaching, is to instill the love of the sport. And that isn't all the performance, which has kind of been most of our conversation today. You know, it's about, you know, our philosophy within the PSIC is an adventure, making it an adventure, all of those bits. So there might be times where you're not working on performance because it's not the right thing to do, you know, fun, safe learning, you know, kind of hit all the bits and in that philosophy. I guess the other one that we slightly touched on that we didn't is some of the off-piste stuff, you know. And again, this— I don't want this to sound like a, a sales pitch, but, you know, the Big Mountain program— and it's not relative at All Hills, but it certainly is here at Whistler or some of the mountains out in the west. Um, I— we've had more feedback on that pathway, and we're talking hundreds of people that have gone through this now, that is. And these are all ski pros, and, and many of them are Level 3s or Level calls from, you know, Canadian organizations or a world, and overwhelmingly what I'm blown away back is, this is the best course I've ever taken. Because it's kind of like you were saying, what do I get out of this? We take these incredible skiers, you know, and put them in an environment that they can just— there's so much low-hanging fruit. And what we're talking about with expert traverse traversing and expert side-slipping and how to navigate entrances and decision-making in consequential terrain. So as much as we've been talking about performance, step back, have a broad picture about instilling the love of the sport in folks out there. It's a dance with the mountain, and that includes the whole mountain. And the off-piste and the, the big mountain program is part of that as well. So just kind of balancing out, you know, where our definitely most of our focus has been and on Carv and the instrument panel. And there's more to skiing than just this. It's an incredible tool and I encourage everyone to use it. It's been amazing shortening that feedback loop for me, but it's not everything.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It makes me sort of think of how Carv do have their little circle of, of sort of skiing. And, you know, you've got your short turn, your moguls, your powder, your parallel, all these different, uh, sort of turn types in there. It's, it's like that, but you should also kind of probably— there's another piece of the pie, which is, you know, a percentage of your ski season that is just pure fun. That is like, uh, I know, social aspect. Are you doing it for that, because humans just need all these different parts, I think, to, to really be totally happy and fulfilled. I'm getting a bit esoteric here, but I see where you're coming from. And I guess the good message is here, there's a lot of people that get into carve and get narrowly focused, and that's all they're worried about is next year I need to get out of 149, I need to crack 150 to be happy. Happy when— yeah, there's skiing. If we go back before all that, it was all about enjoying the mountains.

And yeah, and, and, you know, and just to flip back and forwards, the, the joy and enthusiasm in people's voice when you've just worked with them and they go, that's my best SkiIQ ever, is amazing. So I'm not taking away from— yes, from that at all. And I think on Carv, a huge amount of low-hanging fruit with Carv is to help some of that community aspects of the app. You know, I know I didn't— not this season, but the season before, I spent quite a bit of time in Europe and, and Switzerland, and I would actually, um, uh, you know, try and meet up with some of the high SkiIQ skiers on that mountain, Zermatt, Cervinia, etc. And I couldn't find them. There was no way in the app that could— sorry, sure, permission-based, but help me spend time in a community with similar likes, or help me navigate that mountain, or find those runs where those skiers were getting. Now listen, I tracked them down because of the ski world's small, and you know, I know you and you know that, and so that certainly helped. But I think that community aspect of driving Carv, of people helping support people, um, they can really help with that as well.

Yeah, nice. That's a great way to, to cap off the segment here. I would totally agree. I'm pretty sure that's— they're working— that's a big focus for them as well. Yeah, Mark, just really appreciate your time, expertise, and, um, and the way you explain things. It's very— you can, you can tell you, you really think about it before you sort of spit it out. So I appreciate that because the listeners, I want them to have a great experience of how they, yeah, get this information passed on. So thank you for, uh, for that. And mate, hopefully we get to ski. We've never skied together. We've met in Whistler briefly, but yeah, I'm looking forward to the day we get to go, go ski and, and I, I can go, yeah, check out 170-something on SkiIQ.

Well, thank you for having me, Tom. It's been a pleasure. And I'm a ski nerd and I love talking about skiing. And if, you know, if anyone's coming to Whistler, um, get a hold of me. Um, I love skiing with people and new people. So yeah, excellent. Thank you.