Best Ski Blogs

Skiing blogs are not in short supply

There are many people in cyberspace publishing many blogs and some of them are skiing ones. Because I want to make a difference, I need to make my bobski.com blog different to other blogs out there I hope I do.

My personal view is that a “blog” is a form of essay. I have been looking around the internet at some of the others and they seem to me to be more like Facebook posts than what I would refer to as essays. They are 'friendly', have a lot of pictures, but not much explanatory content. They're more like the things my grand-daughter sends us about our great grandson.

I suppose what I'm saying is that my intention – I hope I achieve it for you – is to make a bobski.com blog post both informative and thought provoking. It will be even better if it induces you to DO something, as well as think something, because human beings learn by doing. When I say DO something I just mean a little bit of practice.

As you may very well be aware, one of the themes on my Youtube channel is that you do not need to be on a skiing piste in order to find ways to very considerably improve your skiing.

By a country mile the most important thing to address when you want to enhance your skiing technique so you can ski more pistes in more conditions, is understanding. Read up all you can. Think about what you read. Question it. Question the authors. Educate yourself in the topic – it will repay you a thousand-fold.

Additionally, two more aspects that you can employ while away from the piste, or even be house-bound as we all now are, are Imagining and physical practices.

Visualising:

Imagining is often referred to as 'visualising' but I think that restricts its power because it focuses your attention on what you see (or can imagine what you see), and it diverts your attention from what you can feel (or imagine you can feel). To enhance your skiing what you feel is vastly more important than what you see.

One of the limiting factors to our improvement of our skiing is that the human brain is so highly concentrated on processing visual information. Regrettably, what we see is far less influential in changing our physical behaviours than what we feel.

What this observation suggests therefore is that while it is undeniable that imagining ourselves skiing is capable of making huge differences, it will be imagining what the feelings are going to be when we make certain pre-determined movements that will have the most effect.

When you see ski racers in the holding area behind the start hut, you'll find them adopting race postures, with their eyes closed, and swaying up and down, side to side.

What they are doing is imagining themselves skiing the set course, but not just seeing the 'gates' and avoiding them, they are feeling changes in pressure under each foot; changes in the amount by which their skis are set to the side away from their centre of mass; changes in under-foot pressure caused by undulations in the course, and so on.

It's said that (I think it was) Picabo Street won the World Championship title after having recently come out of hospital, and she credited the success to the amount of time she had spent lying bed “skiing”. She said she had enjoyed more practice than her competitors.

Perhaps a new word is needed – Feelising rather than visualising?

So what am I suggesting? I'm suggesting you spend half your day in the garden, and the other half watching my training videos on Youtube at “Ski in Control with Bobski” [ insert link ] Go to the “Playlists” section, not just the videos section because the playlists are in pairs, and include an introduction by me giving you hints on how to get the best out of the experience.

If you like what you see there, please please pass it on to others (it's all entirely free), click on 'likes', add a comment or an observation. Share it with other skiers you know. My stuff works and I'm a man on a mission – I want more people to get more fun out of knowing they are achieving more of their potential.

The reason I wrote my first book [ insert link ] which is now sold internationally, and made these videos (for which there is special accompanying second book [insert link] ) is because it became transparently clear to me over the years that everyone who came to me on my courses, had suffered the same experiences in ski schools. Ski schools didn't work for them. The instructors even inculcated basically wrong ideas.

The process just wasn't any good. Of course there were exceptions, some instructors who were successful for some pupils, but mostly the instructors just re-gurgitated the stuff they had been told. The process just got perpetuated even though the clear evidence from watching tens of thousands of pretty ropey skiers every year, is that the process hasn't achieved much in the way of good skiing.

So – that's my view on blogs, videos, and “instructing”. I'm really serious about wanting to help you make a difference to your skiing; the kind of difference you want to make, not me. I don't matter, except as a guide and coach.

Here's to you!

Bob T