Adaptive Ski Instructing!

, 2 min, 398 words

Tags: adventuring national-ability-center teaching

As I've mentioned before, I'm doing adaptive ski instructing this winter, and today was our first day of training! Day one was a combination of assessment and training. We hit the slopes – many of us for the first time all season – and also started to learn about the beginner ski progression. Let's see how much of it I remember a few hours later.

What I thought was the beginner ski progression

  1. Learn how to go on a lift
  2. Use an edgie-wedgie to practice snowplow stops
  3. Turn and practice controlling speed
  4. Learn to hockey stop
  5. Learn to turn with increasingly parallel skis
  6. Figure out carving turns somehow?
  7. Profit??

The beginner ski progression

Okay so my preconceived notion of the beginner ski progression was maybe a little bit off. Here's what I learned today.

  1. Teach a student how to gear up

    • Boots: wedging a foot in, finding a good fit (two fingers behind the heel), start buckling from the top down and build comfort moving in the boots.
    • Helmet: roll it onto your head starting at your eyebrows. Safety first!
    • Layering is important too, especially for folks in adaptive populations.

  2. Go outside and play around in the snow wearing boots!

    • Walk around
    • Feel how to go up and down slopes, both forward and sideways

  3. Try sliding around on one ski

    • Sort of like skateboarding: push with one foot and slide on the other. Try turning or going around obstacles
    • Then do the other ski too!

  4. Glide to an instructor/terrain stop on two skis

  5. Straight glide to a wedge stop

  6. Start turning while in a wedge. Just one or eleven o'clock to start, then continuing to three/nine o'clock

  7. Around here, learn how to go on the lift instead of the magic carpet

  8. Encourage parallel skis on the traverses, with wedges on the turns

  9. Slowly focus on shifting weight to downhill ski on turns, to allow increasingly parallel turns

  10. Build confidence and progress to intermediate skiing!

All of this is largely independent of adaptive ski instructing. But we'll get to that later. To be a good adaptive ski instructor, I guess I'd better be a decent instructor first! Good thing I have lots of inspiring instructors to learn from. The National Ability Center is awesome.