Movement analysis

28 November, 2018, 3 min, 429 words

A key component of ski instructing is observing a student and offering feedback on skiing form. This is known as movement analysis, and my classmates and I learned about and practiced it today. Professional Ski Instructors of America (or PSIA, which just rolls off the tongue) uses the MODDS framework:

Motivation – understand what is motivating your student
Observation – can't give feedback on form without watching it first!
Description – describe what you see, both good and bad. (Or efficient and inefficient, in official parlance.)
Determination – determine what is causing any inefficiencies.
Suggestion – suggest a technique or game to increase efficiency.

For more information about this process, check out the official PSIA documentation. And for lots about what you can look for in the observation step, check out this comprehensive guide.

Learning movement analysis

First off, we tried observing a classmate without any guidance. At this point, we didn't really have any idea what we were looking for, so as a result our "feedback" was pretty useless. Next we talked about one "order" of observation. Our instructor, Kevin, suggested looking at arms and shoulders first, then popping up to the head and down to legs and skis. There are as many valid observation organizations as there are ski instructors, so I'll develop my own over time. But for now, this worked great.

Next we observed each other as a group, with commentary from Kevin about what he was seeing. This was incredibly helpful. I would never have thought to look at the angle of a student's shoulders during a turn. But as soon as Kevin pointed it out, it was impossible to ignore.

Finally, we paired up and took turns watching each other skiing. Here we got practice describing what we saw and suggesting exercises to address it. For example, one skier tended to drop a shoulder on each turn. So we each tried a few turns balancing our poles horizontally on outstretched arms, and the shoulder dip magically disappeared.

What I learned

I had two big takeaways about my own skiing. First, I currently use a whole-body pole-plant strategy, which wastes energy and is a bit inefficient. I'm now working on directing my poles with just my wrists and forearms, rather than my whole torso. Second, while I'm pretty good at parallel turns and such, my wedge turns are downright sloppy. I'll be modeling wedge turns to many students this winter, so I'd better clean those up!