This excerpted article, by PSIA Alpine Team member Peter Novom, appears in the Spring 2025 issue of 32 Degrees. You can read the entire article here.

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I often hear instructors and coaches describe ideal skiing with the caveat: “Great skiers don’t move away from their equipment” at transition. It’s like “moving up” has become a dirty word. In an effort to limit “up” movement, many skiers end up completely rigid and unable to flow from turn to turn. This lack of movement leads to a variety of issues, like struggling to make a parallel turn or difficulty carving the skis early in the turn.

Historically, with longer, straighter skis and more challenging snow conditions – picture trying to ski a modern Super-G ski at 207 cm in ungroomed snow – an up motion was used to unweight the skis during the transition and redirect them. With newer ski design, you can move edge to edge and arc to arc without needing to unweight or employ a sudden up motion. In addition, skiing is often done on super manicured slopes with plenty of space to lay down arcs.

Many modern skiers seem to think that ideal turn mechanics have changed, and you no longer need to move up to release the skis. However, modern ski technique still requires reducing the pressure on the skis or unweighting to release the skis from the previous turn, allowing them to tip and rotate into the next. When skiers fail to reduce pressure, they end up struggling to link turns in powder, are unable to turn and grip on ice, or simply fail to make a parallel turn.

In any given situation, you have options to reduce pressure: up unweighting (center of mass [CM] goes away from equipment), down unweighting (CM moves closer to equipment), or retraction (base of support comes close to CM). I want to challenge the idea that up motion is against the rules and explore how you can use this toward a specific outcome or situation, such as helping you to pass an exam, improving your teaching, or while off-piste skiing.

TWO MOVEMENT CHALLENGES

You shouldn’t rely on abstract thinking to understand how skiers move statically or in motion. Here are two challenges that will help you understand where up motion comes into play with skiing.

Challenge 1: Draw a line in the dirt, snow, or sand. Jump across the line. Standing about one foot behind the line, attempt to jump about one foot forward past the line. Try to do it without popping up.

When I tried this challenge, I could not jump over the line without popping up at least a little. To propel yourself forward and across the line, you must flex and extend your joints, your CM going up as it travels forward.

How does this relate to skiing? If you move up too quickly, you may not move forward at all. If you don’t move up at all, you may not go forward either. If you go forward and up, your CM goes over the line.

Is up motion helpful? The not-so-black-and-white answer is, “Yes, in moderation, and it depends on the situation.” One factor will be your speed – that is, how fast are you going? If you have enough momentum, you might just need to get your base of support out of the way (a retraction move), which enables your body (CM) to “fall down the hill” into the next turn. In the next challenge, what happens if you take momentum away?

Challenge 2: Try to make a parallel turn from a complete stop. Standing across the fall line, without any momentum, attempt to turn your skis to the other direction.

Most people, including myself, struggle on the first attempt. They try to tip or rotate the skis before they move forward and release the previous turn, causing them to stem.

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