Improve Your Ski Carving with Two Simple Hand Position Cues

This video demonstrates how to significantly improve ski carving by focusing on two simple but powerful cues for upper body and hand position. The central theme is that minor, conscious adjustments to your hands can create an immediate and noticeable improvement in balance, stability, and edge grip, making your turns more effective and feel safer.

Key Hand Position Techniques

The video presents two primary cues, demonstrated with two skiers who experience instant improvement:

1. Keep Palms Facing Down: Similar to a tightrope walker maintaining balance, skiing with your palms facing the snow promotes natural stability. This position makes you feel safer, more relaxed, and creates more physical space to achieve higher edge angles without your body getting in the way.
2. Maintain Outside Hand Height: During a carve turn, focus on keeping your outside hand at a consistent height, or even allowing it to get progressively lower toward the snow. A common mistake is letting this hand rise, which disrupts balance and reduces pressure on the crucial outside ski. A key refinement is to also allow this hand to move inward as the turn progresses (staying aligned with the knee), which prevents feeling “blocked” and allows for more fluid movement.

Conclusion and Takeaways

The main conclusion is that skiers can make substantial progress by isolating and practicing specific skills rather than trying to execute a perfect turn from a complex set of instructions. By focusing on simple cues like hand position, these actions can be ingrained until they become an intuitive feeling. This approach leads to more fluid, reactive, and confident skiing, as you are better able to maintain balance and control pressure on the outside ski throughout the entire arc of the turn.

Mentoring question

During your next ski run, pay close attention to your outside hand. Does it tend to rise up during your turns? How does consciously keeping it low and your palms down affect your sense of balance and the ski’s grip on the snow?

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=vlznXBbJvog&si=2hI_ODgnn1ArMO_2