Harald wrote:Wow, where did you learn to apply carving in all mountain situations? PSIA says that's impossible. The Epic gang says you can't ski without steering and leg rotation.
Are you telling us that a new skier picked the correct ski method without getting brain washed here first?
I know of a lot of great skiers that have never had anything to do with any ski instruction system, neither as a student or teacher and as such have not been infected by many of the incorrect methodologies mentioned so often. Their deficiencies, in my opinion, are usually completely different from what PSIA is suffering from. There is always room to improve, but I know I've been carving my skiis for a very long time and working hard to do it way before I knew anything about CSIA, PSIA, PMTS or any other system. I used to ski with a buddy of mine a lot who had some racing background in his youth and we basically put a lot of miles in. He didn't teach me. We just skied a lot and talked about things and tried to rip as fast as possible, and as steep as possible and as big as possible. (back in the good old days). I know it can be improved with coaching. I wasted a couple years trying to be CSIA certified and it literally made some aspects of my skiing worse. I can't deny, however that some things got better. But I attribute that more to the fact that I was skiing several times a week during that period and just thinking about it a lot, not neccessarily learning gold nuggets of wisdom. In fact, I found in the long run that many if not most of the fundamental concepts of CSIA turned out to be flat out wrong. When I finally discovered PMTS I found it to be something closer to what I was doing before I ever got involved with CSIA...except even better than what I was doing before... a more complete and detailed picture of what constitutes great high performance all mountain carve oriented skiing.
I turned my back on the CSIA concepts forever. About the same time I discovered PMTS, I also started investigating PSIA primarily because I am interested in teaching and most resorts base their pay and everything else on your PSIA cert level. But this time around I am much more astute to recognize the gold from the bull crap and PSIA has not impressed me one bit. Not one bit. I keep biting my lip to avoid arguments with other instructors at my local hill. They are so confused. But it shows in their skiing too. Its very hard to take anyone seriously unless they can back it up with how they ski.
The best instructor training I ever got was from the Canadian Race Coaching Federation (CSCF) who did teach concepts more in line with what PMTS is teaching, but with a different language and a more traditional racing approach which is often too much of a mental leap for the common recreational skier.
Anyway, just wanted to say... I've looked at a lot of systems. PMTS is the best I've seen so far. In fact, its the ONLY system I know of that brings racing concepts to recreational skiers in a way that recreational minds can digest.
Harald and his crew have analyzed skiing correctly, just as the better race coaches do... In fact they come from a high level racing background. And they actually have a proper biomechanical understanding of how skiing works in the most efficient means possible. The racing community at the top levels has had to figure this out a long time ago using the best experts in the world in order to win races. The PSIA/CSIA community is each run by a small group of guys that ski pretty well, worked their way to the top and now get the privelage of "making up" the system that will be used by their organization. There is no lack of ego involved there.
Additionally their priority is not performance. Their priorities are more about getting beginners and intermediates to feel safe and solid on the mountain, skiing in control with reasonable safety, having fun and generating income for resorts. Possibly they do an ok job of this task, but unfortunately they are clueless about true high performance skiing....so they don't really know how to get people to that level. They have tried to "make up" a bunch of complicated stuff using rotation and all manner of other atrocities in an attempt to fabricate their own idea of what biomechanically sound skiing should be.
But truly...PSIA has no idea how to teach truly high performance skiing and what is worse..they are teaching beginners and intermediates bad habits that will be very difficult to break.
In any case, If you have not been exposed to PSIA teaching yet, count yourself lucky and STAY AWAY from it.
I highly reccomend you pick up Harald's books. Give em a read. See if it rings true with you. I can't vouch for this camps because I haven't been to one yet. But I hope to attend one pretty soon.