On Snow Drills

[Bulletproof]

Tomorrow I'm going to get serious about doing some on snow drills from the book, if I can tear myself away from the fun of skiing...
I've had difficulty making myself learn anything new in the past, beause doing things the old sloppy way I've been doing them is so much fun. I'll just have to force myself to set aside some time.

[milesb]

That's how it's done.

[Max_501]

Getting serious about doing drills really helped me. Supercharged my skiing ability. Final product is even more fun!

[trtaylor]

It is easy to become impatient and try to learn "it all" right away. It won't work that way. Master one drill before moving on to the next one.

Should be much easier to do mid-week, too. Depending on where you will be skiing, you should be able to find an empty trail that will allow you to review your own tracks.

[ibMED]

Assuming you are new to PMTS, keep it very basic and very specific. Free foot pullback is a great basic movement that can be done in freeskiing; getting counterbalanced is another essential that can be worked into the second half of an arc.

The question I would ask is what drills you plan to do to work on releasing yours skis. Get as specific as possible so that in your mind you know how well you have performed the drill. On my first day of PMTS, I skied better than ever because I knew exactly what releasing drills I wanted to work on. Consider making a short list of 4 drills and commit to making some green trail runs.

Enjoy the ride.

[BigE]

There is no need to put time aside, I find the drills themselves are a lot of fun. The drills involving foot movement, like pull-back, phantom move, javelins, TFR etc... are also great to help your stance and balance. It makes skiing so straight forward it feels like cheating.

[Bulletproof]

The only way I'm going to do the drills is if I put time aside for them. They have nothing to do with the way that I like to ski.
I enjoy skiing fast, on 180 cm GS skis. I never complete my turns, spend too much time in the fall line, and sometimes have to step out to the outside of a turn, then quickly follow with the inside ski, to make quick changes of direction in response to conditions.
I got interested in PMTS to learn how to slow down, make more turns, and finish them rather than giving up part way through, and just 'going for it' down the fall line. I need a more mature, rational, and controlled way of skiing before I get much older, wear my body out, or get hurt in a high speed fall.
So, I can do what I've enjoyed doing for years, or do drills to get more control and complete my turns, but not both.
I'm going to work on going from edge to edge, fast, and not getting seduced by the sweet spot when the skis are flat, and I can just GO if I let them.

[BigE]

If they "have nothing to do with how you like to ski",(which frankly sounds like an unguided missile), then you're in trouble from the start. It's going to take more than puting some time aside. It's going to take some serious dedication to changing the way you ski.

I wish you luck.

[skidaddle]

Bullet - I used to ski exactly that way. The fun thing is that I still can. The difference is that if there was a section of bumps that I worked one at a time and in an ugly fashion, often I would ski around them. Now I am no bump skier, but I can ski a long section of blue bumps and actually look like I know what I am doing to almost everyone on the hill, except perhaps some more experienced PMTS skiers. I am not locked into groomed terrain and when I go fast, I am in better control.

Of course, now I want to be able to ski black bumps. Again, this is a difference, before I never aspired to that. I just figured that since I started late, it wasn't in the cards for me. So, I signed up for a camp to speed my progress. Watch out, it becomes addicting

[Bulletproof]

I started making more turns and skiing more slowly after discovering some PMTS videos of ski tipping on Youtube. Previously, I'd seen an ugly argument about PMTS on Epicski, which told me nothing about PMTS, but a lot about the nastiness of the PSIA crowd.
One of my friends saw me from the lift and commented later that I was skiing a lot more slowly; he asked if I'd had an accident. I told him I was determined NOT to have an accident, like the ones that have been killing over-confident middle-aged men on groomed slopes in recent seasons.
On 12/23 at Hunter the slopes were empty and icy after 2 PM. I let myself open it up and ski very fast once again, on my gs racing skis. I enjoyed it even more after the experience of learning tipping to initiate turns from Harald's video and the website.
I realized that if that one technique could make such a difference, I should buy and read the book, which I did over the holidays , when I don't generally ski.
I know I'll continue to enjoy skiing fast when the slopes are empty; but I can see that PMTS is already making it enjoyable to ski more slowly when speed isn't safe - on bumps or in crowds, for example.

[BigE]

I'd get a set of SL carvers for learning.

[tdk6]

Just as much as I like running scales on my guitar fretboard I like running drills out on snow. As noted here before drills are not necessarily limited to boring repetitions on the bunny hill even though those are a must for everyone that aspires learning the fundamentals.

What drills were you thinking of performing? How will they slow you down? A possible outcome of you doing drills could be that you ski even faster in the future after learning some proper technique. In this case the drills had the complete opposite effect.

[HeluvaSkier]

I'd get a set of SL carvers for learning.

Agreed. Learning PMTS (or anything for that matter) is soooooo much easier on a 12m - 14m radius ski than it is on a 21m - 27m ski.

[Bulletproof]

I'm looking at the tipping, hinging and hopping edge change exercises in Essentials of Skiing, and the counterbalancing that's needed for the hopping. I'm going to carry printed instrucions to read on the chair, so I remember the exact details of the exercises.
I'm planning on sticking with my Atomic GS9 skis. They have a turning radius of 15 meters; and anyway, I'd like to practice the PMTS techniques while I'm on the skis I plan to use for the rest of the season.

[ibMED]

Bulletproof,
For what it's worth, I spent my first PMTS season on Atomic 15m radius skis and did the drills without issues. You may not be equipment optimized, but, the technique works. Just do it!