Phil Smith, Director of Snoworks Ski Courses explains how you can benefit from learning the difference between open and closed sports and how this knowledge can dictate when you decide to go skiing and what type of skiing you do.

We’ve had a lot of chat during the winter about the difference between open and closed sports and why at Snoworks during the winter months much of our time is spent developing skills for the open environment. But at Snoworks we also run courses in the summer and autumn so in this blog we explain the difference between open and closed and how you can benefit from moving between the two depending on the time of year you go skiing – winter, summer or autumn.

For those who have not been following the Snoworks blogs a quick recap on open and closed sports and what they mean to how you learn and how you perform.

A closed sport is a sport where the environment does not change and does not affect the performance of the athlete – running in lanes, swimming in lanes, high jump etc.

An open sport is where the environment is constantly changing and constantly affecting the athlete – mountain biking, surfing, football and rugby in open play are examples.

Then you have all the sports in-between – more closed or more open.

How we learn and develop skills for each is quite different. Closed sports have repetitiveness about the performance. The performance is pre-planned and rehearsed – throwing a javelin, front crawl. Open sports you adapt whilst performing, everything you do is different – akin to running through a crowded bar carrying a tray of drinks.

Skiing for many people is learnt in pretty closed environments where the terrain has been well-prepared – green, blue and easy red runs. Therefore skiers often learn a fairly closed way of skiing, their movement patterns are rehearsed and are fairly repetitive.

Looking at skiing in this way you can easily and clearly see why and where many learning plateaus come from. Many plateaus come from a repetitive movement pattern learnt for closed environments being attempted to be used in an open environment.

They key to development with greatly reduced learning plateaus is to recognize the difference between closed and open. Recognise how you’ve learnt previously and begin to use open and closed to your advantage.

As long as you recognize the difference between open and closed it’s pretty simple to understand the learning and performing process.

The benefit of learning in a closed environment is the performance is not affected by external factors leaving the performer free to focus on whatever it is they’re learning. This has great benefits when practicing a particular movement for example. When operating in an open environment where all external factors are changing the performer needs to focus on the ‘output’ – the speed and line.

It’s simple.
Closed – movement.
Open – speed and line.

Obviously as always there are exceptions to the rule.

However if you’ve learnt in a closed environment focusing on your movements you will need to change your focus onto speed and line when moving into an open environment.

So where does this leave us with training and the time of year?

The WINTER is an ideal time to GO OPEN. The snow is coming down and the whole mountain is open for business. It’s the time to explore, go places, enjoy and make the most of all the changing conditions.

The SUMMER and AUTUMN are the ideal time to GO CLOSED. The skiing on the glacier is well-prepared and constant. It’s the time to develop movements and skills.

If you’re into skiing all year round you’ll see this. The closed slopes during the summer and autumn are filled with skiers developing their skills practicing their movements, rehearsing thousands of times to ‘groove’ their ‘technique’. When the mountains become open from early December then the focus can switch from movements to speed and line. All those thousands of rehearsed movements patterns grooved in the summer and autumn are all in the subconscious so the mind can be used to focus on speed and line, to go places and enjoy the snow, the mountains and the ever changing conditions.

At Snoworks during the winter months we’re involved in the open world of all-mountain skiing so you can see why much of time is focused on developing control over speed and line. Our summer and autumn programme is where we spend our time developing movements and grooving technique into the subconscious in preparation to go open in the winter. This is the time of year to TRAIN.

For the full range of summer and autumn courses including performance for All-Terrain, Race Carve, Pro Training, Eurotest, Test Technique & Gap click on the link below.
Snoworks Ski Courses

Phil Smith, Director of Snoworks Ski Courses explains how you can benefit from learning the difference between open and closed sports and how this knowledge can dictate when you decide to go skiing and what type of skiing you do.

We’ve had a lot of chat during the winter about the difference between open and closed sports and why at Snoworks during the winter months much of our time is spent developing skills for the open environment. But at Snoworks we also run courses in the summer and autumn so in this blog we explain the difference between open and closed and how you can benefit from moving between the two depending on the time of year you go skiing – winter, summer or autumn.

For those who have not been following the Snoworks blogs a quick recap on open and closed sports and what they mean to how you learn and how you perform.

A closed sport is a sport where the environment does not change and does not affect the performance of the athlete – running in lanes, swimming in lanes, high jump etc.

An open sport is where the environment is constantly changing and constantly affecting the athlete – mountain biking, surfing, football and rugby in open play are examples.

Then you have all the sports in-between – more closed or more open.

How we learn and develop skills for each is quite different. Closed sports have repetitiveness about the performance. The performance is pre-planned and rehearsed – throwing a javelin, front crawl. Open sports you adapt whilst performing, everything you do is different – akin to running through a crowded bar carrying a tray of drinks.

Skiing for many people is learnt in pretty closed environments where the terrain has been well-prepared – green, blue and easy red runs. Therefore skiers often learn a fairly closed way of skiing, their movement patterns are rehearsed and are fairly repetitive.

Looking at skiing in this way you can easily and clearly see why and where many learning plateaus come from. Many plateaus come from a repetitive movement pattern learnt for closed environments being attempted to be used in an open environment.

They key to development with greatly reduced learning plateaus is to recognize the difference between closed and open. Recognise how you’ve learnt previously and begin to use open and closed to your advantage.

As long as you recognize the difference between open and closed it’s pretty simple to understand the learning and performing process.

The benefit of learning in a closed environment is the performance is not affected by external factors leaving the performer free to focus on whatever it is they’re learning. This has great benefits when practicing a particular movement for example. When operating in an open environment where all external factors are changing the performer needs to focus on the ‘output’ – the speed and line.

It’s simple.
Closed – movement.
Open – speed and line.

Obviously as always there are exceptions to the rule.

However if you’ve learnt in a closed environment focusing on your movements you will need to change your focus onto speed and line when moving into an open environment.

So where does this leave us with training and the time of year?

The WINTER is an ideal time to GO OPEN. The snow is coming down and the whole mountain is open for business. It’s the time to explore, go places, enjoy and make the most of all the changing conditions.

The SUMMER and AUTUMN are the ideal time to GO CLOSED. The skiing on the glacier is well-prepared and constant. It’s the time to develop movements and skills.

If you’re into skiing all year round you’ll see this. The closed slopes during the summer and autumn are filled with skiers developing their skills practicing their movements, rehearsing thousands of times to ‘groove’ their ‘technique’. When the mountains become open from early December then the focus can switch from movements to speed and line. All those thousands of rehearsed movements patterns grooved in the summer and autumn are all in the subconscious so the mind can be used to focus on speed and line, to go places and enjoy the snow, the mountains and the ever changing conditions.

At Snoworks during the winter months we’re involved in the open world of all-mountain skiing so you can see why much of time is focused on developing control over speed and line. Our summer and autumn programme is where we spend our time developing movements and grooving technique into the subconscious in preparation to go open in the winter. This is the time of year to TRAIN.

For the full range of summer and autumn courses including performance for All-Terrain, Race Carve, Pro Training, Eurotest, Test Technique & Gap click on the link below.
Snoworks Ski Courses

Photo: Emma Carrick-Anderson on the Tignes glacier

Eurotest, Test Technique, Race Camps. This summer & autumn with Emma Carrick-Anderson. 4 x Olympic skier and BASI Trainer and Mike Barker, former National Team Trainer in conjunction with Snoworks Ski Courses & Carrick-Anderson Race Camps.

Hold on to your hats! Race Carve is here. Pre-requisites. A taste for adrenaline, a need for speed.
Race Carve is skills development for faster, higher speed skiing in and out of the gates. Fast, fun, adrenalin-fuelled skiing.

Children are great models to watch, they have no perceptions, they learn by trial and error, by doing it, by having a go, there is no right or wrong, they live in the present, not hang on to past mistakes, not plan for the future, just the now. These are some of the reasons why children learn so fast and learn so freely. Continuing our series where we hand it over to the young ones, in this episode we look at STEERING.

Emma Carrick-Anderson gives advice to all PRO skiers on getting fit for next season.

Lets get out there!

Spring’s here, skis get put aside to allow place for surf boards, golf clubs, bikes, tennis rackets, hiking shoes and any other piece of kit we ‘kit mad people’ love! What an awesome season its been and although I’m quite glad to let my feet air for a few months that awesome sensation of skiing limitless powder will stay with me and keep me going till the next one!

Its that time of year when we all have great intentions to get ‘really’ fit so we are better prepared for the Eurotest, Test Technique, BASI course or just to enjoy the Pow for longer. So lets do it and not just talk about it!

Springs a great time to get out and get some long distance training in. Not only is it stunningly beautiful at this time of year but after the winter many of us have a little winter coat needing shifting.

As a rough guideline try to split your summer training into 6 week blocks which will allow for 4 cycles before the Autumn training starts at the beginning of November.

Training for this period May-June is all about getting moving and focusing on aerobic training.  This training period is great as you can chose pretty much any form of aerobic exercise and as long you sustain the exercise for a longer period you can vary the type of exercise as much as you want. If you get bored easily then mix it up and go running, biking, swimming, blading or hiking. You have to elevate your heart-rate for a prolonged period. As a rough guideline try to exercise for a minimum of 45 minutes if running or swimming but an hour and half if biking, hiking or blading.

Get out there and move – play tennis, golf, basketball, surf, kite surf or do any other sport you fancy.
During this training period don’t get bogged down in specific training as that will all come later on in the summer.
Watch this space as I will be updating it after a few weeks to help you train towards whichever goals you have lined up for next season.

We will be out in Tignes running Eurotest training on 30th June and 7th July
click here for Eurotest details

and for those skiers just wanting to enjoy the sensation of skiing gates and going fast click
click here for Race Carve details

Photo: Phil Smith, Tignes
Phil Smith, Director of Snoworks Ski Courses, asks the question – “Is skiing the ony sport in the entire world where such an importance is placed over the feet being parallel?”

I read the other day in a newspaper that  ‘parallel skiing’ was the ultimate goal for every skier. Coming from an all-mountain background this was certainly news to me. I thought the ultimate goal was to ski in control all over the mountain whatever the conditions, explore great skiing and of course have great fun doing it.

So with the news that parallel skiing was so important I thought I’d spend some time researching other sports where the ultimate goal is to move both feet or both hands at the same time and in the same manner so they remain parallel.

• Rock climbing – Could have a problem moving feet or hands parallel – may fall off the rock face! With the exception of Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 2 and Sylvester Stalone in Cliffhanger!
• Motor racing – Hmmmm pushing the break and the accelerator at the same time could be interesting!
• Running – ok with the exception of the three-legged race, middle legs only!
• Jumping – no
• Football – no
• Rugby – no
• Tennis – no
• Canoeing – no
• Boxing – no
• Fencing – no
• Windsurfing – no
• Horse riding – yes possibly, but not the horse!
• Cycling – no, except for going in a straight line downhill and even then the feet are in different places!
• Archery – no
• Pole vault or any other athletics discipline – No

In fact after going through almost every sport I could think of, I came up with only the following where hands or feet move parallel:
• Butterfly swimming – Only used in lanes not for water polo.
• High diving – feet and hands sometimes but not always.
• Rowing – Only on flat water not in rapids and only in straight lines.
• Sky diving – Only when you don’t need to change direction i.e. just falling.
• Sledging, skeleton or bobsleigh – providing you only travel in a straight line or are one of the passengers in the bobsleigh!

I’m sure there’s a few more that I have not come up with.

Then looking at the list I noticed that all the sports where you may keep your hands or feet parallel either involve sports where you travel in straight lines or sports where the environment does not change.

So if parallel skiing fits in with the above examples it’s either a sport where the environment does not change, a sport where you travel in a straight line or it’s the only exception in the entire world!

Now we know the environment is constantly changing in skiing. We also know most of the time we are changing direction. So are we saying skiing is the only sport in the entire world where there is such an importance placed on the feet being parallel?

Now you may say – “isn’t skiing parallel – skiing well”? Certainly the journalist that wrote the article seemed to think so!

So let me give you examples of two very different skiers.

- Skier number 1. Can ski everywhere on the mountain, down every piste, down every mogul field, off piste whatever the conditions, every couloir no matter how steep and can ski pretty fast – but does not ski parallel. They change the edge of the new outside ski before they change the edge of the new inside ski. This is so they can constantly grip the mountain, feel safe and be in control. Similar to rock climbing or closer to home, walking and running. You could say skier number 1 rarely skis parallel.

- Skier number 2, skis mostly on groomed, well pisted runs and struggles to ski off piste, steep terrain and anywhere where the snow texture and terrain begins to get more varied like ice and bumps. Their skiing is mostly limited to red pistes and easy backs where the environment is more constant. But they do change their edges at the same time so they ski parallel.

The question is – who is the more competent skier and which skier would you prefer to be?

The other question is and it could be a controversial one. Could the act of trying to ski parallel be holding skier number 2 back? Could the act of trying to ski parallel be limiting skier number 2 to environments that do not change?

… and the final question is. Why is skiing the only sport in the entire world that takes place in an open environment, which involves constantly changing direction where there is so much importance on trying to do it with parallel feet?

Is parallel skiing a bygone era or for the millions of us throughout the skiing world involved in all-mountain skiing are we involved in a different sport to the journalist who wrote -  “‘parallel skiing’ was the ultimate goal for every skier”?

Phil Smith
Director, Snoworks Ski Courses.

Snoworks run all-mountain ski courses where you can learn to ski everywhere – and you don’t need to ski parallel.

Click here for a listing of all the courses.

Skiing in May? The seasons not over yet!
Photo: Hintertux May 2012

The Snoworks spring Bonanza has been running for the last 10 years and this year it’s going to be our biggest May ski course ever. May is renowned for late season snow and this season with the recent April snowfalls it’s going to be better than ever.

The village of Hintertux itself is a small, charming Austrian ski resort with a few hotels, bars and restaurants. The Hotel Rindererhof is a 4-star hotel perfectly positioned for direct access to the glacier and offers very comfortable accommodation.

The skiing is accessed via two gondolas that take you to the Tuxer Fernerhaus and the base of the glacier at 2,660metres. From here the whole glacier opens up offering more skiing possibilities than any other glacier in the world.

THE COURSE
The Hintertux Spring Bonanza is an All-Terrain Course for level 4 to 7 catering for all levels of skiers from adventurous intermediates to experts. The course will cover all aspects of skiing performance – bumps, steep terrain, off-piste and all aspects of piste performance. All-Terrain is the most popular ski course in the whole of the Snoworks programme – it’s about skiing, experiencing and enjoying the whole mountain.

For level 4 adventurous intermediates All-Terrain is your stepping stone into the more ‘open’ environment of all-mountain skiing – learning to cope with the mountain as the conditions become more varied and giving you confidence to take charge of your skiing. For levels 5, 6 and 7 the options are endless and Hintertux over the past few years has provided exceptional skiing conditions and challenge for the highest performance levels.

THE INSTRUCTORS
This year we’ve got our biggest course ever with three Snoworks instructors running and hosting the trip.
LEE TOWNEND
Lee has been full time with Snoworks for the past 4 years and is well known by all Snoworks guests. Director of Snoworks Gap programme he is also a British Association of Snowsport Instructors Trainer having just returned from the annual snowsports instructor training in Hintertux.
Lee has been hosting the South American Adventure programme for the past few years and runs the Courchevel Programme during the winter season.
MIKE BARKER
Mike joined Snoworks last year and has just completed his second full season as part of the Snoworks Team. Mike came directly from running the England National Ski Squad and joined Lee as part of the Three Valleys Team.
NICK QUINN
Nick lives in the Tarentaise valley with his family and this past season has been working with Phil Smith and Emma Carrick-Anderson as part of the Espace Killy Team.

This year with three groups running and the recent epic April snowfalls it’s going to be the biggest, best and most sociable spring bonanza ever!

For full details click here.

Phil Smith Director of Snoworks Ski Courses reports from the final weekend of The Espace Killy and looks back at an epic season of skiing.

It’s the final weekend of the Espace Killy. Phil Smith and Emma Carrick-Anderson, Snoworks instructors report on the latest conditions direct from the slopes of Tignes.