 Poster: A snowHead
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horizon, snap - but I am not too worried by it. Not sure I want to perfect the art of going very fast through gates on ice. You can get to a point where you know the kind of skiing you like, and train/learn for that.
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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rob@rar, you're edges obviously weren't sharp enough... 
Was it an ice-injected course? Ice is tricky, but to a tourist, it could be seen as a form of off-piste in itself - a lack of perfect groomed soft-firm snow.
Okay, I've tried arguing my way out of it, I'll just admit that I forgot about ice/it was a very generalised statement...
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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skisimon, skis were sharpened four times that week. It would be nice to blame the kit, but it was my technique that was very deficient. It wasn't injected, it was the glacier at Tignes. After three or four runners we were down to blue ice.
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| rob@rar wrote: |
| fatbob wrote: |
| Grooming does produce very one dimensional skiers ... |
I wonder if it works in the opposite direction? Are off-piste specialists less technically proficient on piste because they spend far less time developing their skills in that context? |
The mountain guide we had in La Grave in Jan said that he was a cr*p skier on piste, because he's not used to it. Off piste, he's a god (my assessment, not his!)
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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This seems an interesting and worthwhile thread 
Reading all peoples views/comments and many of them seem to ring true - had a thought that is comparable to our younger generation on our roads too. Lack of driver skills combined with more modern equipment, total disregard for other users and rules of the road.
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UK skiers seem more likely to learn how to ski with an instructor (up to about third week level), however NA skiers seem more likely to take/continue to take lessons once they reach intermediate/advanced level to push their skiing on and learn how to ski different terrain. Maybe this is down to the skiing patterns, i.e. week holidays (of full on skiing) vs weekends and evenings
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I would think the case of NA skiers is more down to the fact that NA ski resorts allow you to ski any terrain within their boundary, this encourages them to take lessons so they can move off the pistes with confidence.
I dont think we can attribute the problem down to one cause, more of a combination of most of the previous posts.
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moffatross, sorry, I don't understand Paddy's point with this exercise - can you explain? And you won't look any odder than I think I did at Cairngorm recently, doing some of my easiski prescribed exercises...however, zero vis can have advantages!
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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I suppose the people who use a calculator to sums don't have much respect for the people who use computer.
Those who know how to use log tables dismiss the calculator users.
The slide-rule experts may think those who used log tables have no understanding of scientific calculations.
There are always people who refuse to believe there can be more than one way to skin a cat so there will be skiers who believe the only way to learn ski is the way they used to.
So the cross country skiers laugh at the downhill skiers as they do real sport and do not need chairlifts.
The off-piste skiers laughing at those on piste.
Ski touers laughing at those skiers who need mechanical assistance for every ascend.
Extreme skiers dismiss all other skiers not living a real life as they know nothing about danger.
Does being a bad skier, who can only manage to ski a couple of weeks in a year, or whether the piste has been groomed bother us?
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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Agree with many of the points raised.
One that hasn't been covered is inconsistent grooming.
I've skied many Austrian resorts where the grooming on one day is markedly different from the grooming on another.
The unfit holidaymaker approaches the challenge of the slope with their eyes not their feet, makes the same manoeuvers as they did the previous day, and end up getting into all sorts of bother which sometimes results in injury.
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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| Mike Pow wrote: |
...
One that hasn't been covered is inconsistent grooming.
.... |
Quite. In Wengen at the MSB we noticed some pistes had been 'striped' that is to say a piste basher had been up and down them but left unpisted gaps between the pisted sections. This was NOT like in Heavenly where they had clearly left one side of the piste unpisted after fresh snow to leave some powder to play in, this was just shoddy pisting. It made the conditions diffiocult becaus eone minute you'd be on a groomed surface, the next ungroomed. As a general point I thought the piste maintenance is Wengen was poor with some runs ignored for a couple of days. Austria was much better both at Maria Alm and Ischgl.
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| rob@rar wrote: |
| fatbob wrote: |
| Grooming does produce very one dimensional skiers ... |
I wonder if it works in the opposite direction? Are off-piste specialists less technically proficient on piste because they spend far less time developing their skills in that context? |
I think that would apply as well.....
Sometimes I can get out the full pose mode, but mostly I don't and I doubt I carve really well either so I am probably not very proficent either way...but I am pretty confident about coping..!!! 
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You know it makes sense.
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| easiski wrote: |
davidof, Patch, 30 years ago piste machines were only just being invented! In the 70s we didn't have any groomed pistes. I think it started in the 80s (but am not sure). The speed of skiers was enormously much slower, and there were many fewer skiers on the piste. However it seems to me that most peeps these days only learn to slide around on well groomed pistes rather than actually learn to ski properly. OTOH I haven't noticed many more helicopters this year, more rotten manners, yes!   |
I think this is perhaps the point the Austrian doctors were making, but of course there are many more factors such as increased numbers of skiers etc.
It would be interesting to know if a higher level of fitness was required to ski pistes that had not been prepared or were less prepared, than the level of fitness required for skiing the groomed pistes. I suspect so. The doctors specifically mentioned unfit skiers in association with better grooming of pistes, as those skiers noted as receiving the most injuries
Btw, I am not too sure why reference has been made by some to off-piste skiing; the the original post was about a link between increased injuries and piste grooming, fitness and modern equipment.
For the record I must admit to enjoying chopped up pistes rather than groomed pistes and enjoy spring conditions
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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Poster: A snowHead
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Fatbob, yes a wider tool is perhaps an advantage in certain circumstances
Actually you may have hit on a interesting point there, it seems that the majority of skis for hire or in use these days are these carving skis, therefore the industry may well be dictating how pistes are being prepared, and maybe prepared too much ??
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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rayscoops, the reason that I mentioned off-piste skiing (and I presume why many others did), is that to understand fully the problems faced by one group (i.e. purely on-piste, unfit, unskilled... 'holiday' skiers) you have to compare the differences between them and those which are anything but (usually people that ski off-piste, or at least varied on-piste runs such as bumps - which aren't groomed), considering these differences often gives the best idea as the the deficiencies of the poorer group.
| fatbob wrote: |
| I'd love to have a pair of slalom or gs skis in my quiver but practically would probably rarely use them |
Managed to ski on four different carvers in one week (two different SL skis, a GS ski and a GS cheater ski). I found it a great experience as you have to really get used to 'feeling' the ski and what it's doing, and then adapt as appropriate.
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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Skisimon, fair and valid point, but there was a post that referred to me and off piste skiing that had me confused in the context of this thread
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
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Ah, I must have missed that... 
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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| rob@rar wrote: |
| fatbob wrote: |
| Grooming does produce very one dimensional skiers ... |
I wonder if it works in the opposite direction? Are off-piste specialists less technically proficient on piste because they spend far less time developing their skills in that context? |
As someone with a foot in both camps (i.e. both off-piste/touring and a bit of on-piste racing), I guess I have a reasonable view from both sides of the fence here. I would say that groomed pistes don't necessarily encourage bad skiing, but they do allow you to get away with it. You can get down most pistes perfectly adequately with tail-tossing, windsceen-wider turns etc.. and your weight all over the shop, or skiing with virtually unchanging bend in the legs, and rigid upper body. You'll have trouble doing that in anything but the simplest off-piste. I've spent the majority of my time skiing off-piste, and what that teaches you is the ability to react to variable snow, i.e. muscle responses and recovery ability. It also requires you to have a load of different tools in the toolbox, as you never know what you'll be encountering next. So you need agility, strength, and a bit of balance - but not a huge amount of refinement. With that you can get down anything, including any piste, and without this you won't be able to get down. So at this level an adequate off-piste skier will be able to cope with stuff an adequate on-piste only skier will not.
To get to any non-embarassing level of racing, though, it's a different story. This will teach you a much higher level of fine muscle control, awareness of what the various bits of your body are doing, in order to make the turns you need to to stay in the course. Until you get to some pretty serious off-piste, you don't need that fine muscle control and honed technique - e.g. the ability to make small adjustments to pressure fore and aft during a turn - that you need to get down a race course at a reasonable speed. You also spend very little time carving any turns, so you miss an important part of modern ski technique. My first race training session, I'd just come off the Haute Route, dealing safely with some pretty nasty snow conditions with 10kg of clobber on my back, and so thought I was a pretty fair skier. I was soon disabused of this notion though - in the first exercises I managed about 2 turns to about every 5 of the rest of the class. So if technique is measured as the ability to turn a ski tightly at speed, then proper training on piste will give you a load of technical stuff that off-piste skiing will not. I do think it short-sighted to have this as your only definition of "technical ability" though. It will also force you to make the large body movements that you were probably faking in your unrefined off-piste experience much more controlled. You probably can learn all this stuff straight in the off-piste, but it's much harder to distinguish the imbalances caused by the vagaries in the terrain from those caused by you just getting things wrong - and you need that differentiation to tell you when you have got it wrong so you know you need to do something about it. On a groomed piste you can be pretty sure that if something goes wrong it's you that screwed up, can remember what it felt like when you were doing it wrong, and can then have a chance of doing something about fixing it next time around. So 3 years of race training later, I'm now a hugely improved off-piste skier too, with the improved balance and control required by the racing now feeding back into better control of my body in the linked recoveries that is off-piste skiing.
Do you need to be fitter/stronger to ski reasonably off piste to on? Not entirely clear-cut there. I know I get more leg burn carving down a piste at high speed than I do making a big off-piste descent, but unless you've got excellent conditions and are very experienced at reading the terrain, you're going to be skiing much slower off-piste than when haring down a piste, so you're not really comparing like with like. If you were skiing at similar speeds, then I'm pretty sure the off-piste skiing is going to require a much higher level of fitness and strength than does the groomed piste, so again you can ski to a functional level on-piste even if not at all fit.
So the bottom line of this ramble is that I believe the skiils required for above-entry-level-performance on- and off-piste are complementary, and that if you want to be a rounded competent skier you need to be pushing the envelope in both environments.
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Thinking about my own experiences on skis I do fall into the 'agree' with the opening statement camp. Well groomed pistes do make it less challenging and easier to exceed our abilities without the risk being increased by the same extent. It doesn't tax our physical conditioning or our response/reflex levels . . . they just allow us to ski obscenely quickly and develop a 'semi' when looking back up the hill shouting "Wow, I nailed that" . . .
AND WE LOVE IT! A groomed piste extends our 'comfort zone' and is superb at building basic confidence, letting the nervous slider learn and practice base techniques without struggling to cope with a cruddy surface knocking their skis all over the place.
It's when we experience mixed conditions like Wengen and I agree with axeman, the consistency was dire, that we can become just ballistic falling objects. It wasn't until the very last morning that I finally stopped fighting the broken, chopped up surface and started to flow with it at higher speeds and it requires a very different 'mind-set' and body response than the same velocities on corduroy. BUT. I would never have gained the confidence to travel at speed and gain that confidence without first experiencing it on a well groomed slope.
I think the title of this thread may be better phrased as:
Groomed Pistes Producing Bad Skiers on anything other than Groomed Pistes. It's an egg, chicken, chicken, egg situation that has more to do with people eschewing tuition because they can go fast on a good surface thinking it's no different in the crud.
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| GrahamN wrote: |
| So the bottom line of this ramble is that I believe the skiils required for above-entry-level-performance on- and off-piste are complementary, and that if you want to be a rounded competent skier you need to be pushing the envelope in both environments. |
Exactly right, IMO, and a good explanation of why you reach that conclusion. I speak as someone who has spent most of their time pushing one envelope only and therefore can't consider myself a good, well-rounded skier.
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| Masque wrote: |
| Well groomed pistes do make it less challenging and easier to exceed our abilities without the risk being increased by the same extent. It doesn't tax our physical conditioning or our response/reflex levels |
Depends on how you ski that well groomed piste, surely? Are you saying that it is not possible to be challenged when skiing on piste?
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rob@rar, Of course it is, but surely that's a personal decision to extend your skiing outside your comfort zone. Skiing on a groomer gives you a sense of security (false or not). It also massages the ego. What it doesn't do is let you take that same sense of confidence and skills level onto poorer conditions and survive at the same pace/incline. If you desire it, corduroy lets you push-on to mega carving and great speed . . . but you are talking about people with skill to exercise not the numpties who think that skiing fast on a groomed piste will automatically qualify them to do the same in chop.
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Masque, I agree with that, but it just sounded like you were saying that a well groomed piste can't challenge a skiers technique, fitness, commitment or skill. It can do all those things, if you approach it in the right way. The fact that the majority of skiers don't use the pistes in that way, and ski safely while doing so, is more to do with the choices the skiers make rather than the preparation of the terrain they are skiing on, surely? Sorry if I misread your comments.
You also get numpties off-piste; I saw a few a couple of days ago who were well out of their depth (excuse the pun), in poor light and skiing a pitch which had a small cliff and rock outcrop in the middle of it. I don't think numptiness is context driven. Irresponsible skiers who don't have the skills to ski safely can be found all over the mountain.
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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So everyone seems to be broadly in agreement bar the semantics of the original proposition:
Groomed pistes may enable "bad" skiers who are not predisposed to improving their fitness and/or technique to get away with things that they may not do in a less consistent or more technically demanding environment and therefore may increase their chances of injury when they do encounter a problem.
not snappy though is it and we haven't even defined "bad"
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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fatbob, but the thread title had to be a bit 'catchy' to initiate debate
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You know it makes sense.
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| queen_sheba wrote: |
Agreed - a girl i knew went for the first time and boasted a black by the end of the week. i felt so stupid i hadn't progressed as quickly.
i've been twice now and only progressed to a red run on the last day of the most recent holiday...and even then it was an easy-ish one where i was guided down a portion at a time. |
If it's any comfort, you're not alone in this. I don't think I did any reds in my first week, and only a couple of easy ones in each of my second and third. It's only in my fourth and fifth weeks that I spent significant amounts of time on reds and completed a few easy blacks.
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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Wear The Fox Hat,
Now you're on dangerous territory - everyone knows that there is only 1 resort worth going to, 1 ski coach worth listening to, 1 type of car worth having (even if it is a dodgy Italian) etc etc
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Poster: A snowHead
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Any beginner who can link basic turns and stop can get safely down a red or even black run if they're confident enough to try it. Whether this means they can "ski" it or not is another matter. Saying you skied a black run in your first week says little about the progress of your actual technique, but perhaps more about your confidence and bravery. Or even stupidity in some cases - which is perhaps the subject of this thread.
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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| fatbob wrote: |
| Groomed pistes may enable "bad" skiers who are not predisposed to improving their fitness and/or technique to get away with things that they may not do in a less consistent or more technically demanding environment and therefore may increase their chances of injury when they do encounter a problem. |
Exactly, even if you can't quite fit that sentence into a nutshell
For me the real issue is the choices the skier makes, especially whether they ski responsibly, rather than what type of terrain they ski on. If someone was murdered with a gun I would tend to blame the guy who pulled the trigger rather than the gun itself. In much the same way as I blame irresponsible skiers rather than the nicely groomed piste they caused an accident on.
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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rob@rar, but the point of the news reports was that groomed pistes were, in a way, encouraging and even allowing skiers to ski badly, in the same way a gun encourages and allows a gangster to shoot some one. Yes of course the skier and gangster is at fault, but the choice that they make is in some way dictated by what is under their feet or in their hand.
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
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| rayscoops wrote: |
| ... but the choice that they make is in some way dictated by what is under their feet or in their hand. |
I don't think it is dictated, and nor should we let them have that as an excuse for poor behaviour. What's wrong with expecting people to take some personal responsibility for their conduct on the slopes rather than pinning the blame on the piste that they were on?
The vast majority of skiers & boarders use the pistes responsibly. If there was an inherent problem with the combination of groomed pistes and new ski kit why don't we see the majority of people causing accidents? Equally, you see idiots in the bumps, in the powder, maybe even in the park. What has triggered that?
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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| rob@rar wrote: |
| Equally, you see idiots in the bumps, in the powder, maybe even in the park. What has triggered that? |
At a guess, the increasing popularity of ski resorts as mainstream holiday destinations. Benidorm on the snow if you like. When I first started skiing 25 years ago, skiing was more of a hobby than a "holiday destination". Of course regular Snowheads are still likely to treat skiing as a serious hobby, but I think many others just treat it purely as a holiday. Hence the increase in the number of idiots above.
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| rob@rar wrote: |
| Equally, you see idiots in the bumps, in the powder, maybe even in the park. |
Especially in the park, in my experience.
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| uktrailmonster wrote: |
| Benidorm on the snow if you like. |
I think that's right. The groups (mainly young men) that I give the widest berth to seem to have only just removed their "Kiss me Quick, Shag Me Slow" hats from their recent Costa del Whatever adventures. For these kind of people a well groomed piste might enable them to go quicker than an unprepared slope, but it won't affect their mindset.
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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Substitute swimming for skiing & the answer is definitely something that I might do while on holiday but don't really give a stuff about whether my technique is any good and its 30 years since I last had a lesson.
But interestingly enough I am affected by other people's behaviour on the swimming "piste" e.g. kids splashing around, people not respecting lane discipline etc.
Go on swimheads and you'll probably find that I am the casual idiot
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Been touched on already but d'ya think that the "X Factor auditions" effect is in there too? The fact that all the gear and grooming allows someone to "do" a black run by the end of the week makes them actually believe they can ski/board? Over confidence breeds costly mistakes?
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FAQ
Does that make me an idiot? 
