5 Ski Habits to Break on Your First Days Back

The first few days back on snow are always a little awkward. Legs feel rusty, movements feel scrappy, and it can take a while to find your rhythm again. That’s totally normal, skiing isn’t something your body does day-to-day, so it takes time to wake up those patterns.

There are five habits that come up again and again in these early days. They’re not a sign that you’ve hit your ceiling, just reminders that your body isn’t used to skiing yet. Once you notice them, they’re simple to reset, and you’ll get back to skiing your best much faster.

We asked Demelza Clay, Carv Pro Team and Level 4 Ski Instructor, to share the five mistakes she sees most often. Each one comes with ways to spot it, drills to fix it, and, because this is Carv, the some tips and metrics that help you track your progress.

Over to you, Demelza.

1. Skiing in the Back Seat

Every skier on the planet has been told at one point that they are leaning back. Why? Because standing in stiff ski boots attached to a plank of wood is a totally unnatural way for a human to stand. Then you start sliding down a hill, and many people feel safer leaning away from the intimidating slop,e so the leaning back happens even more.

How to spot it

There are a couple of ways to detect this:

• You might notice the tips of your skis shaking, vibrating, or appear to be slightly lifted up from the snow - because you have no pressure on the front section of the ski.
• You feel more pressure under your heel bone than under the ball of your foot.
• Your quads are burning. You may even feel the muscle on the front of your tibia straining (tibialis anterior).
• You find it hard to slow down.

If you can, watch a video of yourself skiing. Your position looks very tall, with not much flexion in the ankle, knee, and hip. You look like you are waiting for a bus, rather than doing a sport. Look at your body in relation to your feet; over which part of your foot is your body weight positioned?

Why it matters

Oh, let me count the ways:

• The skis do not work properly because your weight is anchored over your heels and the tail of the ski.
• You are unable to initiate efficient turns from this position.
• You are creating uneven tension through your musculature, straining your quads.
• This ‘unathletic’ position makes skiing across the board a lot harder.

2. Leaning into Turns

Put simply, you are doing it because you can. Shaped skis are so good at turning that you can get away with just tipping the whole body into the turn, without angulation, and the skis will still make a direction change.

The skill you’re missing here is called angulation, mostly required at the hip. Angulation helps to laterally ‘separate’ the upper body from the lower body. Some people struggle with it because they have poor hip mobility, and others just never learned the movement patterns to create angulation during their turns.

How to spot it

• Do your shoulders face across the slope rather than downhill?
• Do your skis skid and spray instead of leaving clean tracks?

Why this matters

• Leaning into your turns has numerous negative effects:
• Your sense of balance feels very precarious when you ski, for example, you manage to stay on your feet… but only just!
• Anytime you ski on a steeper section of terrain, your skis want to slide sideways too much, feels like they are sliding out from underneath you.

How to fix it

Let’s keep this simple, this challenge will follow on from the previous one:

Warming up for The Infinite Balance Test:

• When stationary, see how long you can balance on each ski.
• How do you need to move your body to get the best balance over each ski?
• How stable are you? If someone gave you a little push, would you be able to stay balanced?
• Make stork turns this time, focusing on that sense of ’bombproof balance’ over each outside ski.
• If leaning your upper body in makes balance hard, where should you lean your upper body to make balance easy?


The Infinite Balance Test:

• Make a full C-shaped turn with the tail of your inside ski lifted the whole time. Stay balanced and keep turning until your skis point back up the hill and come to a stop.
• Can you make it all the way to the end and stay balanced when the ski comes to a stop?

3. Hip Dumping

If you are hip dumping, it means you are moving your hip too early and too quickly into your turn. In my experience, a lot of people do it because they have the hip mobility, so it’s easy for them to move inside with hip angulation. They also do it because they didn’t learn how to incline or topple into their turns properly.

How to spot it

This is a problem that is most obvious in higher-performance turns.

If you are trying to get your whole body position lower so you can better oppose the forces of a fast pure carved turn, you might get the feeling during your turns that you are blocked, like you are stuck as you move through the turn. You want to get further inside, but you can’t.

You will see a similar over pronounced angulated position to this.

Why it matters

More is not better. Overdoing any skill in skiing usually has negative consequences:

1. Using too much hip angulation means you will eventually reach a point where you can’t move inside any further because you haven’t balanced your inclination with angulation.
2. You cannot use inclination when you hip dump - if you try you will lose balance.

How to fix it

The idea is to slow down hip angulation by introducing earlier and stronger inclination. Inclination in skiing is the act of tipping your mass inside to initiate the turn, inclination must happen for a skier to turn.

Ideally, you want to use both at the same time, but in reality, in good quality turns, it feels like you incline first, then balance that inclination using angulation.

Try this task to encourage better timing of both movements:

White Pass Turns:

• The goal is to initiate your turns on the inside edge of the inside ski.
• Hold your outside ski in the air.
• When your skis are in the fall line, put the outside ski down.

4. Z Shape Turns

When we learn to ski, one of the first memos we receive is that we need to make parallel turns to slow down. The focus is: if you make the skis go from left to right, it will slow you down, and at this stage, it’s great advice. After that, those who have spent a lot of time on steep terrain usually have a zig-zag-shaped turn, and those who prefer mellow runs tend to develop a turn shape that is straight and directed to the bottom of the hill.

As we improve and want to ski with more speed on steeper terrain, the focus needs to shift to the shape and quality of the turn. Great skiing requires smooth, round ‘functional turns’
that make skiing on this type of terrain
more efficient and easier.

How to spot it

• Do your skis feel like they “fight” each other?
• Does one ski chatter or skid more than the other?

Why it matters

Functional Turns’ serve a purpose; they are better at slowing you down, and their round shape gives you the time and space to make the movements to create fu,n exhilarating ski turns. ‘Dysfunctional Turns’ don’t serve the skier very well.

These include zig-zag shaped turns or turns that go straight down the hill without a lot of lateral deflection - they “kind of get the job done” but are not very good at controlling speed, and their shape doesn’t allow you to experience the thrill of higher performance skiing

How to fix it

Beyond this, using video is a great way to understand how round or straight your turns are. You can also pick up some cues if you pay attention to your ski tips in your peripheral vision when you are skiing. Here’s what to pay attention to:

• If you think your ski tips spend most of their time pointed across the slope, either left or right (at 10 and 2 o’clock), then your turns might be zig-zag shaped.
• If you think your skis are mostly pointing down the hill, and the tips rarely point across the hill to 10 and 2 o’clock, then your turns are probably too direct.
• If you think your skis are spending an equal amount of time in the fall line running down the slope and pointing across the hill, then your turns might be more round.

There are also a couple of drills you can do to help you fix this:

3 Sided Box Turns:

• Imagine you have to make a round (half circle) turn around a 3-sided box;
• Does this exercise encourage you to spend more time skiing across the hill or in the fall line than usual?

Count It Out:

• As you make your round turns, see if you can spend an even number of beats skiing across the fall line and down the fall line.

Which type of turn shape do you think you make?

• Work to even out the shape of your turns in whichever direction, across or down the hill, that you need to.

Lastly, if you feel like you are never quite able to control your speed, then your turn shape might need some work.

5. Static Skiing

Locking into a rigid stance instead of staying dynamic. Skiers who hold one position through the whole turn miss the smooth build-and-release of pressure that makes skiing flow.

How to spot it

• When you finish skiing a regular run for your ability, do you feel out of breath? (Spoiler alert, I do!)
• Do you have a video of your skiing? If yes, take a look at your skiing to see if you can detect any ‘parking and riding’ during your turns.
• Does it look like you are just standing there? Or can you see some subtle movements (these still count by the way!)
• Look for continuous movement of your whole body (inclination or ‘toppling’) and individual joints; this could be angulation of the hip, ankle/knee, or even the shortening of the inside leg.

Why it matters

Great skiing is characterized by the concept of continuous movement. A talented skier’s body is always moving; from dropping in and angulating through a turn, to exiting that turn with a diving crossover into the next.

You will never see a great skier move into their turn, then just stand there and ride it out; hence the term the ‘park and ride’.

Among many things, continuous movement creates exhilarating higher-performance turns, helps refine more powerful edging, and helps you utilize stored energy in the camber of your skis to increase the efficiency and liveliness of your turns.

When you look at the Carv data of some of the greatest skiers, they all have one thing in common - they are incredibly dynamic. Carv measures how well you unweight during your turn. Let’s compare this data between an expert skier, Marcus Caston, for example, and an intermediate skier.

We see that experts are much more active in the vertical plane. They generate significantly more downward force during the turn and release much more of it in the transition.

This is because the expert uses rebound, flexion, and retraction to unweight during the transition, setting themselves up to generate a strong downward force through edging and forward movement in the turn. This isn’t easy to do, which is why a lot of skiers end up skiing more statically.

How to fix it

As with a lot of these common problems, developing some awareness of the problem is the first step. If you think you are a little static (you probably are), begin by simply exploring a greater and more continuous range of movement throughout your turns as you practice skiing. Are your skis working on the snow any differently? What can you feel happening?

Skate Turn Drill:

• Head to a green or gentle blue terrain.
• Tighten up your turns by trying to skate inside the turn.
• Make sure your skis are cutting the snow as you skate around each turn (no skidding).
• Challenge yourself to see how round and small you can make those turns.
• What do you need to do with your body to achieve this?
• What parts of your body can you move inside to achieve this?

The Takeaway

These early-season habits aren’t proof you’ve hit your limit; they’re just the natural rust that shows up when skiing isn’t something your body does every day. The upside? They’re also some of the quickest things to reset if you catch them in your first few days back.

If you’re a Carv user, this is where it really shines at the start of a season. With real-time feedback on the fundamentals - balance, edging, rotation - you can shake off the rust faster, rebuild confidence, and get back to skiing the way you want to. Fixing the basics early builds a foundation that makes the rest of your trip, and your whole season, smoother, more controlled, and a lot more fun.