We caught up with one of our instructors Adam, who has been the instructor for our Level 6, 9 – 12 years skiing Performance Clinic last week. This is our one of our two top ability levels, and we have some fantastic skiers that join us every school holidays for the ski lessons.
Adam told us a bit about what his group have been up to this week.
Daily planning – group lessons
“Our lessons start every day at the Relais des Neiges restaurant at 9am, opposite the main Medran lift station, which is also where we finished at 4pm. Today was the last day (day 6) of the group, which has been running Sunday to Friday.
This week, due to the speed and ability of the group we have managed to ski most of Verbier, and even conquered Tortin, apparently one of the top ten scariest runs in the world (but not according to the Level 6’s this week!)
We started each day by doing a fast tempo warm up to get ourselves moving, whether it was on our skis doing jump turns, or lifting our arms and legs, to also off our skis doing obstacle courses.
Carving & edge control
Today in the lesson we were focusing on fast carving, and specifically the initiation/start of the turn and edge control. We then moved into the movements we make in the moguls.
With kids, I always try to be as positive and fun as possible through the whole lesson, so that it’s enjoyable for them, and they come away having had a lot of fun as well as having learned a lot. We played games on and off our skis, always trying to develop our knowledge and skill of skiing.
It’s great to see individual children develop in their skiing ability throughout the week. Whether it’s about building up confidence or tweaking their technique, I always see an improvement in every member of the group and its great to see that they enjoy skiing more because of it.
Moguls
This week, Eloise who is 10, had never really skied moguls and was quite apprehensive about skiing them, but the rest of the group were quite keen to ski them. So throughout the next few days, we talked and practiced on easy sections of the mountain about how to get down bumps. By Thursday, we had conquered Col des Gentianes, one of the bumpiest and hardest runs in Verbier! Well done Eloise!
What I enjoy most about teaching is for someone who is scared of certain runs or struggle to ski under control on those runs at the start of the week, to the last day where they can then ski that run and can’t remember why it was ever so hard! It’s great to see the smiles on their faces.”