Happy New Year and welcome back to the channel.

Now I've been pretty busy the last few weeks teaching lots of people and I usually find that when I look at their riding, the root of people's problems often come right back to the basics, the fundamentals of simply getting your body in the right position, in the right place, at the right time during the turn.

So for example, I often see people counter-rotating, throwing their shoulders, their arms all over the place as they turn from their toes to the heel side.

So that's the problem, but the origin often starts here with the toe edge posture.

If you're already starting to ride completely out of line like this and I want to turn the board around that way, I'm already rotated to my maximum, I can't turn anymore.

So to get the board to turn down the hill onto its heels, I have to throw my shoulders in the opposite direction, which puts me in this weak position and kicks that back foot out.

Now while this might be working for you on the pistes, on the mellow slopes like this, if you want to progress your riding, if you want to move on to more difficult terrain, ride off-piste, ride powder, all these things, you're going to have to sort this out.

So today I've got a really visual exercise, it's going to be easy for you guys to do and easy to understand and it's really going to correct your posture, not just on your toe side, but on your heels, at the edge change itself and crucially it's going to show you when it is okay to actually separate your upper and lower body a little bit.

Okay, so without further ado, let's get into it.

So for this exercise, all you need is a trusty ski pole.

You can borrow one of these off your skier mates, if you don't have any skier mates, well lucky you, but no, get yourself a ski pole, I'm sure you can find one.

And first actually what I'm going to do, I'm just going to draw a very basic snowboard in the ground here that I'm going to stand in.

It's quite big, but it does the trick and it's good to practice this one like I'm going to do right now before you're even on the board.

And all I'm going to do, basically, I'm just going to rest the pole here on top of my thighs, okay, I'm not even holding it, this is going to become quite apparent later because if you hold it, you can still move your arms out the comes out of line, the pole is quite clearly going to fall out.

So as I said, start off here with the pole on top of my thighs, and I'm on a bit of a slope here, I'm in the heel edge position.

And right away, what this does, it just helps keep everything dead in line.

So my shoulders should be in line with the board, so the pole is going exactly the same direction as the snowboard is.

And because I'm on my heel edge, that means my hips are pulled back slightly, the pole is pretty much vertically over the heel edge.

So if you do this, and there's any twist, if your posture is slightly out of line, you will notice immediately that the pole is not in line with the board.

So coming around now onto my toe edge, same idea, just going to rest the pole here.

Once again, it's dead in line with the board.

But of course, this time, because I'm on my toe edge, your hips should be pushed slightly forward.

And once again, the pole is vertically directly above that toe edge.

If I was to drop it now, look at that, it sat perfectly on where I drew the toe edge.

Okay, so those are your first visual cues.

And you might be thinking, literally the last video you posted, Malcolm, you talked about the benefits of riding in a slightly open stance.

And yeah, that was, but specifically that was for some quite sort of full-on hard carving.

For pretty much all your other riding, we want to be in this stacked position with everything in line.

It means you're really ready, any bumps or lumps you're going to hit, you're ready to react to them, and you can quickly turn your board onto the toes, onto the heels, wherever you need to.

And that's what brings me onto the next part.

So come back around here, I'll start showing you from the heel edge.

So yeah, we're dead in line with the board when we're on our edges.

And a lot of the time when people talk about getting the right posture and things like that, they always talk about being dead in line.

But when it comes to the actual edge change, it is okay for your upper body to open up into the turn just a little bit.

And if you're turning properly, using your knees independently, kind of using them one at a time as levers, as I've explained in this video here, which is really essential watching, like pretty much every video I reference this video, because we really want to be turning, you know, with our feet and our knees independently.

So give this watch to make sure you've got that movement down.

But I'll just quickly explain it here.

So I'm on heels, I'm going to go to my toes, because I start the turn with this front knee, I push this front knee across the board, my hip starts coming through as well.

At the beginning of the turn, it's not much, but essentially, my shoulders are now turned a little bit ahead of the board, they've come out about 15-20 degrees into the slope.

As the board starts coming around, my back knee is going to follow.

Okay, now I'm back on the toe edge, everything is back in line again.

But now, again, at the initiation phase of the next turn, toes to heels, because I just roll this knee, this front knee down the mountain first, once again, my pole has just turned a little bit ahead of the board, and it's just going to pull me down the slope.

So always at the end of every turn, when you're on the heels, or you're on the toes, sure, everything is back in line.

But at the initiation phase, the first movement you do when you push that knee across the board from heels to toe, or pull it round from toes to heels, it's okay for those shoulders to open up just a little bit.

Now, if you haven't quite got that technique, if you're turning more just with a kind of up unweighted movement, that is basically just standing up to initiate the edge change, the pole will stay more in line with the board, that's okay too.

But as I say, if you are turning using your knees, the shoulder will lead in first, and this pole will turn just 15-20 degrees before the board does.

All right, so that's it on the snow, now let's put our board on, let's put it into practice on the snow and see how it works.

Okay, so let's get into it, rest the pole on the top of your thighs, straight away you can see my pole is right there, dead in line with the board.

Vertically, it's above my heels, and it's not the front end sticking up or the back end sticking up, that's going to help keep my shoulders in line, everything's dead in line.

Now, if I just come around onto my toe edge, once again, pole dead in line with the board, stacked vertically over my toes, and it's not sticking up or down.

Now, I'm just going to start to show you at the actual edge change, what happens, the pole just there very slightly turns a little bit ahead of the board, and that is totally fine.

The more you use your feet, more you use your knees independently as their own levers, the more of a twist you're going to have here, but crucially it goes in the same direction the board goes, just a little bit ahead of it, so it comes around just like that, from toes to heels, around.

Okay, let's get into a bit more of a rhythm now.

You can see this really works for whatever kind of turn size and shape I do.

If I'm just holding on an edge, gently rocking from one edge to the other, it works, but what I'll show you as we get over here, as we get over this little ridge, I'll do some tighter, smaller turns, and this exercise still works for that as well.

Coming around.

My phone is in my back pocket, which is actually knocking it very slightly out of line, but you get the idea.

This exercise is so good because it forces you to keep everything locked in there.

So often, as people come around onto the toe edge, they do this kind of movement, that counter-rotation, but I've kept a hold of it there, but the pole would have fallen out.

I would have completely lost it if I'd done that, so it's going to really force you to pull that right arm back, keep that locked in on the toe edge.

If you find yourself often having the arm out there, it's probably a sign that you are counter-rotating a little bit.

Sometimes you do just have to really bring it back to the basics, check everything's in line, and though you might not think your posture is that bad, it could be the root of a bigger problem that is affecting some other part of your riding.

Let's razz it down here a little bit now.

I'm just going to keep the pole there to work on keeping everything dead in line.

Okay.

What you see now as well, this really does even work even for flat basing, keeping everything dead in line.

I'm not even on my edge.

I'm a little bit on my heels now, but it's really just going to help keep everything dead in line.

If you're having issues with flat basing, it's a good exercise for that as well.

This really can help with all aspects of your riding.

Just really correct that posture, sort it out.

As I say, guys, when I'm teaching lessons, no matter how good a rider is, often this is one of the first things we go back to, just aligning everything up so that you can get the most out of your riding.

Well, I don't think I need to explain that too much more.

You can give your skier friends their poles back.

I hope this has helped you guys out.

Thank you for watching.

Let me know you want me to cover next and we'll get through it.

Cheers guys.

I'll see you next time.