3 Tips for Getting Comfortable on Skate Skis

One of the challenges of getting comfortable on skates whether you are a new Nordic Skier or just getting back onto snow for the first time is the single leg Glide. One of the best drills we found to work on this is to start by taking one ski off. Standing on the leg that has no ski on it fully shift your weight on that leg. Being balanced on that leg push yourself over onto the leg with ski on it. In the landing, there three things that we want to focus on: 

 1. We want to think about landing on a flat ski, meaning the base of the ski is totally flat against the snow. To accomplish this we actually want to think about exaggerating the movement and landing on the pinky toe or the outside of the boot / ski. 

2. We want to think about getting good ankle flexion as we land on the ski. Having a soft ankle and a soft knee will allow us to effectively engage our leg muscles to create stability within that leg. One of the external cues we can focus on is pressing our shin into the front of the boot. that gives us some external feedback to know how far forward we are in our shin angle.

3. The third piece we want to make sure we have dialed is getting our weight our Center of mass over the ski. Since we only have one ski on, we’re really focused on proper body position on the landing ski. A great way to do this is to think about squaring our hips and shoulders towards the tip of that ski. we can almost think of our torso as a rectangle and slightly turning that rectangle towards the tip of the ski.

Don’t try to focus on all three things at once! Work your way through a few times on each step before moving to the next. After you’ve gone through each focus on one leg, shift to the other leg. Practice this in a flat area where you can be out of the way of other skiers!