[Closed] How to ski / snowboard: Catho equivalent?

All you need to snowboard correctly

Go Snowboard by Neil McNab

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/9781405315746/Go-Snowboard-McNab-Neil-1405315741/plp

I’m not a skier but my wife rated this:

Magic! Thank you. I have that McNab book somewhere. I do remember picking up some good stuff from it!

Snowboard Pro camp on you tube is good for breaking things down.

The Darren Turner ski vids are quite good.

SnowboardAddiction.com is excellent, although it's more freestyle orientated than newbie. Still some good basic stuff on there.

I learnt to snowboard on a ski trip when the weather closed in and we all couldn't be arsed to ski. Instead we went and hired snowplanks for the day. Because it was Chamonix and a long time ago, the boards were for hard boots and we were only doing it for a giggle and figured our ski boots would work fine enough; maybe just loosen a buckle a bit. Next stop the chairlift at Le Tour...

... None of us had much confidence in actually scooting our way onto the lifts so we carried the boards (we paid homage to the Monkees at the top of the lift). And reality hit.

... We were in a whiteout with snowboards, ski boots and no effing clue at the top of a red run. Six blokes. Learn or perish. We had one runaway board when somebody didn't get their leash on. Most of the rest of us pushed ourselves upright and felt the balance, slipped the edge and started moving in the right direction. Turns were a learning process.

Blah blah. Everybody lived. Some took up snowboarding in preference to skiing.

To answer the question... don't do it like ^^^^.

For skiing the answer for me was to work a season (two in fact) and get ski instructor foundation training. They broke down skiing to its core elements and got us to consider which elements to bring to bear in any skiing situation we found ourselves in. A lot like Cathro. I had three inspirational instructors who ran courses for a small class of season workers as a bit of relief from the monotony of punter lessons.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

Peaslake, that's pretty much how I learnt to snowboard, along with a few tips from some good guys in the bar after the first afternoon of falling over all the time. I seem to remember the key nuggets were distilled to:

1. Bend your knees
2. Weight forward / don't lean back
3. Look where you want to go
4. Relax

And when I went out the next day and thought about that it all kinda worked out! Not had much practice latterly but got pretty proficient, certainly far from a newbie, so it can work. But based on the quality of Cathro's videos it occured to me that having had zero formal snowboard coaching and figuring it all out on the basis of the four rules I though a similar resource would no doubt be helpful.

And then after snowboarding for 20 years or whatever decided that I should try to learn to ski. Better for towing the kids around and touring. Got one lesson and was getting the hang of it when Covid struck - was a good winter up here too... I suspect the downside is that it really helps if you can do more than a few days a year to get truly proficient, as your season indicates.

1. Bend your knees
2. Weight forward / don’t lean back
3. Look where you want to go
4. Relax

Kind of obliged to post this, but that's kind of OK up to a point, but it's beginner technique at best. There's a bit more to it for higher-performance riding!

The "look where you want to go" bit is helpful in context but leaves the door open to a million bad habits. And there's times when you DO want to lean back. Also, what you really, really want to bend is your ankles.

(Professional snowboard instructor!)

Videos! Cheating.
Read Paul Parker's Freeheel Skiing: Telemark and Parallel techniques for all conditions

He actually explains how it feels, and I seriously learned to ski reading the book in bed. I did practice on snow every weekend, but I had it pretty well after 6 weekends. It was simply a case of replicating the feelings described in the book.

All you need to snowboard correctly

Go Snowboard by Neil McNab

Another +1 on the McNab book.  He does a great job of breaking down exactly how to turn, why it works and some exercises to help you manage it.  Can't recommend it highly enough.  I've been on a couple of courses run by Neil and Keith in the videos and it is pretty much exactly exactly as they show in the book

This dude is good - though not exactly a online course.

A lot of the fundamentals of skiing have equivalents in MTB. The main things I was given to think about were:

- finding the middle of your skis (kind of the boss stance, so you can dynamically move out of centre and return)

- the ways a ski can interact with the snow (weighting left to right, forward/back, angulation, steering,weighting/unweighting); that's just about all they can do, so it is about how your positioning and movements invite those changes in the ski/snow contact

- stance (wide to get more side to side weight transfer so suitable for hard pack/high speed/carving, narrow to form a platform for soft snow/moguls)

- basic differences between long turn carves and short turn techniques

- separation of upper body from lower body

Now I was also learning with a disability that the paediatric surgeon for my club foot had told my parents would mean I'd never be able to ski. With a locked left ankle this meant I had to pay closer attention to equipment setup that most people but this gave me an important insight...

... most beginners skip over the importance of keeping their heels in the back of their boots.Most beginners cannot perform the exercises that ski instructors give them because their heels are not in the back of their boots. When you get taken out of your comfort zone, your foot tenses up and your toes claw your heel out of the back of your boots.

Rule #1 Keep you heel in the back of your boots.

Young kids are the only people who its allowable for them not to keep their heels in the back of their boots (racing snowplough). Everybody else needs to. Wit the heel properly located, the lower leg angles forward and the knee becomes a hinge - with the heel forward, the lower leg is forced to the vertical and you can't push your weight through into the boot.

Find an instruction course that shows you what these concepts look like and it is a good basic instruction course.

Others will no doubt critique this but I've tried to sum up the very core essenceof the sport. If you've done 20 years of snowboarding you'll know the snowboarding equivalents of many of these. For instance you'll know exactly the importance of keeping your weight central/forward to keep control through a turn on steep terrain. The advancement becomes a matter of combining the basic elements using situational awareness (type of snow / type of terrain) and having a wealth of muscle memory.