Urghh. Hello there.
Hi.
Are you trying to make your voice deeper?
Got to get psyched up. Yeah.
Today we're out here in Laax and I'm going to teach you five easy tricks that are mind-numbing, ski-bending, and
snow-grinding,
and to be honest, they're all quite easy
if you do the basic version of each trick, but I'll introduce more advanced versions.
This video has a little something for almost everyone.
And since this is the funnest video I ever do, we are doing the biggest giveaway we've ever done,
so don't miss that. Enough talking, let's hit it. Trick number one, snow grinds.
All you have to do is to find something to grind.
So, I'm at the side of a slope where you can often find a little ridge to grind, and the first variation of the ridge grind
is
to just grind it and then lean back so you put some extra pressure on the tails so you go back to forwards together,
just like this.
You can really ollie quite a lot off it and you can also try to
go against the pressure of the tails and do the ridge grind to switch again, where you just ollie to switch, it just feels pretty cool.
The snow grinds can be really quite transformative for beginner freestylers.
It's really easy and safe and the whole mountain turns into a terrain park.
Once you are comfortable with this snow grind
you can go to a halfpipe or a mini-pipe like this one, which I actually call a coping grind or something like that.
Don't miss the coping if they're 180 on Lewis grind, grinding
or 180 off it, what I'm saying? Whatever, you know what I mean. If you get that down just go
wild. There are so many different variations to do, 360 on, 360 out,
and all of that good stuff. Let's see if I can do any of it.
Yeah.
Early nose grab. It's quite exciting. I recommend that you leave your poles
like I just have and then you can try it off a jump.
First time you do it,
definitely head out from straight and the jump should be really small. So let's try one.
All right, so now I'm going to try to do an early nose grab 360, never done this so I'm excited.
I'm going to have to rely on the carve pileup and the left arm to do the swinging.
We'll see how it's going to go.
Jeez, early nose grab 360 is not an easy trick.
I think it's easier to do switch because it's a more natural position. It's so hard to even just get the nose
before you hit the jump, you almost could get the nose while at the end run.
It gets a little sketch. And in my experience it's easier to go right hand, left nose,
because that foot's going to skid a little bit away to help you with rotation.
Let's do one of those early nose grabs onto this mailbox. Get the grab.
Ah I dropped it.
It slipped out of his hand.
I wish I had my sticky gloves on. That's a terrible excuse, Jens, it's not going to cut it with the fans.
Alright, let's learn our very first snow ballet move.
And this is quite tricky if you try to do everything in one go,
so I really suggest you practice one part at a time. Find a bit of a flat slope, even flatter than what I am on.
So the first step is
get into this sketchy position
Twist the foot over, I prefer to be on the uphill edge because it's safer for the knees
but you can put it on the downhill ledge for extra room.
You know, as usual, at your own risk.
And then this one is going to drag you around,
so this is dragging us around in a 360,
a 180 I mean, and then open the hip into caribou wide stance and I step around.
Oh, this is fast, go around,
drag it,
into caribou, and out.
Nice. Yeah. As you can see, the ski ballet move looks sort of tricky,
but if you break it down into its parts, it really ain't that hard.
So once you get that down
I do suggest that you could try it right at a drop-in just to look a little cool,
or you can do it just before hitting a rail, for example.
To do this twirly, ski-ballet thing onto a box, timing is key.
And what I've experienced is that it's easy to start too high up
or you should be pretty close to the box to really finish the ballet move straight on to the box or even from one leg,
which I haven't got yet, but we'll get it in the next one.
That felt nice.
I would have preferred it with a ?, anyway, that's the ballet.
Next trick, hip slides.
An easy hip slide is best done on a flat box with a wee bit of a drop off at the end.
Unfortunately, I don't have a feature like that.
The features with drop offs at the end can help you to land straight onto your feet, while this battleship box, or up-flat-down,
since it's down, it's hard to get your feet under you and you've got to land with your edges in the snow a little bit
but it can easily over-edge.
To avoid the over edging, I suggest that you have the skis at like a
45-degree angle to the slope so it gets a little less aggressive.
Stay low, stay down.
Now we're going to do something quite exciting that I've never done, I've heard it's called cinnabon slide.
So it's basically like the hip slide,
but we're going to do it with the head down the hill and then spin with the tummy up the hill.
So I'm going to just stay really low in the box in the beginning and then, like, fall onto my hip forwards,
grab the outside of the box and chuck myself around.
Wish me luck.
And I made it my own with almost 5 lip out
I'll leave it at that because my hips are bruised up enough. Next trick.
Manuals, and to be specific, tail manuals first. To learn this
I suggest you start out with perfectly flat, and you just lean back,
lift the toes, you lean back some more and try to not use
the poles to help you. It matters a lot what kind of ski you have, if you have a soft ski, it's going to be significantly easier.
To add some style, it's important that you pop off the end of the manual, like a little ollie.
You can do it at the drop-in, dropping into the pipe or all the rollers over like anything flat where it's like
a clear cut between here, we start a manual, and there, we finish it. Then it's going to look pretty sick.
One easy manual combination you can do is a manual to 180.
Then you can step it up and try to do to all the snow features or even boxes.
Switched tail manual or whatever you'd call that. I don't recommend it, it feels sketchy. If normal manuals was too easy, try nose manual.
This is much more fun to do but it's a little sketchy.
Because the noses can slide apart and you fall on your face, you don't want to do that.
So it's important you keep the feet very close together and arms out, this is to keep the balance.
And you extend the legs, but don't overextend them, that could hurt your knees.
So you want to keep them slightly kinked, and go up on the noses.
Before we hit the competition, don't forget you can come here and learn from me and my great coaches at their own freestyle camps.
Competition time. You can win
my socks, no, they're new. Men's socks and ski socks from Smartwool, an intra-knit base-layer from them as well.
Can even win the Chetler skis from Atomic.
These goggles, this helmet, and even a weekend stay here in Laax with your ticket.
So, to enter the competition you've got to do the following, post an easy ski trick to Instagram with the hashtag,
"I Stomped it". Then you follow @Smartwool-Europe, @Atomic Ski and @Laax, and you could give me a little follow too at Stomp It Tutorials.
Do not be intimidated by this competition. We do not choose to win on who's the best skier ever,
it's who has the most fun, who shows they really tried hard.
Good luck. The winner will be announced one month after the posting of this video.