Every four years the Interski Internaltional Congress facilitates the gathering of the world’s best ski & snowboard instructors from forty nations. This is truly a global event designed to exchange knowledge about education in snow sports and inspire the overall growth of the industry. Put simply, this is the Olympics of ski & snowboard instruction and technique.

RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

There are many reasons that CASI will be attending this International event but the main one is heavily about staying true and fully committed to our Mission Statement. We are there to share our model with the world and dive in to those of other countries. It’s all about research and development. We’ll learn about how snowboard instructors around the world are approaching the same goals we’re striving for in teaching and riding, and use that fuel to make our own approach stronger.

Inspiring the world’s best snowboard instruction.

CASI has been attending Interski every 4 years since the 1990s and have earned a solid reputation among community peers. Out seminars, sessions and on-snow demonstrations are always well attended and thus we take our duty to the global community of snowboard instructors serioulsy.

MEET THE TEAM

Your National Technical Team will be in Vail for the congress, representing the membership and our association with the utmost pride. As a team that was assembled to develop and innovate our already solid system, who better to share with and learn from the world’s best instructors.

WHAT TYPES OF EVENTS OCCUR

Over the course of the week-long congress, the team will both attend and host:

• on-snow clinics
• off-snow educational sessions
• inspiring keynote speakers
• technical riding demonstrations from national teams
• ongoing opportunities to network and exchange ideas with peers from around the world

CASI is honoured and thrilled to be participating at this event and dive headfirst into the “ALL IN” theme of congress.

Workshop description (from their Interski website) :

“The focus in this workshop is usage and overcoming of snow resistance. Understanding the interaction between snowboard and snow is at the base of an efficient snowsport’s lesson and therefore central in teacher training “.

We were given an example of how this is taught during their courses, during a lesson on turns. Our session leader asked us to think about these four stages and what we do with them and how we apply them in our riding :

1.Snow resistance
2.Searching
3.Overcoming
4.Using

We paired up and gave ourselves some feedback about the application of each stage.

In the conclusion we also talked about the movement patterns involving indirect movement with the upper body and direct movement with the lower body.

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Suisse – L’approche suisse de la compréhension technique

La clé de Swiss snowsport pour offrir une expérience positive à ses clients est d’améliorer les connaissances techniques de ses moniteurs, qui sont basées sur la compréhension des forces physiques agissant sur la neige, les planches et les planchistes. 

Description de l’atelier (extrait de leur site Internet pour l’Interski) :

“Cet atelier se concentre sur l’utilisation et la maîtrise de la résistance de la neige. Comprendre l’interaction entre le snowboard et la neige est à la base d’une leçon de sport de neige efficace et donc central dans la formation des enseignants.”

On nous a donné un exemple de la façon dont cela est enseigné pendant leurs cours, lors d’une leçon sur les virages. Notre animateur nous a demandé de réfléchir à ces quatre étapes, à ce que nous en faisons et à la manière dont nous les appliquons dans notre technique sur la piste :

1. Résistance à la neige
2. Recherche
3. Vaincre
4. Utilisation

Nous nous sommes mis par deux et nous nous sommes interrogés sur l’application de chaque étape.

Dans la discussion finale nous avons parlés des schémas de mouvement impliquant des mouvements indirects avec le haut du corps et des mouvements directs avec le bas du corps.

The tool is designed to encourage instructors to think broadly about snowboarding and to remember to incorporate as many disciplines as possible into every lesson. On courses they go further and train their instructors to use the tool to view and select varying terrain. In the session I found the compass to be a good way to remind myself of types of riding I don’t often think about (like half-pipe) and how to view the terrain (not a half-pipe) with a more open and creative eye.

This feels very similar to how we encourage an open and global teaching approach in our own system. Good lessons aren’t limited to just one task or type of riding and often the cross-training of kinds of riding actually creates more improvement than not.

We started with an interesting exercise involving pinching or index finger and thumb together while either inhaling or exhaling. Someone would then try to pull the fingers apart. There was a noticeable difference in strength with one compared to the other; some people in the group had more strength while exhaling but most seemed to prefer inhaling.

We then tried to apply this to our snowboarding by coordinating our breathing with specific movements, parts of the turn and sets of turns. There is definitely some application for purposeful breathing in our snowboarding, but the Spaniards agreed that they had not worked out the most reliable techniques yet (the session was being used as a workshop to generate more ideas on the topic).

The German (DSV) model is elegant in its simplicity and usefulness as a descriptive and analysis tool.

3 Points to their Model of Movement:

1. Position — the Germans have a base athletic position they teach to beginners and new instructors, but very quickly their system emphasizes riders changing the position to be specific to personal preference and the task the rider wants to acccomplish.

Any position is suitable as long as it allows riders to accomplish their task; although they emphasized that most of their corrections when teaching come from position faults.

2. Actions — this covers all movement patterns that move the snowboard. Starting from ground up, these are:

• ankle dorsiflexion/plantarflexion,
• lower joints: vertical/along the length of snowboard,
• rotational and counter-rotational from hip joint, hips and body,
• head and eyes: controlling and stopping rotation, planning line and making decisions.

3. Regulations — these are movements a rider does not intend but just keep a rider upright. These are neither good nor bad, but are a key analysis tool. When you’re a beginner the regulation movements you make are very large as you get better the regulation movements should become smaller and smaller.

To apply this model to movement analysis an instructor looks for Regulation movements as well as ability to perform the task. If the Regulations are detrimental to the rider’s performance, then the first step is to provide improvement to Position. After that (or if Position is not the cause of the negative Regulations), then an instructor will focus on improving Actions with a focus from the snowboard up.

Fun fact: the Germans will usually use “frontside and backside turns” instead of “toeside and heelside turns”.

Ultimately, we’re talking about the same things in different ways, which is a common theme here at Interski; however, I think there is a lot of value in trying to interpret one concept many different ways, as it can bring greater clarity and understanding of the base concept. In CASI, we like to say ‘there are no rights and wrongs, just actions and consequences’…