Improve Your Skiing: Go Airborne

You won't hear this from ski instructors but if you want to enhance your ski fun and get whoops and hollers from other skiers, take your skiing vertical.

I don't mean ski steeper stuff; I mean let your skis leave the snow surface. Launch off every little blip and mogul. Go airborne on every turn.

This may sound crazy and only for the expert skier. However, going airborne has some advantages. First, you're weightless, which takes some pressure off your burning legs. Second, since you're weightless you can turn in the air and not have to carve a heavy turn.

Even in a normal turn there should be a point where your body is weightless as you come out of a turn and initiate another. This method simply takes that to an extreme.

Of course you should be a competent skier before trying this move. If you're able to stick landings on jumps you have the skills to do the airborne ski turn.

Here's the process. When you're skiing, start looking for every little variation in the terrain. As you approach a small mogul, push off and go airborne. Don't absorb the mogul with your knees. Don't try to go high; you shouldn't be more than a few inches off the ground. Just a little pop is enough.

When your airborne look at your landing point and get ready to carve a new turn. You can initiate your turn while you're airborne. As soon as you land start looking for another launch pad. You don't need to launch on every turn, but the more you do the better you'll feel.

When you're starting out with this skiing method keep your speed moderate and do giant slalom turns. When you get better start adding in some tight slalom turns.

Pretty soon you'll be doing this style of skiing on mogul fields. It's not the classic tight mogul pounding that freestyle skiers do. You'll be flying over moguls half the time.

As you get better you'll start figuring out how much pop it takes to clear the next mogul and land on its backside. In other words you'll jump off the front side of one mogul and land on the backside of the next.

Don't do this move when you're facing straight downhill. If you do, you'll pick up far too much speed. Do it when you're traveling sideways to the fall line.

You'll find doing this in powder is especially rewarding. You launch in a spray of powder and land in a spray of powder. This is the stuff of ski magazine photos. I'm sure you've heard the term, face shot.

If you ski this way under a ski lift you're sure to get lots of whoops from lift riders. It's an aggressive and fun style of skiing that looks good too.

When you really get it down, you can add style to your mini launches. Throwing in a quick helicopter really wows the crowd. Obviously this is an advanced move but, something to strive for.

Even if you just ski this way every 6th turn or so, you will enhance your fun level by a huge degree. Looking for those little launch pads will become your main focus and you'll ski better for it.