Ski drills only work if you practice them the right way, and Tom Gellie of Big Picture Skiing has a clear method for making them stick.
Gellie walks through a structured progression used with his students that centers on isolating one feeling at a time. The session begins with hand drag drills, starting at very low speeds to build awareness of ski bend and maintaining strong outside foot pressure through the ball of the foot.
From there, students work on touching the inside hand to the snow before the fall line, with Gellie instructing them to let everything else go and focus only on getting the hand down low and early. Once that movement became comfortable, attention shifted to where exactly the hand was making contact, experimenting with earlier and later touch points to find what worked. The final progression brought the arm and hand closer to the body and in line with the inside knee, reinforcing the connection between the upper and lower body through the turn.
“Only think about that one piece and don’t worry if the other pieces fall apart. The other pieces will fall apart a little bit. Don’t worry.”
The key principle Gellie returns to throughout is that when you isolate one piece of a movement, the other pieces will naturally fall apart a little. Trying to hold the entire technique together while drilling a single element defeats the purpose. This approach asks skiers to accept temporary breakdown in exchange for genuine progress on the specific movement being trained.
