How To Buy Skis

Hi, my name is Luke and I'm a member of the Snow and Rock Hemel Hempstead branch team. Today, I'm going to be talking to you about how to select skis. A little bit about my history, I've been skiing since the age of 5 where I got heavily into the race scene.

Last year, I was the number one ranking artificial ski slope racer. I also do a lot of racing on snow, having 79 fierce points for sliding and 101 for guess. I've now gotten into the freestyle scene.

I've been progressing quite rapidly and I'm enjoying myself thoroughly. Okay, so on to selecting skis. The first and most important part about selecting skis is working out what type of skier you are.

From this, you can choose the shape and the width of the skies you're going to use. So basically, P skis. These are quite narrow on the foot as you can see here, and very shaped.

So they're quite wide at the top, narrow in the middle, and they widen out again at the tail. This aids with carving of the skis. Then you range up to off P skis.

These are a lot wider on the foot. As you can see, they aid with surface area to give you more floatation on the powder. As you can see with these skis, there's not as much shape to them and you do have regular ski D skis a little bit longer than normal so you have more surface area and a better off piece experience.

We also have race skis. These skis are designed for people doing sliding and racing. They're very stiff and rigid, a lot harder to use but very rewarding and will hold the racer extremely well.

We also have freestyle skis which are symmetrical basically. It's the same from the top to the bottom which is completely different to all other skis. The bindings will be mounted dead center to enable you to spin when you're in the air and so you can ride backwards very easily.

Next step when selecting a set of skis once you find out what type of skier you are is you'll have about 5 sets of skis to choose from if you come to a Snow and Rock branch. From here, you can work out what type of skiing you actually do. So if you like spending a lot more time off piece, if you like doing bigger turns, if you like shorter turns.

If you're doing the bigger turns, it's better to go for a ski with a higher turn radius. This means when you're on an edge at high speeds, you're going to have more grip as opposed to a shorter turning radius which is more for a technical on piece skier. When it comes to choosing a ski, there's quite a few things to look at.

There's obviously the shape of the ski which is going to determine what type of skiing you're going to do. We have 50/50 skis. So if you're a free-ride skier, we have skis that are in between the piece and off piece ski.

This allows the best of both worlds, being that you can go anywhere and do anything on the mountain. Also when coming to select a ski, it's very important that you make sure that the den settings are going to be correct, so you've worked out your statistics before you actually purchase a ski. You want to know that your weight and height are going to be compatible with the bindings you buy and some skies are on a system mount.

So you only have one set of bindings that can go on it. For instance, if you have a look at this ski you have the system mount in the middle and the release settings written on the top here. So if you're not, if your skiing ability, height, weight don't seam, you won't be able to ski on this ski.

So that's very important, and that's how you select skis. .