Beginner/Intermediate

You are comfortable on green and blue runs and perhaps venture onto the occasional red. You may even be a first week skier. Difficult and icy conditions cause problems.

Advanced

You can ski most of the mountain although certain conditions could affect this. You may be keen to improve your technique on the bumps or in off-piste conditions. You appreciate when your skis need tuning..

Expert

You search out the most demanding runs, you are accomplished in all types of turns and you look for skis that provide stability at high speed. You can handle the bumps and variable conditions both on and off the piste..

Race Standard

You are a sponsored skier, or an accomplished racer, who trains hard for their skiing and loves a challenge.

Alpine

Alpine skis love the hard groomed pistes. They are precise, fast and high performing. Suited to advanced through to race levels.

Freeride

Freeride skis are all mountain animals that love the tough conditions. They float through powder, cut through crud and slice through the slush. Many now also have twin tips to allow back country tricks. Usually 50% on-piste, 50% off-piste, they are suitable for advanced, expert race skiers.

All mountain, all terrain bandits

All mountain, all terrain bandits are less demanding than the Freeride skis. They are easy to handle off the piste, but still provide good performance on the piste. 70% on-piste and 30% off-piste, these skis are suited to advanced and expert skiers.

All Mountain

All mountain trailblazers are just that. They are easy turning piste carvers that love blazing around the blues and reds. Suited to beginners and intermediates through to advanced skiers.

Just Cruising

Just Cruising are very easy turning beginner and intermediate carving skis. They are perfect for cruising along blues and greens.

Carving carvaholics

Carving carvaholics are short, fun, extreme carving skis. They will perform best if used by advanced and expert skiers.

Freestyle

Freestyle skiing has developped over the last ten years or so, moving away from the original idea of moguls and acrobatics to refer to park and pipe skiing. Freestyle or "Nu School" skis are shorter and have twin tips to facilitate rotations in the air and backwards (or switch/fakie) skiing.

Carving Ski History

Two forces came together in the mid 90s to revolutionise skiing - snowboarding and new technology. In the early 1990s many skiers started to take up the new, cool sport of boarding. Snowboards - due to their shape and dimensions - provided a carving sensation that was difficult to match on traditional skinny skis. Consequently the ski manufacturers started to run into difficulties and were forced to rethink ski design radically. Ski manufacture is a never-ending search for the correct flexibility. In the beginning, all skis were made of wood. There was a limit to the shapes of skis you could make - too narrow and they snapped, too wide at tip and tail and they would twist and lose their grip on the snow. Manufacturers slowly became more adept with composites and complex internal structures. By the mid 1990s, with the help of these new materials and improved technology, a number of revolutionary skis emerged. These new shaped skis combined the torsional stiffness necessary for precision and good edge grip, with the longitudinal flexibility that makes turning easier. And so carving skis were born.

Shape & Sidecut

Shape and sidecut Carving skis are narrow at the waist and wide at the tip and tail, which is what gives them their shape. The sidecut is the difference between the tip, tail and waist. The deeper the sidecut, the quicker and easier the ski will turn. The shallower the sidecut, the harder it is to initiate a turn and the ski will prefer longer turns. will also be more stable, especially at higher speeds. All skis have sidecut so that they can turn - no sidecut and the ski, when put on its edge, will want to go in a perfectly straight line. On carving skis, the sidecut is more pronounced.

Sidecut Radius

Sidecut Radius Imagine the hourglass shape of a ski. If you then extend that profile to form a circle, the sidecut radius would be the of this imaginary circle.

Turn Radius

Turn Radius This is dependent on the effort that each skier makes. By using steering, pressure and edge control, the radius of each turn is determined.

Ski Lengths How They Have Changed

When you have decided on the type of ski you want, you then have to choose the right length. Once upon a time, as an adult beginner, you would start on something around 150-170cm. As you grew more confident, you would aim for a ski your height plus 20cm. A bit longer if you liked speed, a bit shorter if you liked ease of turning. With the invention of carving skis, things have changed radically. The new skis are taken up to 20cm shorter than traditional skinny skis. Short is now cool. Even racing skis are shorter and shapelier. As a general guideline most carving skis should reach between your nose your forehead. However you need to consider the type of skiing you want to do, your level and your weight; a ski cannot tell how tall you are - only how heavy you are. If you are a beginner or like to ski slowly, then go shorter - for ease of turning and control. If you want to ski fast and hard, turn little and have better stability, or if you want extra flotation in the powder, then go for a longer length. .