As the North Carolina ski season is drawing to an end I have created a video showing my skiing progress from Dec 26 (Ski IQ: 85) to Mar 5 (Ski IQ: 120)
While I had returned to skiing for the 2018/2019 season, I switched to snowboarding for 2019/2020. With the pandemic resulting in ski resorts being far busier than normal, and my kids/wife being skiers I returned to skiing for the 2020/2021 season and bought some Blizzard Competition 76 skis which were too advanced for me, but I was confident I would improve enough to get the benefit from them over some beginner skis.
My skiing technique was horrible at the beginning of the season. Luckily Santa was nice enough to bring me Carv. While I took one 60 and 90 minute instructor lesson the majority of the next 9 weeks was spent watching YouTube videos and using Carv for direct feedback and guidance on my skiing. My SkiIQ has increased from ~85 to 120 during this season. I've not quite managed to get to 'Advanced Carving Detected' and with the NC ski season drawing to a close it will now be my goal for next year.
While many Carv videos are from more advanced skiers, as a more intermediate skier I found Carv Digital Ski Coach to be well worth the investment, my wife ended up purchasing one as well after she saw me using Carv for a couple of weeks. While Carv is great for the data (and tips) it provides, it is still incredibly helpful to have someone video you so you can review afterwards. I don't believe it is probably the right solution for everyone though.
I found using Carv plus YouTube videos beneficial for improving my skiing technique and this approach worked well for my learning style. However the GoPro video taken by my kids/wife allowed me to really see what was actually happening vs what I thought was happening. A good example was around angulation/inclination/body separation where I thought I was doing it, although I wasn't seeing the increase in the Carv metrics I wanted to. Watching myself on the GoPro really showed how little I was really doing and how much twisting of my upper body I was still demonstrating.
It was also interesting to see how the changing environment/skis affected my SkiIQ scores. Skiing at night typically knocked my SkiIQ down by 10 points. Skiing on my Volkl Revolt 95 TwinTips initially reduced my SkiIQ by ~10 points but by the end of the season the difference was reduced. Skiing on the days where we had a very dry, coarse granular snow reduced my SkiIQ by ~20 points. On the steeper slopes I typically got a higher SkiIQ however I then started to actively focus on edging/balance metrics on the flatter slopes and was able to bring my SkiIQ to be almost at parity to the steeper slopes.
I am sure if someone wanted to maximize their SkiIQ on a leaderboard they can just do the perfect 10-15 turn run on a perfect slope so it is possible to 'misuse/abuse' Carv. However as a consistent set of data points for measuring progress it works well. For next season I plan to use more of the 'Drills' and 'Monitors' features as while I briefly tried them I am sure I could have made much more use of the these features.
Is Carv perfect? No, I've had a few issues during the 9 weeks. One time Carv updated the iOS app and broke it (which is what originally brought me to this forum/thread several weeks ago), however the Carv team were very responsive and quickly fixed the issue. I have had a few occasions where Carv has not correctly registered that a run has ended - a couple of times on a shorter chair lift it never registered the end of the run at all, whereas on a longer chair lift it gave me the post run feedback but then merged the run with the next one. A couple of times I have had to 'force close' the iOS Carv application at the beginning of the day as Carv was asking me to go through the full calibration exercise rather than just the Force calibration. However, of the ~460 runs across the 9 weeks there have probably been < 10 runs that have had any impact from issues.
So for me, Carv was a great investment and I have no regrets. I also like that Carv has an active Facebook group where they seek feedback/ideas and provide tips. Some of my suggestions to Carv so far include:
- Moving the data to the Cloud so an instructor can view it as well
- Showing the 'blue' course line as a heat map where it is colored red/yellow/green based on each 5 turns and whether those 5 turns are better/at/below the overall SkiIQ for the run. This would help show where on a run you are limiting your SkiIQ etc.
- Adding notes to a run e.g. powder/fog/ice for future reference
- Having a 'friends' feature and begin to add more social type aspects
- Integrate with the Garmin ecosystem
- Creating a kids version
- Creating a snowboarding version
- etc
regards
TheWombat