I have spent a lot of time trying to walk the fence between both worlds. PSIA instructors don’t understand PMTS as harald has pointed out countless times. Their feedback about your skiing is meaningless. Their point that you are using PMTS and they are using PSIA and leave it at that is the truest thing they have said to you. They should leave it at that and if I were you I would flatly ignore any other “advice” they try to give you. The higher up in PSIA they are, the more likely they are to try to correct you in ways that are opposIte to what you’re trying to accomplish and will be detrimental to your skiing.
Here are some of the things they will try to get you to conform to, and detrimentally to your skiing:
- widen your stance
- push on your outside ski with early and hard extension to generate high c pressure
- do not lift your inside ski off the snow even a tiny amount, ever.
- twist your legs more to initiate turns, steer turns and create upper lower separation
- keep your skis flatter on the snow don’t tip them so high on edge. This facilitates steering (their way)
- recenter yourself through transition by projecting your pelvis forward using extension, up and over drill
- avoid early counter balancing and counteraction ( they will use different words ).
- create edging by angulation ( their newest junk science )
- stand up taller in general while skiing
- master pivot slips they are the key to eveything
Truthfully, PSIA is not even remotely close to PMTS; they endorse and push certain movement patterns that are diametrically opposite of what the best skiers in the world and PMTS are doing. They might get by with that nonsense on easy groomer hero snow and with lower level skiers, but they will never become a truly top shelf skier that way. A lot of them are even quite adept and graceful at demonstrating their backward ideas on easy terrain and they are all working really hard to master those poor techniques on easy terrain. They love to stand around and criticize each other over PSIA minutia. None of that is of ANY use to you! As helluva said, your goal should be to get so good they don’t know what to say. Even then some of them will still criticize the PSIA minutia because an awful lot of them are so far down the rabbit hole they can’t see the forest from the trees. And let’s face it, unless you are skiing dead nuts perfect, their PSIA trained eyes will be looking out for the above flaws and quick to conjure up a theory for how your imperfect skiing would be improved by widening your stance or some other PSIA based theory that is usually flat out the opposite of true, lacking any understanding of what you are actually doing or trying to do.
Bottom line, don’t listen to them!