This past November I decided to take up skiing. It’s not like me to casually start a new hobby or activity, as I tend to dive deeply into it and spend hours reading, researching, and practicing it on a daily basis.
In the past, I’ve done this with hurdling in track and field, memorization techniques (memory palaces), handstands, juggling, and more.
This time around, I’ve decided to document my learning process and share it in a way that might help others on their learning journies.
The Morning Internalization Routine
The first task on my list whenever I start learning something new is to create a daily morning routine that helps me accelerate my learning curve. When I build it out, I focus on my weak points physically and mentally.
This routine can take anywhere from two minutes to fifteen or twenty, depending on how much time I have each day. It’s sustainable because it’s flexible.
The morning internalizer routine, besides formal practice, has been the most helpful habit in my toolbox when it comes to learning quickly.
You might be wondering what “Internalization” means. When you internalize something, you learn and know it so well that you understand it down to the bone. It becomes like breathing or blinking. No mental effort is required to initiate the right action at the right moment in time. The goal of this routine is to create habits that are internalized so well that it’s natural. Applied directly to skiing, it might be the act of turning the skis a very specific way during the third phase of a turn, or planting a pole in the correct location just before initiating a turn.
I’m now going to describe my process for creating this morning routine by using what I’m currently working on for skiing.
We’ll start with a general outline first, and then I’ll dive more deeply into each topic as I focus on each in turn.
The Routine Outline
Each routine I create starts with an outline that I constantly adjust as I identify the best possible habits, weaknesses, and strengths to focus on.
As of right now, for skiing, I’ve identified five areas of improvement: Mobilize, Simulate, Differentiate, Internalize, and Strength & Endurance
Mobilize
To mobilize your body is to unlock the full potential of your body’s ability to navigate and impact the world around you.
If your tissues (muscles, tendons, ligaments, and general facia) are knotted up, tight, overactive, or inactive, you’re going to have a hard time accessing this potential. It’s also going to make it more likely that you’re going to hurt yourself as you will be less responsive to dangerous situations due to the reduced pliability of your tissues.
If you want to progress over the long term and do what you love for life by moving well for life, you need to focus on your mobility.
Mobility is the ability to actively use strength in a range of motion. Flexibility is passive: It’s the difference between being able to passively stretch your hamstrings to touch your toes or actively raise your legs up to touch your outstretched hands.
I’ve been running my Moore Mobility Club at Lifetime Fitness for one year now, and I can say that I’ve seen the longterm effects of spending time on mobility work: You have less pain & injury as well as better performance.
Later, I’ll walk you through how I’m using mobility work to increase my skiing performance by opening up the hip internal rotation in my left leg, which has become imbalanced and weak due to overactivation of my right leg through habit and sports. This has greatly affected my right turns by making them unstable, which will be potentially dangerous if lose my balance and need to stop quickly rather than heading for the trees.
Simulate
If you’re practicing outside of your normal training environment, it’s important to simulate the environment you’ll be performing in no matter where you practice. If you don’t this can lead to domain-specific knowledge: The inability to transfer information from one domain (one area of life, one environment) to another.
We need our practice to functionally carry over into the skills that we’re learning, otherwise, we might as well watch TV or play the guitar instead.
Differentiate
Differentiation between movements and mental concepts is an important step in learning anything at an accelerated rate. This is especially true of skiing, as many intermediate skiers that neglect this stage end up with habits that are detrimental to the effects that they want to have happen. They can’t complete one action without also doing another, unhelpful, action.
To differentiate is to be able to tell the difference between two things, as well as the ability to complete one action separate from another. A good example of the ability to differentiate occurs between cultures: Certain cultures cannot tell the difference between blue and green, while others have dozens of names for the unique hues within one color category.
This is also true for identifying types of snow and ice: The Eskimos are said to have fifty variations, while the Sami people of Scandinavia and Russia reportedly have at least one hundred and eighty. This allows them to more accurately describe snow conditions, which is an important part of living in a frozen world.
If you can learn to differentiate the movements and actions of skiing, you will be better able to understand your movement patterns and adjust them for unique scenarios. I’ve been speaking of differentiation by uisng word examples, but differentiation occurs also in how your body knows how to move.
Internalize
This is the meat of the internalization sequence: internalizing by mentally and physically practicing the actions we want to have happen.
The goal is to increase the number of repetitions we take ourselves through by identifying one sequence of habits that we want to have then and practicing it over and over again in a simulated mental and physical state.
This solves a problem that arises in many disciplines: The inability to get your reps in.
You might have weak point within a very specific scenario, say, regaining your fore-aft balance after losing it while initiating a turn on a right-slanting slope in powdery snow conditions, and it becomes very difficult to practice overcoming this barrier because it occurs so infrequently.
Or, maybe you’re a beginner skier and can only complete 8–15 runs each day before you are fatigued and can’t continue.
Or, you can only find time to ski once every two weeks because the mountains are hours away.
In each case, your practice and progress is limited by either your environment or physical body. This is a huge problem that can be resolved through deliberately internalizing the solutions to your skill-based pursuit.
Strength and Endurance
Lastly, and most commonly, I work on building the endurance and strength to ski more effectively. This phase is completed last because if I don’t get to it in the morning, I can always complete it as part of my weekly workouts. It’s also the limitation that affects me the least as I’ve been training myself physically my whole life. Once I master the basic techniques and start to up my game, this will gain more relevance in my daily practice.
That’s the outline, now, it’s time to break each area down for you so that you can better work towards creating your own.
