The significance of the beginner stage
The beginner’s stage is the most formative of all in our skier’s development since no other stage has more significance for our evolution than the first attempts at movements and actions in a new environmental space.
Here we experience the technical and perceptive bases for our entire evolution. The characteristics of this phase are rapid technical progress, the acquisition of motor management adapted to sliding on slanted and destabilizing surfaces, and the strengthening and adaptation of our mental dispositions to the new environment. We learn all the knowledge we need to move in a physical and social environment that surrounds us but, at the same time, restricts us. Our future evolution will depend on what we learn at this stage.
In no other period of skiing is so much learned in such a short period of time as in the initial stage. The importance of this stage is characterized by the fact that we find ourselves in a complex context, with a set of emotions and instinctive reflexes that play against us and that we must know how to regulate in order to adapt to each situation we face, besides assimilating the appropriate technique.
The challenge arises from the need to adapt to situations that we have never encountered before, so that it is essential for us to properly navigate this stage in order to develop our psychological adaptability. If this period of rapid learning is not taken advantage of, what has been accumulated will most likely not be applied to its full potential for future learning, interfering in our own evolution. The foundations for future skiing behavior are laid in this phase.
Beginners are generally grouped into two categories: those who give up skiing as soon as they start, and those who become passionate skiers. Some of the latter continue learning until they reach a plateau where they are satisfied with their technical level and stop being interested in continuing to evolve. As they get older, they become less adventurous and their performance declines until they finally stop skiing. Others remain as passionate as they were from the start because for them, every day is a learning opportunity, taking advantage of every experience that contributes to their own evolution.
Chronology of the psychological stages of the beginner skier (adapted from Jeroni de Moragas):
- Projection stage: he uses his intelligence and will to project himself into the environment, establishing contact with reality, and adapting his inner world to it.
- Introjection stage: here he broadens his understanding of himself by introducing knowledge of the environment into his interiority.
- Autistic stage: in this stage he discovers the environment for the second time and withdraws connecting in a whole with himself.
- Overcoming stage: the beginner discovers, in his inner and outer world, the valorization of the activity which tends to lead him towards a certain positive disposition of skiing.
The basic tendencies of the beginner’s behavioral dynamics (adapted from Simone Buitendijk):
- Lack of direction of his movements (sensorimotor incoherence according to Piaget) is observed, although he tends towards one or more goals and maladaptation of movements to external situations.
- His attention is divided between the purpose of the mediate descent and the present situation.
- The contradiction of moving in search of freedom and overcoming obstacles but at the same time remain balanced by using rigidity or blocking movements and postures.
- Impulsivity due to movement anxiety translated into constant and abrupt changes in the direction of movement. The beginner moves because he needs to capture sensory-motor information and does so with hasty movements until he can control his own degrees of articular freedom.
- The shyness that manifests itself in front of the situation of sliding on an unfamiliar environment.
- The tendency towards hesitation between facing the world (the environment) or taking refuge in the Self.
Information processing
When skiing we have a goal: to descend a slope by adapting to its conditions. We put on our skis and direct them downhill, we tilt them to change direction, we feel a greater support on our external foot, and we notice the edges cutting the snow. All the energy transmitted returns through vibrations that inform us about terrain conditions which allows us to modify our motor behavior based on the feedback we receive.
If we are advanced skiers, we seek to adapt our posture to the great variability of the skiing conditions: the conditions of the slope, the characteristics of the skis, speed, traffic, or visibility; all aspects that make us act or react. This interaction between us and the external conditions varies continuously, so we must constantly process information to make the best decisions, many of which we do not have time to evaluate.
Our brain would present an internal model of how to ski, that is, a mental representation of the ideal skiing that we would constantly seek to update by the information we receive and process. When we were beginners, on the basis of continuous learning experiences, we formed our internal model, that is, how skiing should ‘feel’ which we improved and updated during our evolution, therefore, we should be able to count on these internal representations to be able to compare ourselves.
Generic model of the learning process in skiing (adapted from Emanuel Peterfreund):
- The changes that occur in us are due to the confrontation with a situation of mild stress when responding to a stimulus or a new source of information generated by internal or external causes. Learning occurs when these changes are appropriate.
- Stress breaks homeostasis and generates an imbalance in our organism which begins to function less efficiently. We experience a certain level of confusion and alteration with a tendency to regress and to mix previous learning with information from the new to be learned. New adjustments and compositions occur.
- A search process generated by trial and error testing is initiated.
- As the selection and classification of information emerges, stress is reduced and our organism resumes dynamic equilibrium.
- The application of the new information process takes hold and our executions tend towards efficiency.
An example of this generic process could be applied in someone who decides to learn to ski and begins having access to a series of stimuli (skis and boots, snow, slides), which generates a large amount of information.
Before starting the activity, he begins to feel a certain level of stress and anxiety experimenting sensory stimuli while setting two immediate goals: reducing stress and learning how to slide. In order to achieve this second purpose, he must define the most efficient motor configuration that could be achieved since, when experiencing the degrees of freedom of movement, he chooses to structure them in an initial rigidity that he will gradually loosen until reaching the minimum effort.
Each body and motor state is compared with the imagined one through feedback and, as he begins to control the situation, stress is reduced. But the skier can maintain homeostasis and thus minimize stress by not letting in new information; in this case he would not be learning but protecting himself.
