When we don’t know something, we consult a bibliography or someone who is a “reference” on the subject that intrigues us. When we don’t have references on how to act in a given situation, we imitate the behavior of others, which we take as references.
The process of building references in skiing does not only result from the ‘fabrication’ that comes from the instructor’s teaching, but derives mainly from our individual effort, i.e., it’s our own ‘construction’.
The use of references aims to reduce the complexity of our movements or the execution of certain technical gestures, since having references reduces the complication of controlling our skiing.
The application of the Referential Method is a simplistic principle, but even so, the problem that may arise in the fabrication of these references might become our dynamic in referential changes, since our potential to act is based on references about possible actions.
We believe that, when skiing, there is no perception of external objects without a bodily reference and, conversely, there can be no perception of our body without an environmental frame of reference; in other words, there is constant interaction between us and the mountain. We must therefore consider that the first stage of any motor act is the choice of a frame of reference that we will use to organize our movements as we travel down the slopes.
References are formed by the following factors:
- Through experience: learning by trial and error (leaning too far to one side to avoid the slope, thus losing our balance).
- Through observation and imitation: beginners learn from instructors and other skiers.
- Through conditioning: we associate stimuli (loud sound from scraping edges to get a reference point about icy snow).
- Through internal factors: stress, anxiety, or biological factors (hormones, injuries) modify the references for our skiing behavior.
Incorporating references while skiing is our tendency to process and remember information better when it is connected to ourselves, involving self-analysis that affects our memory, attention, and emotions, which is key to understanding how we continue to build our evolution as skiers.
One of the benefits of referential learning is that we remember data related to ourselves better than neutral information, creating stronger connections with our own references.
Another benefit relates to memory and attention, as referential information captures our attention better, being voluntary and direct, and it is stored more deeply. But we should be careful, because over-analyzing our own references or constantly comparing them can be a sign of anxiety.
This referential system we are proposing here creates our own skiing reality, which affects how we perceive our environment and our skiing. In short, the Referential Method is a mechanism that allows us to relate better and optimize our learning by detecting key references and understanding how they contribute to managing our own skiing.
Changing reference points
In everyday life, we constantly change our reference points and use several at the same time.
When we descend a new slope, or one we are familiar with for the first time that day, we focus on terrain and snow characteristics, looking for reference points that will help us determine how to adapt. Moving from one reference point to another refers to the ability to use them simultaneously.
When moving on snow, we can describe the same movement in several references: one related to our body, others to other people on the slope, and others more to the environment.
We are speaking about relying on different references when skiing as we use visual, kinesthetic, or postural references. We have different referential modes and we use them according to the context.
For example, we can apply a “ski-centric” reference, as focusing on what the skis are doing (“pressing the ski,” “moving the ski away from our body”). This is useful for understanding how the tool works, but we can also employ a “body-centric” reference by focusing on our own joints (“bend the ankles,” “move the hips inwards”).
