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[pozorvlak]

Whenever I teach somebody to contact juggle (if you don't know what I'm talking about, this video's quite good), I always start by asking the same question:

"Do you know how to ski?"

Skiing and contact juggling, you see, work in

Comments

[ext_5743]

I was first taught to ski by a guy called Simon, who had once taught skiing in the Army. His "fast-food" technique was beautifully simple. Get people to put skis on and stand up in a line. Then make them mime opening a can of baked beans, and mime pouring the beans into the front of their ski boots. Explain to them that they need to stand with their ankles flexed and knees slightly bent, crushing the imaginary beans between shin and boot. Having explained this, and deprived of ski poles, we were then encouraged to slide down a gentle slope and come to a stop naturally, keeping the skis parallel (like "chips"). We were then told to lean our weight onto one foot or the other in order to steer, and given a slalom to do, again on a gentle slope. The final stage was the snowplough ("pizza"), initially as a stop and then as a turn. The whole thing took about an hour and a half with 10 of us.

Sadly after that Simon left, and my progression to parallel turns had to wait until much later! But various people used to shout "baked beans" at you if you stood wrongly...

Another variant on teaching techniques: a German friend of mine was taught to lead very early in her climbing career, on incredibly easy routes. This got over the apprehension that otherwise builds about leading if you've only ever climbed top-rope or second. Similarly, the York Uni sailing club used to make beginners crew for about a year before teaching them to helm, whereas when I learned we were put out on the river in a single-seater boat after an hour's talk and made to get on with it. Helming is easy, really, but the York Uni method made a big deal of it.

[pozorvlak]

:-)

That kind of mental image can be very useful - I remember being taught to row "like Superman going round corners".

You're probably right about it being a good idea to lead early: it's all too easy to build leading up into a big thing otherwise. wormwood_pearl did a multi-pitch climb on something like her third or fourth trip climbing, and consequently found multi-pitching much less of an issue than I did.