The Great Dilemma: To Teach Snowplow or Not?

Teaching snowplow is useful—it’s the safest way to start skiing. It allows beginners to control their speed and stop on gentle slopes, often enabling them to ski on their very first day.  

However, let’s face it: once you learn to ski using the snowplow, you’ll likely spend weeks—or even years if you only ski once a season—trying to unlearn it.  

So, the real question is: can someone learn to ski from scratch without ever using a snowplow? Snowboarders do it, so why shouldn’t skiers?  

Let’s start with a number: 70% of people who try snowboarding quit. Why? Because the first two days—especially without an instructor—are painful. That’s one of the reasons snowboarding exploded in popularity in the ‘90s but isn’t as common as you might expect today.  

Skiing, on the other hand, feels safer at the beginning, largely thanks to the snowplow. Your stance is wide, your speed is controlled, and you’re facing the direction you’re moving—all comforting factors on your first day. Snowboarding offers none of these. You have to balance on an edge just a few millimeters wide, face uphill half the time while still moving downhill, and when you turn, your board momentarily points straight down the mountain, forcing you to manage your speed without much control.  

So why bring this up? Because learning to ski without using the snowplow has a lot in common with learning to snowboard. You’ll need to:  

- Stand on the edges of your skis while traversing and slowing down.  
- Accept that your skis will point straight downhill at some point in each turn.  
- Learn to face downhill even while turning—otherwise, you risk going backward down the slope.  

If you’re comfortable with these challenges, learning to ski without the snowplow can offer real advantages. First, you’ll immediately focus on keeping your skis parallel, helping you develop a true feel for skiing. Second, you’ll experience brief moments of being out of control before regaining stability at the end of each turn—an essential sensation for becoming a skilled skier. Most importantly, you’ll avoid the common struggle of dragging the inside ski and clinging to the snowplow edge, which can slow down progress.  

Of course, if you want to skip the snowplow, you must start on extremely gentle slopes.