I want to do sport until I'm older, much, much older.
I want to enjoy all these things for as long as I possibly can.
And if you get to work at it right now, by trying to look at what your body's capabilities are, your machine will go on lasting longer and longer and longer.
But if you're grinding down one side of your unbalanced body, you're going to know about it and those joints won't last forever.
Hey guys, how you doing?
Hope you're having a good week so far.
My name is Dr. Rangan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More.
Today's episode is with someone who is regarded as one of the best ski coaches on the planet.
Yet this is not a conversation about skiing.
The things my guest has experienced over the years through teaching, coaching and working in the mountains in unpredictable conditions hold valuable lessons for us all.
Warren Smith is one of Britain's leading professional free skiers, an internationally qualified performance coach, creator of the Warren Smith Ski Academy and someone who has spent several decades helping people understand their bodies better, to help them move and ski with more freedom.
Warren has been a sponsored vocal athlete for over 10 years and is one of the most innovative instructors working in the Alps and is held in high regard for the research and development he carries out, combining ski technique, ski biomechanics and ski skills physiology.
As well as coaching tens of thousands of recreational skiers, he's also well known for being the ski instructor that many high profile individuals seek out when wanting to improve their skills, including Prince Harry, Heston Blumenthal, Laurence DiLalio and Bradley Wiggins, to name just a few.
Now I myself have known Warren for almost two decades now, having sought him out in my mid-20s, when I first started getting into skiing, because I was deeply fascinated by his philosophy.
That made a lot of intuitive sense to me.
In our conversation, we discuss why so many of us feel limited by our bodies and how simple five-minute functional exercises can help, why differences in strength or mobility between the two sides of the body are incredibly common and how they affect everything from skiing to running to daily movements.
What Warren's injuries have taught him about resilience, patience and rehabilitation.
Why fear on the mountain mirrors fear in life.
The mental and emotional benefits of elevation and nature.
The life lessons that Warren learnt from surviving an avalanche and losing friends in the mountains.
And Warren's incredible life story from growing up in a council estate to now living and working in one of the most prestigious ski resorts in the world.
This is not just a conversation about skiing, but one that reminds us that when we prepare well, stay curious and look after ourselves, we can keep doing the things we love for longer.
Well, it's really interesting that skiing, of course, is not something that everyone does.
Yeah.
There's a cost element to skiing.
Yeah.
It's perceived to be a sport of the wealthy.
It used to be.
It definitely used to be that way.
Same when I got into it, it was that way.
Yeah, but I think your backstory is actually really, really interesting, because I'll let you elaborate on it.
But ultimately,
You grew up in a council estate.
Yeah.
And now you're considered one of the world's best ski coaches in this incredible elite, prestigious resort of Verbier, having taught Prince Harry and whoever.
Like I could just list off these kind of A-listers or whatever you want to have.
You have taught.
Yeah, tell us a little bit about that journey.
You know how did a boy from a council estate in Hemel Hempstead end up doing what he's doing today?
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I was quite lucky.
My council estate in Hemel, I liked it.
I don't see... To me, it's got a lot of qualities that could be higher than the town of Verbier.
And it taught me... quite a lot of principles in life.
I was lucky, this is where the luck part comes in, or it's destiny, that they built a dry ski slope which still exist all over the UK and they're mega accessible.
They're mega affordable.
Even if someone never, ever goes skiing on snow, it doesn't matter.
You can still learn this brilliant sport on a dry slope and it costs next to nothing.
In fact, quite a lot of other sports cost more.
So nowadays, skiing's become really accessible.
From where I learned, I used to BMX as a kid in my sort of area.
They built a skateboard park in the late 70s, early 80s, which is phenomenal.
You know it was like if anyone's ever seen Dogtown and Z-Boys.
We were lucky enough in Hemel Hempstead to be in that wave.
So they built a skateboard park.
We lived in the skateboard park.
And then they demolished it.
And we were all, we were very unsatisfied kids in our local area.
Unsatisfied is a nice way of putting it.
Yeah, they built a dry ski slope, right?
So they built a dry ski slope.
So they knocked down the skate park where you and your buddies hang out.
Yeah, exactly.
And in its place, they put a dry ski slope.
So how were you and your mates feeling?
We weren't too happy about it.
Spend our time, you know, probably not doing great things to this slope.
Don't want to get in some of the trouble.
But yeah, we used to do things like burn it and whatever.
We used to key the cars.
We did some horrible stuff.
So you were kind of you and your mates were showing you frustration with a bit of vandalization, kicking some of the car stuff that you know you're a lovely guy.
You would never do, you know, this is back in your youth, right?
It's a long time ago.
But weren't you caught?
Yeah, so that was one of the sort of things that happened getting caught by the local Bobby on the Beat.
And one of the local Bobby on the Beat solutions was to work at the dry slope.
Yeah.
This policeman who caught you... Yeah.
I guess... there are a number of options that were available to him, right?
So he didn't have to do that, right?
So was he quite?
Do you think he was quite understanding?
And thought God, I get why these kids are like this.
Let me see if there's a way where I don't have to, Either take him into the station or what?
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I've often reflected on that.
It's the same with my school teachers because our school was at the back of the dry slope that was built.
There are many people on that journey that that were critical at the point of your career development.
And it could have gone the other way really easily.
But someone that had a positive outlook on life rather than sort of drawing on the negative, helped me through a situation and just redirected me, redirected my energy.
So you had to, I guess, part of your punishment, I think, was working the ski slope.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
So do you remember how you felt the first time you went in?
You know, this kind of, that was put in on top of your fun place, right?
Yeah.
Were you a bit resistant when you went in for the first time?
Weirdly enough, I think there was a bit like a skateboarder can relate to snowboarding.
A skier has a really strong crossover with cycling.
Um, any cyclists out there that right know the feeling of pushing your left pedal down, pushing your right pedal down, and the continuum of that is what relates to skiing, is how we ski.
We put pressure against one ski and then the other.
And it's very much like having sort of leg extension and flexion movements.
Soon as I jumped on skis, I kind of slipped into skiing. quite naturally.
So I was sort of straight at it.
I felt the balance of skiing.
I learned everything from my career.
And this is one thing I'd love people to understand that everything I learned from my career was accessed locally in the UK.
A council dry ski slope council funded.
There's many, many dry ski slopes around the UK.
If you look up the guy, James Woods, you know he won an Olympic medal, X Games medal, learned to ski at the Sheffield ski village, sheffield dry slope.
That isn't there anymore, but there are hundreds of these venues around the uk.
I was skiing on one in dublin on saturday, running a ski instructor training program for them, and they're there.
They are accessible.
You can go and see how you get on with skiing.
But that's what helped me with my career.
I was lucky enough, stone's throw away from where my mum lived and skied on Hemel, and lived there.
I mean, that became my second home.
I spent more time at the dry slope.
I became fanatical at the dry slope.
And then that linked to me into a connection of someone who skied at the dry slope who said oh, come out and ski in this resort.
We'll get you a job and you can be a ski instructor and learn the ropes.
And then my passion was kind of, you know, ski coaching and then free ride skiing, off-piste skiing.
That was my goal.
And that led me that pathway to Verbier.
So I'm forever grateful to what is now the snow center in Hemel.
It was the dry ski slope, the Hemel ski slope.
You know, those guys sparked my career and I'll never forget it.
You said that growing up in a council estate... was really impactful.
It's taught you many lessons and that you really enjoyed where you grew up, right?
One thing I've noticed being around you and knowing you for a good two decades now, it's how calm you always seem to be.
I've seen you in stressful times or when things are going off or whatever, but you always seem to have this calmness, which I can see why it would be so important for a ski coach.
You know, with clients feeling stress whatever, you know you need someone who's not getting caught up in that.
But do you think that ability to stay calm in the face of of a lot of stress or perceived stress by others is something you've learned as a kid?
Possibly, yeah.
I mean, I was very lucky in my upbringing.
I had two loving parents, but my parents were divorced.
It's a broken sort of home.
And those money issues and you know, things like making sure the electrics on an electric meter, putting 50ps in, sort of.
I guess it taught me the challenge of like didn't really have time to sort of be upset in the moment about something.
I had to go and do something about that moment.
Mine was going out and washing cars or cleaning cars in the local neighbourhood to get money for the meter, to get some money to stick in the electric meter.
And my mum was brilliant, you know she had two or three jobs um and and my dad, my dad, you know he he did his best um but he didn't really um managed to provide in the way you'd sort of need to financially.
So what ended up happening in my scenario, I kind of went out to work a bit early.
Weirdly, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
I mean, for me, it built resilience.
For me, it taught me to get on with it.
You know, no one else is going to get on for it for you.
You know, not in my scenario anyway.
And it gave me a bit of independence, made me feel good actually going out and earning a few bucks.
And I remember paying for my first ski trip myself.
And I don't think anything's ever been that different in my life.
I've gone out there and got it, but my job and the success perhaps of our academy and push him away.
I mean again, you become quite pushy, not in a rude way, in a respectful way, but you become quite pushy to achieve, And that's what I sort of, that's what I did.
You know, I kept on going with it.
And I think it's installed something in me.
And there's an inner engine.
I think that got developed from perhaps coming from the background.
I did
Yeah.
What you teach people to help them ski better better and more efficiently.
And what you've learned along the way, I think absolutely apply to non-skiers as well.
So this idea that, oh you know, to ski well, you need to keep your upper body facing down the slope.
Yeah. your legs and your hips should be rotating around your upper body.
So you don't want the whole thing moving together.
You need that separation, right?
And then I think I saw a video of you online or I read it in the multiple magazines you were in.
You said something like What's the point of me trying to teach a client on the mountain to do that if they don't have the biomechanical capability?
And so let's talk a little bit about that, because one of the things you're really big on with your skiers is the importance of preparation.
You can get technique coaching for something, but if your body isn't able to apply that technique well, you're probably better off spending time on your biomechanics first.
That applies to anything, whether it's running golf swimming, whatever you want to do, because preparation for me is also about biomechanics.
Before technique
I think you've just the nail on the head.
If you want loads of things to go right, whether it's the psychology of the sport um, whether it's the fatigue you might get, that could lead to psychological issues, you know, whatever it might be in your day that goes right or wrong.
In skiing, The biomechanical functional movement pattern of the left and right side of the body being even is essential.
And nearly everyone and this is a bold statement to make on your show but I would say in 35 years of coaching people, I have rarely come across a person that is even
And the work that goes on during that thing.
You said the lesson is usually always focused on the side that's starved or strangled of a movement range.
If people went away and did the preparation work.
It doesn't take as long as it sounds.
Skiing is based around turning left and right, unless you're going to plan on skiing in a multi-story car park and work your way around it on, on what are your turn directions?
Um, you're going to get caught if you haven't prepared and you're going to get caught on biomechanical restrictions on one side of the body.
Now, it's not because you're walking around and like, my God, that person is so unfit.
Look at the state of their biomechanics.
Biomechanical sort of functional movement patterns are way more simple than that.
It's just you need to be made aware.
Simple exercises and, like you just said, if you, if you want to take a lesson, and let's, let's say, skiing as one, you know you you could hire me for the day.
And if you're blocked and i'm spending my whole day screaming, finish your left turn off, mainly because you've got a restriction in your, in a rotation of your outside leg steering towards the left.
Now, on a test like that, measuring leg steering, there is a national average.
This is no word of a lie.
We've just finished our UK tour of 30 degrees as average.
So people, before they've even started to put skis on, will have this left and right side difference.
It will 100% affect their tennis.
Let's just go into that.
So what do you mean 30 degrees?
So we're currently talking about just for people who are listening like, I guess, if you were, if you had your back against the wall and you weren't moving your pelvis to the side, how far could you sort of rotate your leg in your head?
Yeah, so to explain this for people that can't see if you stood up and you were looking in the mirror and you held your hands on the sides of your hips and you stepped your feet to one direction, let's say towards the left, you'd measure your right legs ability to inwardly rotate to the left.
Okay, it would feel quite blocked on one side.
You'd go the other way, towards the right, you'd inwardly rotate your left leg and when you score yourself, one leg will normally feel quite free in movement and the other leg will feel like it hits a brick wall, gets blocked halfway through the movement.
Now that that for me fundamentally, is one of the biggest secrets in learning and understanding why technique doesn't always feel perfect when you try the sport.
Yeah, so you've just been on this UK tour.
You're teaching your ski technique lab approach to lots of people around the country.
Yeah.
But the principle applies beyond skiing.
It applies to martial arts yoga, to running, to even one-sided sports.
It probably applies to as well.
That's exactly it.
And what should we have rotation-wise in our hips?
You should have the ability to rotate your leg to a degree where your foot eventually ends up at 70 degrees 70 degrees, right?
So we should be able to go 70 degrees in both directions.
Yeah yeah, and what are you saying?
Most people do.
National average of what we've just completed with another 2000 people we've tested is 65 degrees one way, 35 degrees the other way.
That's a national average.
Right, so the average.
So hold on, 65 degrees one way, not bad, right?
It's nearly at 70 degrees.
But this is one of those other universal principles I think that we can take from skiing to non-skiers.
This idea that you're only as good... as your weakest link.
100%.
So if one side is only going to 30 degrees or 35 degrees and you put yourself on a steepish ski slope, it doesn't matter how good your coach is.
It doesn't matter.
How good your skis are.
Yeah.
It's irrelevant.
You're being limited by the movement of your body.
Which still comes down to what you've just said by a lack of preparation.
Yeah.
That's it.
Preparation is everything.
Finding this stuff out before you go is your responsibility to yourself, but also people you're skiing with.
You're better as a person on the mountain and safer and better to help your buddies.
If you've already unlocked this, then when you've learned about it, pass on the knowledge.
Is that the thing about the inner rotation of the outside leg?
Let's just say for the sport of skiing, you don't use that rotation in day-to-day life.
Yeah, it's a really unused movement and yet you rock up on the sunday morning of a ski holiday or if you're going to an indoor snow dome to try and practice it, or a local dry ski slope.
If you haven't sort of figured this out and worked on it before, like you sort of said on the start, at this point it's it's going to affect your day, it's going to affect your um experience and and the annoying thing and frustrating thing is your side that got to 65 degrees will soak up and absorb all that information.
And you'll frustrate yourself psychologically when like ah, I'm hitting a brick wall.
Why can't I do this?
And people usually because we're humans start beating themselves up with the Yeah and they try and push harder and try harder, but that ain't going to fix it, because you would have benefited from spending the last three months doing five minutes a day trying to bring that 35 up to 45 or to 50, which again will not only help you if you choose to ski, it's going to help you For life, right?
Absolutely.
So I know we had a joke when you got here because your Ubers didn't turn up this morning.
Oh my God.
And so you were about, what, 10 to 6 in the morning.
Stressed.
I was stressed out because you know you have to get here and you had to sprint all the way to Hammersmith Tube.
Yeah.
But I just said to you when you told me that, yeah, but that's why I think fitness is so important.
It's not necessarily fitness for skiing or fitness for running which, of course, is fun if that's what we want to do.
It's being fit for life.
Like you had to, you had to make a call.
I'm going to miss my train up to the Northwest.
I'm not going to make the slot for Ronga's podcast.
I have to sprint now.
It's an interesting part of the chain.
I say the chain of preparing with your own physiology.
I would not have made today.
And in the finite moment of like living in a different country to being in the UK for a limited amount of time, to this point where we talked for however long we talked for, to try and bring this conversation about on your show.
The sprint I did, and this is not a joke, you know, I'm 53 now. and I've, and I've had injuries.
And when I, when I was younger, I used to box.
I used to play basketball and I've always biked and always cycled.
Um, but I could feel myself like I made it.
Thank God.
And I spread the sprints between stations and the.
You know, getting off um Green Park to get onto the Victoria Line, to get up to Euston.
Those sprints I did to get to the train where the guy was blowing the whistle, you know, got on the train.
Like you said, if I hadn't kept fit over course of the last couple of years because i've been through injury, i should have probably lost my fitness level, and i was quite conscious going through injury that on the rehab side i had to stay fit.
Yeah, that brings up an interesting point about confidence.
So to perform well at anything in life, we need a degree of confidence, okay.
And I feel, from what you just said, that confidence, or part of confidence, can be related to preparation.
We're talking about this big theme that preparation's really important, right?
Preparation to go up on the mountain, preparation before you go to work, whatever it might be right.
Preparation before you take your kids away for the weekend camping.
If you've prepared and got everything you need, even if the weather goes off or whatever, it doesn't matter, because you did the work, so you can cope right.
So the confidence comes from the preparation.
So you, for example, you actually had knee surgery.
You've done your rehab.
You're always paying attention to left and right symmetries to make sure your body is as balanced as you can be.
That then means in a kind of, I was gonna say a stressful situation in life.
Look, I get you making the train come on my podcast, it's not life threatening, right?
We're mates.
Had you missed it, we would have set up another slot, right?
But the point is, is that you actually have this inner confidence and trust in your body Because you've prepared and you've done the work.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%.
That's what's keeping me in my game of skiing.
I have an element of my job is office-based, but my job relies on a physical part. to make the whole job work, obviously, because I'm on the mountain, I'm skiing, I'm up at altitude.
And I wouldn't say I've been unlucky, but I've just had accidents in cycling, bike accidents actually, that have really and unrailed me a bit, got me off the track.
And that thing that happened with a mountain bike accident in 2023 has now finished its three different surgeries on my left knee to get back in the game of skiing.
The other thing I noticed about today and it sounds like quite unrelated, but it's not.
It's really related.
That sprint didn't hurt me.
And I took away from today.
You know, I don't know now how deep you want to get on it, but I sat on the train when I finally made it and like, went to the loo, took my shirt off because I was literally dripping with sweat.
But I was like God, that's brilliant, because actually now I've just run that at that pace, that distance, like launching up steps.
I've never been put through that tolerance test yet.
And now I'm like, oh my God, I'm skiing on Sunday.
I'm going to take my little one in Verbier.
Verbier, the resort, I mean, opens tomorrow.
I'm going to take him skiing.
My confidence level, because of my preparation, got given an extra little gold medal today.
And because it could have easily have gone wrong.
I didn't have a choice.
But because there was two month, three month lead time of prep, which is what we're trying to get across to people for skiing, but it applies way beyond skiing.
It applies to every sport you do.
And if someone wants to avoid injury.
Today's episode is sponsored by Vivo Barefoot.
The human foot is a masterpiece.
26 bones, 33 joints and over 100 muscles and tendons that evolved to move us and ground us.
But unfortunately we've lost touch with our natural connection to the earth through modern footwear.
Barefoot shoes are a tool to restore that primal link between brain and body, foot and earth.
I've been wearing Vivo Barefoot shoes for over 12 years now and there is simply no way I would go back to wearing cushioned shoes.
What many people don't realise when they are used to wearing cushioned shoes is just how disconnected they have become from their feet and the way their feet interact with the ground.
Vivo Barefoot strips away the unnecessary.
No thick spongy foam, no elevated heels, just thin, flexible protection that lets your feet move, stretch and strengthen the way nature intended.
The science is simple.
When your feet can feel, your body moves better.
I have felt it myself and experience feedback from thousands of patients and friends over the years who have also felt the incredible benefits of wearing barefoot shoes.
As well as their regular office shoes and athletic shoes, Vivo also have a fantastic range of winter boots.
And my current favourites are the Tracker Forest absolutely fantastic feel.
They are really comfortable, really warm and, at the same time, have insane amounts of grip.
I cannot recommend vivo barefoot shoes enough and if you want to give them a try, please do use Vivo's online sizing tools to ensure that you find your own perfect fit.
Step into better health and freedom for your feet.
Get 15 off your first Vivo Barefoot order, plus a 100-day discovery period with money-back guarantee.
Visit vivobarefootcom forward slash, live more and start your Barefoot journey today.
This episode is sponsored by Thriver, the personalized blood testing service that helps you listen to your blood.
And Dr Mark Hyman, you will know that regular blood testing can be a brilliant tool to help you take a more proactive and preventative approach to your health.
And for me, I use Thriver to help me do this.
Thrive and make the process really simple and stress-free.
You just take a test at home with a painless device, post it back and a few days later your results are ready in the app.
And what's more?
Thrivers Doctors give you personalized actionable guidance so you know exactly what to focus on.
What's new is that you can now compare your results against other Thriver users, so you can see how you compare to what's typical for someone like you.
By retesting every few months, you can build up a clear picture of what's working and where to adjust.
From cardiovascular health to hormones and metabolism.
Thriver helps you optimize now and for the future.
And you may be interested to know that Thriver do a specific test to check your ApoB levels, which give you a much more accurate idea of your heart disease risk compared to standard cholesterol tests.
Listen to my show, can get 20% off at Thriver.co with the code LIVEMORE.
That's 20% off at Thriver.co with the code LIVEMORE.
Thriver, listen to your blood.
This is a really key point.
Someone gets an injury, especially at my age, it's a much longer comeback.
Um so if anyone is out there doing after work sport and activity which people try and cram in cuz it's such a limited time.
So if you are going off to play paddle or you know whatever it is, you're gonna go off to run or you're gonna go and bike that preparation.
It could be something as simple as being in the office and thinking right, I ain't going to go and just do this stuff blind.
I'm going to get out there.
I'm going to put 15 minutes aside.
I might even do it in my lunchtime or whatever because I'm going to do something active.
People don't do that.
They don't do it.
And there's two elements of that which come up for me.
One is to do with enjoyment and one is to do with health, right?
So enjoyment... which is an important part of health.
We know that people who enjoy their lives or do things that they love are more resilient to stress.
So it's absolutely very, very relevant.
But how many people think that, I don't know, skiing is not for them.
And I'm conscious that A lot of people think skiing is not accessible and that of course, for many people there is a cost element to skiing.
And I'm very aware of that, which is why I want to make sure these principles are universal and go beyond skiing.
But some people will maybe go on a ski holiday and go, oh, skiing's not for me.
Well, maybe it's not for you because you haven't done any preparation.
And this imbalance that you have in your day-to-day life, you're taking onto the mountain.
So of course you're going to get found out because skiing is a symmetrical sport.
You can't just turn one way.
So if one of you, you can get away maybe with tennis one way or table tennis one way, or do you know what I mean?
To a degree.
Yeah, to a degree.
You may not be able to do it to a degree.
But it'll still affect one element of your game, or even five elements of a game.
Yeah, or how many people think that running is not for them, right?
And it's... it may not be that running's not for them.
It may just be that they haven't put in enough time to actually work on their imbalances.
Turn their weakness into their strength.
Figure out oh, my right quad, for example, is way stronger than my left quad.
You can address that in five minutes a day.
I talk a lot about this five minute strength workout I do every morning.
That is five minutes.
And that keeps me in really good shape because it's a diligent daily practice.
What I'm...
Constantly working on this stuff.
So if I need to sprint up some stairs to get a train.
Yeah, you're ready.
I am ready.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And what I think people don't understand is that this is how you build trust in yourself, and confidence is through doing that small bit of prep consistently.
Do you know, it's really interesting what you just said.
It really brings home a big point, which we try to get across on this year's tour.
So Ski Technique Lab.
If anyone's listening to the show, if they Google it or look at what it is, it's basically looking at six functional movement patterns where you need to gain range of movement.
You're usually going to be different on left and right.
And you have to gain stability of movement, that quality of the control of it.
And on our tour this year, Like I said, we got through about 2000 people and people asked us like so what's the key point to you know what is gonna be the bit of this?
You've got to do it.
And actually, no, no, but we said, go and get your phone out now or your phone, go to your calendar.
And what you just said really hit home.
So we just said, put in, an actual reminder, but do it now.
Because you'll forget about what we just talked about.
The intensity of the talk will die off a little bit.
And it was all great and it sounded brilliant and wow, this is going to change things.
And in two weeks it'll be like you'll be cracking on with the, the busyness of life.
That also lets go of all these kind of key points sometimes.
And one of the things we tried to push across this year was open your calendar, put it in now.
It's the Ski Technique Lab five-minute session every night.
We've called a boot flexing test, a Netflix ski boot test trying to gain muscle memory in your ski boot because you think it's going to work when you clip onto your skis on a Sunday morning and finish skiing on a Friday.
Do you know what?
You haven't even rehearsed it and it's not like you go down to the local supermarket in your ski boots and have all that muscle memory.
You don't go and run for a train in your ski boots.
They're on for this alien tiny bit of time.
So now go and do the prep work.
But that's just hit home with me what you've said about the five minute a day and we're finding already when people are putting this in preparation, not just of your body preparation, of the preparation, which sounds ridiculous, but it's actually.
That's sometimes the only way you're gonna get it.
Yeah.
But the thing is, a lot of people might be thinking well, I'm not that obsessed about skiing or running or hiking.
You know, I just like to go and do it now and again and have fun.
And I get that and I have to respect that, because everyone's their own person, they're entitled to see life in the way that they want to.
I would frame it slightly differently, you may.
It's not about obsession, it's just about basic preparation.
It's about, you know, There's all kinds of beliefs about life and actually what this life actually is.
Do we have one life?
Is there life after death?
Everyone's got different views on that stuff, right?
But we've only got this one body to experience this current life, right?
And I really feel I owe it to myself and this experience of being a human, for whatever the 90 years I'm gonna be on the planet or 80 or 100, who knows to keep this body in as good a shape as I can, so that.
I can enjoy things like skiing or running or hiking with my mates, so that I can help someone on the plane who needs me to lift up their suitcase and put it up for them.
So that, when hopefully one day I become a grandfather, I can lift up my grandchildren.
And still ski with them.
And ski with them.
But I honestly feel, on a personal level me spending at least five, 10 minutes a day on mobility and making sure both sides of the body are equal I guess it's a sign of love to myself.
Yeah, it's longevity.
It's love but it's going to give you longevity because whatever happens is, you know you get people.
We get people certainly from the ski environment like oh, my left knee, It's getting worse.
You look up the chain of the body.
The chain of the body, if it's out of alignment, it isn't going to go on that longer journey.
It isn't going to last to 80, 90.
It's going to conk out at 70 years old because it got ground down.
It was off alignment.
And quite often in skiing, as you said earlier, that left and right side of the body imbalance will interrupt the flow of someone's experience in the sport.
I certainly know that from a personal perspective, I have to. on a daily basis manage my body now.
If I don't I feel it.
I know that I can't usually perform to my best of ability and I can't give to the clients.
And it feeds back into confidence, right?
Yeah.
A lot of confidence comes from preparation.
The more you repeat it, the more you prove to yourself that you can do it, the more confidence you start to build.
You mentioned injuries before, and you've had a lot of injuries over your career, right?
Yeah.
You can get away with stuff when you're younger, right?
You can have these big imbalances and somehow kind of sail through, right?
But as you get older, injury is not just about that injury, right?
Let's say you're out of something you can't run for three months because you pushed it too hard or whatever.
That three months where you can't move, it's not a neutral three months.
What I mean by that is it's not only are you not, you know, you can't do that sport that you love.
By you not being able to move your body properly, your body starts to atrophy, your muscles start to atrophy your tendons, your ligaments.
So even when you do pick it up again three months later, you are way further behind than where you would have been, had you not got that injury.
Does that make sense?
100%.
There's something that happens around the joints, the parts of the body, the whole system slows down Um, and you can't afford injuries too much as you get older.
What happened to me wrong?
And I was skiing.
I'm not sure if I was, I mean, it was in Japan.
Basically I was skiing in Japan.
I was unlucky.
A tip of one of my skis went under the root of a tree.
Root of the tree, caught the ski, ski moved forward.
I was going forward at 30 miles an hour, but my binding on my ski didn't release for a variety of reasons, whatever it was.
And my Achilles went, bang, as in like shotgun sound.
So I snapped my Achilles in Japan.
Was this 2010?
Yeah.
Mate, I've got a memory of this.
And we were the first people we kind of ground broke the whole thing in Japan, like you're not allowed to ski off piste in the sacred trees.
But we did that in 2008, got arrested, got my lift pass taken.
We just went in the forbidden area turns out it wasn't forbidden.
It was only forbidden because it was privately owned land, or something like that.
Long story short, by 2010 we'd opened up a resort of furano to allow us to ski off peace legitimately.
So that's the big thing.
A lot of people, when they learn to ski, a goal for some people is to ski in the powder.
It's a bit like what surfing would be like for anyone going near the water, that sensation.
So for us, it was to get people into powder, that incredible feeling around the body.
We'd achieved it in 2010.
We'd had quite a lot of groups, about 50 people going to Japan with us.
And it sort of backfired on me because when we did it all the security guards in the resort were being used with our groups to delicately carefully take them into off-piste environments.
I was filming for Vocal, which is my ski brand, and I was being filmed by a young British athlete called Nick Southwell.
I put the camera, I skied down, had a great run.
And then the tip of my ski, unlucky, went under a tree branch.
It was out of sight and went under the tree branch.
I went flying forward.
Ski stayed back at the tree at 30 miles an hour.
I was traveling, and then I heard the Achilles snap.
And it was an awful feeling, if anyone's ever done that listening to the show.
But what I had to do was get my ski back on.
We waited for a little while to try and get the security to come and help me.
And all the security guys are gone.
And then it was like, oh, no.
So I skied down with this snapped Achilles on my leg.
And it was like one-legged skiing all the way from the top of the resort down to the bottom.
And it was going great and I thought this is going to be fine.
So I just skied down very slowly on a blue run style piste.
Hit a mogul field.
Anyone that doesn't know what moguls are.
They're kind of an undulating thing going up and down, up and down.
They're bumps.
Like an inverted sort of egg container, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Inverted egg container is the best way to describe it.
Went through that with the snap kill.
He's got to the bottom. got fixed, had the surgery.
But the problem with that is that that Achilles that got snapped.
Yes, psychological effect, massive pain on the moment loads, you know, having your boot, ski boot cut off with a Dremel and that sort of thing.
All of this happened.
But the weirdest thing was, a year and a half later I had surgery on my back, my lumbar spine, because the the compensation of hobbling around and getting around off balance, off alignment.
You know, even with the best will in the world, it has a knock-on effect.
The knock-on effect was in my hip positioning and everything goes up the chain.
Everything's connected right.
So you're managing your Achilles, not having surgery, but you're walking differently.
You're moving your body differently.
So the strain goes up.
After you, it was in your back, which then causes the back issue, which goes back to the point we're trying to make, which is Yeah, 100.
You shouldn't... Don't ignore these little nickels.
Or if... I don't know.
If every time you do your Saturday park run, if at 3K in you're always getting right hammy discomfort but you push through and you do it great, but you keep doing that week after week, month after month.
Something's going to happen at some point.
You've got an early warning sign saying, hey, listen, you're able to do this.
Your body's strong enough and resilient enough, but there is an imbalance here.
You know, go and see someone.
Or maybe you know, even if you're a runner, I would say, the Ski Technique Lab program that you've got.
There's sort of six core moves that we all need right.
So even a runner could go onto your website, for example, and look at them and do them.
And it would help them identify these imbalances.
The Ski Technique Lab applies to nearly every other sport, okay?
So ours is just based around skiing.
But the general point is it's functional movement patterns of the body.
And, you know, whether you... do or do not sort of understand it.
Once you've dipped your toe in it, you're very quickly, within half an hour of trying and testing yourself be like oh my God, I can see, I can feel the difference between left and right.
You can't unknow it.
That's what I found the first time I did it with you many years ago is that, Once you've done it and you're like oh wait, like to my right is super easy.
70 degrees.
Right?
But then to my left, it just feels stiff.
You're like, you can't unknow that.
Yeah.
But I think fear comes in here as well, right?
Because...
This core theme of preparation being important for skiers and non-skiers I think is massive.
The more you prepare, the more confident you become.
At the same time, a lack of preparation can massively contribute to an increase in fear, can't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
So like even on that point there, the preparation that should be in there by doing biomechanical functioning testing.
When you apply that to, let's say, I'm skiing down the slope, I'm going from a blue run to a red run or a red run to a black run, for example,
And for someone who's never skied before, can you just explain what that means?
Yeah, so blue run is what your first week of your skiing is going to be on, probably.
Red run would be your second, third, fourth week exploring and getting better at skiing.
So they're getting steeper and steeper.
They get steeper and steeper and more challenging.
But when you're on a slope that's quite steep and you're being tested and it might technically feel more difficult, but the outcome is like oh my God, I'm traveling 40 miles an hour faster here.
I'm dropping 40 meters where I should have only been dropping four on the the descent of the slope.
That can get really scary.
So what wasn't prepared for?
From a physiological point of view, simple preparation can lead to a huge psychological challenge.
And the psychological challenge sometimes can even put you off doing the sport.
It can make you walk away.
Or it can put you at a much higher risk of injury because you are being put into a situation or a zone which your body wasn't prepared for on one side.
And that can get quite confusing.
It's like, hang on a second, I can do this one way, I'm really confident.
That first turn got you into a very confident place, but the second turn in my world this is ski specific.
Unfortunately, you skied across the slope and that second turn was on 10 degrees steeper just happened to be but you unluckily, were on your weaker turning direction to the left.
Now that adds up.
That's where you're working in terrain and working with biomechanicals.
Yeah, there's another point there for me Warren, which I think is really key, which is this idea that so we're talking about these gradients of a ski slope right, but you can apply that to just as your sport gets harder, or you're running steeper and steeper hills, whatever it might be okay.
It's the same principle, but the blue slope being quite shallow, the red being a bit steeper and the black being the steepest.
If we just take blue, red and black as a way of simplifying this, those imbalances that you have in your system, they're still affecting it on a blue slope, but you're getting away with it.
Because it's not steep enough to push you.
You've got enough compensation within you to get away with it.
So you think you're fine.
But actually to your eye, and I would say my eye.
Now You can easily see it in people on a blue sleigh, but they're thinking well, I'm sailing through a blue sleigh, my skiing's great, I can ski both ways.
And then the reason they're struggling on a black often is because actually no you, just you sort of didn't address The problems that were there, even when you skied on a blue slope.
Yeah.
Yeah, this is brilliant what you're saying.
In fact, if anyone wants a ski lesson, that's one of the most important points is the prep work done at the lowest stages.
I can relate to this when we do instructor training programs and you take someone who can already ski quite well back to a beginner scenario of learning to do a snowplow.
And in fact someone, a journalist, who came to a ski session of ours in Hemel, the snow center which you guys in Manchester have one of those as well, the indoor snow dome.
We were running a ski course And it was for advanced skiers, you know, in all fairness.
And the lady that was interviewing me sort of said oh you know, ski technique lab is tech and it's.
You know, lab and it's.
All this stuff is obviously just for advanced skiers.
Right.
And I was like, you know what?
Absolutely not.
If anything and I was so lucky in this moment that happened to be a beginner lesson going on
So anyone like trying to dip their toe in like do I want to do snow sports?
You know we'll come to it later like there's one big reason from a psychological point of view why it's worth trying that snow sports.
But In terms of what this woman saw, I know what you just said.
You think it's tech, it's tech, it's high tech, it's advanced, it's like this, that and the other.
We saw the beginner lesson going on and it was just about to get to that stage, which some people might be experiencing this winter for the first time, where you're snow plowing.
Snow plow is your first part of your progression.
And they were just about to learn to snow plow turn.
And I said, I know you say what you say, but just watch this.
These guys for the first time in their life are going to do a turn on skis.
And every single person like Clockwork thankfully for me trying to explain this to a journalist who thought it was just advanced naturally steered one way.
Their success was so, so apparent.
And they went to turn the other way.
And, rather than just repeating back the other direction, they swung their shoulders and upper body into that direction, because something down there didn't function, didn't work.
It didn't work and it was like there you go, point blank, like Right at the beginning of the journey in skiing or in this sport.
Let's just say this sport could be something else for someone else.
You know, it could be cycling.
It could be tennis.
It could be whatever it is you do in your in your leisure.
But straight away there, it happened.
Now, I relate. a solution in this kind of point as well.
My solution to most people is to say to them go away and prep yourself for skiing with pilates or yoga.
But in yoga, when I go to yoga after having a break for three or four months away from it, I feel good one side and I know damn well on the other side.
It is really tricky for me to hold that same stance, whether it's stability, or make that same range of movement.
And if anything, I almost feel quite, pinched and unbalanced, sometimes painful on one side.
Yoga, for me, shows it up.
Fear is quite an interesting one when we think about it through the lens of skiing, right?
So people are up on a mountain, right? which is an unfamiliar environment to many people, right?
But let's say, a client with you and you guys have gone down far enough where there's no real way out.
You've committed to, getting down the mountain on skis, right?
But let's say, either you or your client has suddenly got the fear or is like oh wow, this is way harder.
We shouldn't be here.
You know, this is what happens in life, doesn't it?
Absolutely.
You still have to deal with it.
Yeah, yeah.
So I guess a couple of questions, Warren.
How do you stay calm in those situations or how do you help a client stay calm?
And then the second part is, well, what do you actually do?
This episode is brought to you by Airbnb.
Now.
At the moment, I'm starting to plan next year's summer holiday with my family, and I know full well that for us, the places we choose to stay in can make a massive difference.
We just love staying somewhere that gives us the time and space to just hang out together, whether that be to chat, read books or play cards.
Now.
Last summer, as part of my Australian tour, We stayed in a gorgeous Airbnb in Noosa, just north of Brisbane, where we caught up with family and friends.
And whenever I stay in a homely Airbnb, it always gets me thinking about hosting myself.
Especially because so many of my friends have been hosting on Airbnb for years.
And if you have a trip coming up, you could potentially do the same.
If not the entire place, perhaps just a spare room.
It's a lot easier than you might think.
And the great thing is that it's flexible as well.
You get to choose when and how long you host for.
So it's a smart way to make some extra money with the space you already have.
Your home might be worth more than you think.
Find out how much at airbnb.co.uk forward slash host.
Today's show is sponsored by Bond Charge.
I have been using Bond Charge wellness products for over five years.
From blue light glasses to red light therapy, Bond Charge make it really easy to get healthy while staying at home.
Now, one of my current favorites is their Demi Red Light Therapy device.
There are just so many studies now showing the potential benefits of red light therapy, including better eye health, pain relief, reduced inflammation, enhanced recovery, improved sleep and even better skin.
In fact, when it comes to skin, I have many friends and family members who absolutely love the Bonn Charge Red Light Face Mask.
Super light and portable and, after using it for just 10 minutes a day, are reporting more radiant and glowing skin.
So if you're looking to take charge of your health at home, I would highly recommend you check out Bond Charge.
It's currently the Bond Charge holiday sale, so you can save an incredible 25 off everything on their website.
Just head to bondcharge.com. and your 25% off code will be automatically added to your order.
This sale will end on the 31st of December, 2025.
So hurry and don't miss this massive chance to save big on your favourite Bond Charge products.
So to calm them down, you've got to visualize the pathway for them.
If they've just seen a moment, a glimpse, and the fear is in them because they've looked down a gradient they don't want to ski, you take them very calmly over to that gradient and you pinpoint and you map out and say right, our first process is to get ourselves to that point.
That's point number one.
Point number two we're going to try and side slip down to this next area.
In that next area where point number three is, we'll be able to start making ski turns.
In their mind, they're going to turn, turn, turn, turn to get down this slope.
You actually have to intervene and spell it out like a children's book, literally going back into the point of, like That's point number one.
We are stepping down here.
Point number two is side slip.
Point number three, we're going to put in some basic turns.
We may even use a snowplow turn at that point.
But if you don't break down the map of this entry point, that builds fear.
If it's all just chucked into like it's, that
The whole thing is, how am I going to get down?
Yeah, yeah.
Fear is going to sit in them.
So it's the explanation of a real challenge tactical approach.
The tactical approach has to be broken down into bite size, smaller pieces.
This run, it might only be 20 meters.
But I've broken that rundown into two meters there.
That next three and a half meters is this part.
The next four and a half is there.
And every little pass.
This jigsaw puzzle has a different tactic, has a different technique, has a different part of it where we're gonna be holding hands to step down this little area, because I don't feel I want you in an environment independently.
I'm gonna be your buddy, I'm gonna hold your hand, we're gonna step down there.
And by the time you've finished it, you've segmented this horrible dark gloom into bite-sized little chunks of something that's achievable there, achievable there, achievable there.
That's life, right?
Yeah, totally.
You end up in a situation you don't want to be in.
Instead of looking at the totality of that situation or how I don't know, My to-do list is through the roof.
How am I going to get it?
It's like, wait a minute, wait a minute.
You've done this with me.
You've done this with me on my physical state sometimes.
And I've come to you and like, Jesus, I've got all this going on.
Mine's the same brainstorm.
You know, my brain goes like that.
It goes over speed and doesn't stop to think sometimes.
So it's exactly the same.
I love what you said about breaking it down because that is how we get through anything in life.
A big problem, well, it's kind of five mini problems.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I love that, you know, what you say, like, oh, that bit, you're just going to sidestep down.
You're not going to ski it because the person's scared because they think they have to ski it.
Like, how will I stop the ski there?
No, no, no, we'll step that bit.
And then I guess what you'll also do and I know you do this is that you'll know that ah, Their strong turn is their one to the left.
Their weak one is the one to the right.
Ah, you know what?
So on that little steep bit where they have to make a turn, I'm going to make sure that they are approaching it where it's on their strong side.
100%.
And not their weak side.
Because then that... you then help them build the confidence by a strategic approach.
But it's in day-to-day Rangan because one of the things that will affect my job is part of my personal life.
So if I've got, you know, with my, my oldest is almost, uh, youngest is almost five.
My oldest is 24.
And, um, with my, with my youngest, um, he's sort of neuro divergent.
He's, you know, he's, um, He's a great kid.
He's always smiling, super happy.
But my preparation work that I've had to learn which I didn't actually have, you know, I didn't have it before for him is make or break.
Make or break on whether his mood changes.
If it's regulated, it's make or break in terms of what he eats and how it affects his mood.
It's make or break in trying to, almost like seeing two steps ahead.
Or it changes very greatly his day, which I don't want to do.
And it changes mine as well, because my fatigue, by not prepping, planning strategically tactically, his day of his things we need to do, end in an explosion, like an eruption.
It's literally like skiing somewhere steep where you lost it, lost the turn and your, your equipment came off and you started tumbling down the hill.
It's an eruption, it's an explosion um, But in ski terms you're exactly right.
And it's the best explanation of that steep face where someone can only see down the whole of that radius.
And if you want to sort of calculate it, it's 500 meters down and it's 70 meters across.
That's what they see.
And what we're talking about is literally 20 meters at a time in that space.
But what do endurance runners do?
Or people who run half marathons or marathons when they're feeling tired, they break it down.
They're like, oh, I'll just go to that next lamppost.
Let me just do one more mile and see how I feel.
They don't think, or the best ones are not looking at man, there's still 15 miles to go, because it doesn't help you.
You have to break it right down.
Yeah. into those small bite-sized pieces.
And then you do enough of those small, bite-sized pieces.
Before you know it, you're at the bottom of the mountain or you're at the end of the race.
It wasn't the big thing, it was the small things.
And one thing I will say, because I've been on many of your five-day courses, Because I love the approach that you and your academy take, always have done.
It's always made sense to me that you do it the right way.
But, you know, you guys at 10 a.m. when everyone meets up, you split us into groups.
We're doing warm-ups for 10 minutes, right?
A lot of people don't want to do a warm-up.
It's like, what are you talking about?
I've got my gear out.
Let me ski now, right?
But you're doing warm-ups.
Then we're doing low-speed brakage drills, right?
Yeah. which actually are really difficult when you first do them, right?
Because you don't have momentum.
So you're having to, just in a very small area, rotate your skis around without using your upper body.
But then, as I reflect back now, I think that's why your flagship five-day courses that you guys run for people are just so phenomenal because you get to do all the cool fun stuff that you're hoping.
But you guys might spend the morning preparing us so that in the afternoon we can go and do one of the cool slopes.
But we, you know, going back to preparation we've prepared all morning, we built up our skills, we keep getting better, our confidence gets higher, which means by the time you take us up there, we're like yeah actually, you know what?
And we've also built trust in you or your instructors, which then it's less likely to freak us out, because we built that confidence in ourselves and with you guys right.
Yeah, absolutely.
Another one of these universal principles that apply to skiers and non-skiers.
I think it's to do with perspective.
Yeah.
So you are lucky enough to live in the gorgeous mountains of Verbier.
Okay.
So the views are stunning.
And you shared before that there have been some challenges in your personal life.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay.
Over the last few years.
Yeah. can we talk a little bit about perspective?
What, what does it do for you when things are going off in your personal life?
Yeah.
But then for your job, you get up out into the mountains.
Like what, what do you to help us understand that?
Yeah.
So so for me um Personally having the view or the perspective of looking out and seeing when you're elevated.
You're not just elevated in terms of altitude.
It feels like you're elevated in perspective where you can see a greater distance.
And there's something just for me and I know other people do feel this that you're it kind of weirdly for me.
I find it difficult to switch off right.
So, so I, I sometimes I'm not brilliant at sleep.
Uh, brain goes about a thousand miles an hour and I and I have to, like you know sometimes, you know, figure out a way that I'm going to get sleep, get the sleep to try and get the energy back up.
When I've got the perspective of a huge view and a space of like a distance, I naturally, something in me naturally switches off and unwinds.
We've often done... things with a charity we work with called Snow Camp.
So Snow Camp is where we get a chance as skiers, you know.
So we've done all right in the ski industry.
We want to give back to things that we've been lucky enough to come from.
And we've taken a lot of kids who have been in really sort of rough situations.
It's usually london based, south london based, but the snow camp charities exist all over the uk.
The ones that we worked with were london sort of scenarios and we got kids out of bad environments um, bad environments that were triggering them to do bad things.
It wasn't their fault that they were just in the place where, whether they liked it or not, there was a strong percentage outcome of things would go negative for them.
If you measured it.
When they came out to the Alps, the same kids put into a perspective where they, let's just say their vehicle was the fact they did our ski instructor training program right.
So they came to Verbier.
We sponsored these guys through Snow Camp and they did a ski instructor training program and they It was incredible to watch how they turned up in the resort quite edgy not chippy is the wrong word, but quite tense and stressed.
Their natural perception and their demeanor within a week completely changed their performance.
Their ability to perform was excellent.
A lot of these kids who had survived through a lot of street life and broken homes, came out and ended up being like the upper level of performance in our skiing structure training program.
They worked for us.
One of them came out and worked for us, ended up teaching members of the royal family I was skiing with.
And you almost couldn't explain it, but it was like wow, you know, I'm in a completely different environment.
Now, not so much to do with us and what the of the program was, the individual you could see by perspective and elevation and distance and, like you know, forget about the postcard looking beauty of the place or a lovely chalet, but you forget about all that.
Just the simple elevation, of seeing a greater distance, as opposed to the opposite, of being low down with a really tall skyscraper around you.
Whatever you want to call it.
But basically, if you're continually down there in an environment that's trapped, you know that's darker, it's more dingy, you're boxed in and whatever.
And you flip it upside down and this person then gets elevated and stuck on this.
For us, we're lucky, we're on the mountain and get even cooler when you're really high up and you've achieved and you hiked up to a peak.
The mental side of that and how it physically reflected.
If you just look at the shoulders and someone's stance and someone's, you know, you've seen it where someone's got the tension in their body.
Yeah.
It kind of, for me, the mountains unwinds.
People just switch off and everything becomes a lot more like, ah, I can breathe out.
Personally, I actually used it.
And we talk about personal scenarios.
I had a really bad road cycling accident in...
It was 2017 when my front tire blew out and I ended up in hospital for 10 days and shattered my hips, dislocated my shoulder, twisted my lower leg the wrong way around.
It was all sort of terrible for my ski career.
And I ended up having to have therapy for it because I didn't get knocked out when I hit.
My bike was going downhill about 75K.
Front tire blew out, bang, hit the ground quite hard.
And I kept having these things at night where I was like I was re picture in it.
I couldn't switch the picture off and um, i went to a therapy session which was labeled emdr, right so, and I didn't believe in it because I kind of I'm the hardest person, like you know lights going on just reminded me of Clockwork Orange, so I was like I don't believe in this stuff.
So this woman was persistent, she was brilliant and she said um, I went to a place called Cognacity or Cognicity in London.
Anyway, I did this thing, sat in front of the lights and we went for a procession.
She was writing those notes and she asked me to pick your happy place, right?
And at the time I was breaking up in a relationship with someone that was quite stressful and it had other factors of like my son being involved, and all solutions were made and it was all ended up well and good.
But in her process of where she found me, my happy place, what is your happy place?
I couldn't really think of anything.
And I just said, actually, it's my balcony.
It's my balcony of my house where I live in Switzerland.
And actually, I bought the house in 2002.
That has been my happy place.
It's been the only place I think I could go outside and take a breath out um, and and feel not that i'm protected, but just feel like i've got a moment of peace in a moment to let the body, let the mind sort of reset, recover.
And, weirdly enough um, there was almost like a delayed effect of this EMDR therapy working.
And to this day, whether it was how she used my happy place being elevated in my balcony.
In my view, I'm lucky.
I've got like a 180 degree view.
I could see over to the face we were talking about there from a chalet.
There's lots of memories that are positive stuff.
But there's a lot about it.
It's like the breathing in of the fresh air.
You know, wherever you are in the UK, I can pick anything.
Any number of places I choose to go, to jump in the car and say right, I'm driving up to the top of that.
The air's fresher, the view's more, the emotional state of it's calmer.
So elevation for me, you know, is one of the reasons has magnetized me towards the mountain of my day to day job, which I love.
But elevation is a cure for a lot of the day to day that we get sort of sucked downwards into, you know.
And I would recommend it.
I'd strongly recommend it.
I did a thing for one of my sponsors, Heli Hansen, and it was mountains.
It was about getting people to go to the mountains, go to the hills.
And we've got loads of them in the UK.
I mean, I know this goes out internationally, this show.
Whichever city or town you're in close by, you ain't going to be that far away from something which is elevated, which gives you a view back down looking at everything.
It's profound and it's...
Again, as you sort of mentioned, we're not all lucky enough to live in the mountains, right?
But many of us do have access to some form of hilly area.
Not everyone, of course, but many of us do.
And if you can access it.
If you're struggling in your life, if you're feeling stuck, if you're feeling lost, if you can't see through the problems, you think you're in the wrong job whatever.
It is amazing how getting some elevation, getting out into some awe-inspiring nature, if you can, will just start to shift your perspective.
And hearing your individual experience was wonderful.
And I love hearing people's individual take on what it's done for them and how being in the hills, for example, gives them a different perspective.
There is also a lot of science now to support it.
There's science showing us that simply being out in nature will lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol.
So it literally changes you physiologically.
There's also science showing us that when you have this big panoramic view and your vision becomes more peripheral, right
So if we're on a screen, right, our vision is not peripheral.
It's central, it's all locked in in front of us, right?
Which actually, if you think about it on an evolutionary level, that's kind of where we look when we're stressed right.
We're not looking around us, we're just focusing on the problem at hand.
When people get out into nature whether it's a mountain or not frankly, and if they're not looking at their phone at the same time right which of course these days a lot of people are and you just soften your vision and you start to take things in from the side and more peripheral.
We know that that turns down the dial of your stress system.
Your sympathetic nervous system, the stress arm of your nervous system, starts to come down and the parasympathetic arm, the relaxation arm, starts to get amped up relatively.
It's not just, oh, it feels good.
It literally changes you physiologically.
So I think what you guys are doing with your charities to try and get people out to the mountains to experience this just helps people see a different perspective on life.
You know, I totally agree.
And if you look into it, I mean, snowcaps are a brilliant thing.
Is that S-N-O?
S-N-O. at W and then camp.
So yeah you, just you go online you, you Google um snow camp.
You'll find it straight away.
But snow camp operates at the you know many venues around the UK.
But even if you don't go to snow camp and you don't ski, go and have a look at where the local ski slopes are, the dry slopes, and go walk up to the top of one of them.
It is incredible.
In Dublin on Saturday when I was coaching there, the view that we got just because the dry slope was situated on a hill, it has to be right was incredible.
We saw right into the bay.
In Dublin you saw more and that was a buzz I mean I'd strongly encourage.
I mean this weekend I get to Verbier right, so I'd be in Verbier, I'd be Getting back in the swing of things and the first thing I'll do is go and enjoy the altitude and the view.
Now, elevation doesn't have to be going up to a ski resort high.
Elevation could be going up 100 meters or two, somewhere around the hills. you know, anywhere you are.
But take in a few deep breaths and just let your system switch off and reset.
Talking about perspective, I think about the fact that you were caught in an avalanche early on in your career.
And I'm really interested to know Warren well, if you could tell us a little bit about that experience and what you learned or what changed in you.
Yeah, so the avalanche I was caught in I was quite lucky actually.
You can be in an avalanche where you're caught in it and you're sort of like been in a washing machine effect.
You can end up when everything stops, head down, feet up.
I was the other way around.
My head was right next to the surface.
Anyway, I got caught in it and I was lucky.
I got out.
But to me it really it made me reflect a lot on life.
I remember getting in the car that afternoon and driving to a trade show to go and see one of my ski sponsors, like mentioned vocal, and going through your mind all that drive is like god what, what if you know?
What if that was just a bit different?
What if the outcome was different?
What if i was further across?
An extra 10 meters over would have been a more intense strike by the avalanche.
If i was 10 meters lower, would i have ended up the other way around, upside down.
So it really woke me up.
Um, I dealt with scenarios in skiing in my early days where I did silly things, took high risk.
My first child came along and I definitely lowered the tone of the risk taking, but I still took the risk.
After that avalanche, um, that I definitely changed a lot about it.
You know, sometimes we are just caught in the with the blinkers on and we're just going full speed ahead with not much time to think sort of laterally or sideways.
And that moment, that incident, definitely made me wake up a little bit.
Think about the sort of longevity how long is life for me?
How long does that picture look like?
Yeah, it's kind of we're talking about avalanches and when you come close to death, how it changes the way that you value life and appreciate life.
You have an increased sense of gratitude usually.
But of course, skiing these days, Certainly not when you guys teach or an academy, which is very, very safe.
But a lot of people out with those things, a lot of people by themselves often will go into some quite gnarly ski terrain.
Yeah.
I've done a couple of ski seasons in Chamonix with my band earlier on, maybe 20 years ago or so.
And every year people die.
Yeah, 100%.
Usually not when they're being coached and doing stuff.
It's off doing crazy stuff usually, right?
Yeah.
You've had friends, I believe, who have died when out in the mountains.
What has that done to how you view life?
Yeah, I think knowing and seeing the repercussions.
It's made us try and raise awareness for sure.
One of the first things that when you see the damage it does when someone's taken before they should be and leave, it's something that affects such a big wealth of people.
That you want to do something about it and you want to raise awareness.
And in our game, we often see scenarios nowadays where someone didn't expect it.
Someone did all the preparation work but because of the environmental element, of the way the planet's warming up and the way that things are changing in the winter preparation preparation, preparation didn't always get the outcome because there was some chance involved.
But it still remains the fact that if you can educate someone a little bit, I mean, our bigger issue at the moment is temperature shifts.
So we are getting now in a winter season unless, like you said, more and more people have been caught in avalanches, in recent years especially.
But in january last year you've got a temperature shift of minus 10 to plus 10 in the space of 24 hours.
That's too much.
And what people are not understanding yet not to my knowledge in terms of the degree of the volume of people who want to understand it is that you know it's the temperature shift that's making the snowpack weak, which wasn't there 20, 30 years ago.
Now it is.
We've got to be more aware of it.
And if there's one thing that someone's life being taken in the mountains in an avalanche has done for me, it's waking up the idea that let as many people know about it as we possibly can educate people.
Help them prepare, help them realize that there's a set bunch of pointers you've got to check before you go there.
And it comes back also to greed and want and desire.
For you know, you now look at a traverse line to traverse into a beautiful off-piste.
Imagine that lovely open powder field.
And there's tracks in the powder field everywhere.
But do you traverse the extra 10 or 20 meters to get something that visually had a perfect flat surface but above you took a huge amount more risk and risk to life because you were just a bit too far out in that risky zone.
Or do you sort of. back away from it a little bit and say, I'm going to ski this line.
It's still awesome.
It's 90 of the awesome that the one that took high risk was going about the 10 20 meters further across.
Um, they're the bits we want to get across to people.
And that's playing with a few different like technical knowledge of the mountain, but also the ego as well.
And like, do we, do we go and grab that part?
I mean, I certainly know that the client of mine that wants wants wants wants, get that, got this, got to grab it, take it home and turn the trophy on it on the instagram photograph on their phone, that's the extra 20 meters that can cost a life, and so we're playing with technical knowledge but also ego.
Yeah, it's amazing greed and desire get humans into all kinds of problems when unchecked.
Yes, on a mountainside, but also in life.
That desire for more.
I want to keep pushing.
I want more.
I've got enough already, but I need more.
I need more money, more promotions, more whatever.
Again, it depends on what your start point is.
It depends where you are in life.
I think one thing humans are not very good at is knowing when enough is enough.
And it's something, I've said it before on the show, but I can't reiterate enough.
One of my very favorite phrases is from the old Chinese philosophy text, the Tao Te Ching.
True wealth is knowing what is enough.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think about it all the time.
What does enough look like?
Because often the quest, the greed for more starts to decimate what you already have.
Yeah.
And of course, on a mountain... that could be fatal.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think that's really important is to get some form when someone's learning in our world of this is your expectation.
This is what we're going to go for.
The problem in the modern world is the videos you watch online.
The videos you watch online.
Now, every kid coming up age 15 to 20 have got to prove themselves, because the videos are so much more extreme.
They're jumping off of a bigger cliff.
They're doing... more backflips, they're skiing powder in the most remote places.
Then it's coupled with the ego and the expectation of what their Instagram feed, compared to their mate's Instagram feed, is looking like, and what risk have they got to take to go and get the better picture.
It's really important.
Education at this stage is where education is key, is where education kicks in and says right, you've got to learn Like we work with we, we mountain, we mountain is a bit like if anyone's dived this bit like the paddy in explanation book for off piece knowledge.
We've got to get people with more off piece knowledge.
And when they get that knowledge, they pass that knowledge on, definitely passing on to your friends and family.
Once you've got the knowledge, you can then go and exercise your technique and practice it safely.
But within all of those elements you've got to respect the current situation of what the weather history is like.
You can't just get out there and just run for the mountains like you used to.
You've got to have preparation.
So much more so now, because we're dealing with a different type of media.
We're dealing with a different type of expectation that you've got to be putting out this content on your Instagram, which is crazy in our environment.
It's just like a mega risk-taking side of things, coupled with an environment that's a hotter planet.
So it's like it's really difficult to manage that, but the best we can do is make people better technically prepare, better in what they do.
Respect now like more so than ever respect the mountain itself, because that there is no um.
The mountain doesn't forgive.
You know, you get one chance to sort of look at it and treat it the way it should be treated, but it's really important to respect that.
As someone who's been a coach for several decades, what would you say is the number one skill that you need?
The number one skill to ski?
No, the number one skill you need to be a good coach.
Oh, wow.
Listen.
I mean.
For me, it's listening and understanding the person, because my job is to give that person a great experience and it's very easy to get carried away because we've got the knowledge to give them all the right ingredients.
But you've really got to know who the person is you're going to coach and what their expectation is.
You've got to listen to, not just verbally listen to them, but listen to the way that they portray themselves, their expectations, what they want to gain from it, what their history and their profile is.
Listen to what they've done.
Listen to the fact of they, have they done a lot of sport in the past?
Are they fragile?
Are they agile?
Are they, you know, Are they confident?
Are they underselling themselves?
What type of person is it?
So the listening game covers way more than audio.
Way, way more than audio.
I think that's the same thing I would say as a doctor.
I think the number one skill is... your ability to listen, listen without preconceived ideas.
Warren, I could talk to you for hours.
I love what you have given to me over the years. what you brought to the ski industry.
And I love the fact that you are keen to get these principles particularly around our body biomechanics out to everyone, skiers and non-skiers alike.
Yeah.
If people want to find out more about you and sort of ski with your academy or get hold of this gorgeous ski technique lab sort of program, now where should they go?
I mean, that's a big question there.
95% of people don't take ski lessons.
5% of people do.
So so, in terms of the millions of people that ski, if you're a skier that doesn't take ski lessons, the ski technique lab that sits within our academy and and It's called the Warren Smith Ski Academy.
You can Google that.
But the Ski Technique Lab is the content that will help someone that doesn't take a ski lesson improve their skiing technique just because of being better at functional movement patterns.
And there's an understanding that goes with that.
You can find a lot of that content online.
If you are a person that likes ski lessons, the chances are globally, you probably might not be skiing with us.
You'd be skiing with a ski school, in a resort, wherever you go.
If you're going to invest money in a ski lesson, we'd urge you, like beg you, to go and work on the functional movement patterns of technique lab, because if you do so, the value for money at your ski lesson will be at least doubled, because the one side of the body is going to absorb it, which might not have done, and it goes the same for someone buying ski kit as well.
You know, one side usually works better than the other.
Um, If you are skiing with us, fantastic.
You know, come and say hi.
We're based in Verbier, but also we're quite often accessible in the UK at the Snow Centre in Hamel Hempstead and the Snow Centre in Manchester.
And then these are brilliant indoor ski venues that give someone the chance to ski on real snow, which is unusual.
And this sort of new magazine.
Well, it's not a magazine, it's your Ski Technique Lab Expert Programme, which I love.
I'm looking through and although it's, you know, revolves around skiing, you think well, actually anyone's gonna benefit from trying to do these simple exercises.
If they go to your academy websites, can they find the ski technique lab stuff?
Yeah, and this little program on there.
If they go to our academy website, along the top bar there's an option that says technique lab.
And if you go to technique lab you'll find the content in there.
One of the things we'll evolve and people can do is, if they don't get a chance to ski with us is run an online coaching session with somebody.
And that's a way that, okay, I'm not going to Verbier.
I'm not going to get a chance to see you guys.
But if you want to access and work through the functional movement patterns, you can hire us.
You can book that online.
And quite often, that might be all you need.
It's been so fun talking to you to finish off warren for that person who's been listening and let's say that they don't ski yeah, but they want to stay active and there are sports that they want to do but feel that they can't do because they're scared or the state of their body or whatever it might be.
You are an elite coach.
For that person, What would you say to them?
I would say to get out there and try.
I would say that you have to look at the idea of your sport you want to do how you're going to prepare for that sport.
And in the preparation phase that we've been talking about, you know, being functional and moving movement itself is something that will improve so many elements of life.
If you choose a sport and let's just say you want to be good at paddle or running or whatever it might be um, go behind the scenes of your body, you know.
Go behind the scenes and see what your body can do.
You're going to quite often, as we've been mentioned throughout today's talk, you're going to find a difference between left and right side the body.
Once you've identified it, you might find that it was only one side of the body that drew you away from something, that stopped you going there.
And you can make the changes in that you can make it balance.
But you can only make it balance by finding out about it first.
That's how we've made our life and our business work in skiing.
In terms of that word, in terms of preparation.
I think the big thing for me personally is I've got through areas of my life where, outside of work in personal life,
With preparation, I've learned to be a better dad.
With preparation, I've learned to manage my time and try and find a balance between sort of work life and home life, which is a really important thing for me.
And then the other part, I think, from today, from what I would advise to someone is I want to personally and you were saying the same I want to do sport until I'm older much, much older.
I want to enjoy all these things for as long as I possibly can.
And if you get to work at it right now by trying to look at what your body's capabilities are, your machine will go on lasting longer and longer and longer.
But if you're grinding down one side of your unbalanced body, you're gonna know about it.
And those joints won't last forever.
Yeah, I love it, Warren.
Fantastic advice.
It's been fantastic having you on the show.
Such a fun conversation.
I really hope we get to...
Have a little ski adventure at some point over the winter.
Absolutely, mate.
And until next time, I'll ski you later, mate.
Ski you later.
I like that.
Cheers, mate.
Really hope you enjoyed that conversation.
Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life.
And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else.
Remember, when you teach someone, It not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information.
Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday Five.
It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas. to improve your health and happiness.
In that email I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I be consuming and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect.
And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving.
So if that sounds like something you would like to receive each and every Friday, you can sign up for free at drchatterjeecom.
Forward slash Friday Five.
Now, if you are new to my podcast, you may be interested to know that I have written five books that have been bestsellers all over the world, covering all kinds of different topics happiness food stress sleep, behavior change and movement, weight loss, and so much more.
So please do take a moment to check them out.
They are all available as paperbacks, ebooks and as audio books, which i am narrating.
If you enjoyed today's episode, it is always appreciated if you can take a moment to share the podcast with your friends and family or leave a review on Apple Podcasts.
Thank you so much for listening.
Have a wonderful week.
And please note that if you want to listen to this show without any adverts at all, That option is now available for a small monthly fee on Apple and on Android.
All you have to do is click the link in the episode notes in your podcast app.
And always remember you are the architect of your own health, Making lifestyle changes always worth it.
Because when you feel better, you live more.
