[Photo: Ben Blackenberg, Keystone]

Many people think good parallel skiing means keeping your feet locked together at all times. Beginners or intermediate skiers will select someone who can negotiate the nursery slopes with skis chattering against each other as their role model of an advanced skier.

Wrong! To start with, a wider stance improves your balance. Chairs topple over, tables don't. Perhaps even more importantly, good edge control requires two things: the ability to roll the skis easily and quickly onto their edges, and the ability to put pressure on a carefully targeted part of the skis' edges. Skiing with your feet too close together impedes both of these actions.

Try the following experiment: with your feet locked together, flex down and try rolling your knees to the side to simulate setting your skis on edge. Then try the same move with your feet 6-8 inches apart.

With your feet locked together, the extent to which you can set your skis onto their edges is limited. As you roll your knees, your weight is increasingly displaced to your inside (ie wrong) foot.

On the other hand, if you start with your feet 6-8 inches apart, it is easy to roll onto your edges and place your weight firmly where it should be: on the inside edge of your outside foot.

In short, you should not worry about how wide apart your skis are. Concentrate instead on the fundamentals of your parallel turns. If you get them right, your inside ski will be flat and unweighted as you perform your turn. It should float towards your outside ski under the influence of centrifugal force, with very little exertion on your part, and without interfering with your body's natural movements.