Part of the key to advanced skiing is versatility: having a large assortment of different techniques to deal with differing conditions. You can now build on your basic parallel turns to provide yourself with a short radius turn for narrow or steep slopes.

If you practice this material, you should be able to hug the fall line, performing linked short swings, one turn flowing into the next.

Anticipation is a powerful technique for making the initiation of your turns more fluid, powerful and balanced. A simple analogy is that of your body as a spring. When you anticipate, your shoulders and upper body face down the fall line, committed to the turn, while the pressure on your edges keeps your skis and hips tracking across the fall line. This puts your body under torsion, tightening the muscles of your abdomen.

If anticipation consists of winding up the body's spring and using its release to initiate your turns, counter-rotation takes this one stage further. You actually use the muscles of your abdomen and thighs to inject power into your steering. This means rotating your skis strongly one way while your upper body rotates the other way to compensate (hence the name).

Make sure that you don't overdo it. It is easy to fall into the habit of unweighting and throwing the skis round by counter-rotating every turn. This is ugly and tiring, and will slow down your progress.

Counter-rotation uses the muscles of the abdomen to accelerate the unwinding.