If you’re very athletic and can generally pick up new sports quickly, you can probably ease through blue i.e. intermediate trials on your 2nd day with a personal coach. If you’re in a group teaching session or only being taught by a friend, then it may take a bit longer as there may be bottlenecks in groups, while your friends may not know how to teach.

To get to the intermediate level, there are actually only 2 tricks to learn, pizzaing and parallel turns. Others are tips about controlling ski tilts and movements. and placing your center of mass in the correct position when doing turns.

Pizzaing

Basically just face toward the valley and make a triangle (or a pizza), the bigger the bottom the triangle i.e. the wider your leg opened the more the friction hence the slower you slide down.

After mastering this technique, you can probably slide through all the trails, in a very boring way.

Parallel Turn

Stem turn in the above picture is basically making turns with pizzaing, but it’s pretty slow and looks lame, so you should learn parallel after you get used to your skis.

The key to parallel turn is your center of mass and the tilts of your ski edges. To make a left turn, you’ll first put the center of mass on your right foot, and lift the weight on your left foot. To do that, you’ll need lean toward your right foot, and tilt your left ski to try to make it orthogonal to the gravity i.e. lifting the inside (big toe) while putting weight on the outside (little toe).

With this technique, you can slide down steep slopes by making frequent turns to slow down.

Tackling blue tracks

After mastering the 2 techniques, you’re ready for blue tracks! You may find them a bit too steep in the first few tries, but you can always cut through the slope in an almost orthogonal manner so that you’re super slow, and than make very slow turns with pizzaing. After a few attempts, you’ll get used to the slopes, and will ultimately be able to make parallel turns with ease on the steep tracks.