What’s the best way to reach your maximum level of performance when skiing? How can you obtain complete mastery? Is it possible to take the benefits of skiing beyond the slopes?

Find your own path toward ski mastery. Develop your ability to attain those magical moments that make it such an exceptional sport. Go beyond technique to embark on an inner journey that will transform all your other activities.

Based on the experiences of nine skiers, practitioners of all kinds of downhill snow sports, from skiing to snowboarding to telemark, this book covers a wide scope. Starting with the essentials of the mechanics of skiing, how to listen to the body, and how to control mental states, Toward Ski Mastery and Beyond will guide you through the state of flow, opening multiple paths to further progress in the art of skiing.

This approach to gliding paves the way for an extraordinary inner journey.

No matter your level or your favorite downhill snow sport, this book will be of interest to you.

Mastering the art of skiing will change your life!

Free-heel boarding could simply be defined as skiing downhill on a single board mounted with free-heel bindings. One foot is in front of the other, along the longitudinal axis of the board.
On first impression, there’s indeed a bit of paradox with free-heel boards. The combination of free-heel bindings on a single board leads to an apparently odd set-up. But looking at it more carefully, free-heel boarding opens a unique range of possibilities (of movement, especially) that can be turned into an advantage in multiple snow conditions. This makes a free-heel boarder perfectly at ease with all snow conditions and terrains.
So what is at stake for the boarder is to use all these possibilities in a coherent free-heel boarding technique, and to exploit technical elements from other sports (monoskiing, skwalling, snowboarding) to sublimate them with the free heel.
This is the challenge of this book.
It provides an introduction to free-heel boarding, the unique Nordic boarding snowsport. Various free-heel boarding techniques are described.

Skwall on, Thias travels the mountains of North America, Japan, New Zealand and Europe, training competitors and instructors in this new discipline and organizes a circuit of competitions over many years.
From this long and fruitful research emerges a new approach to snow sports, giving birth to the book La Glisse Intérieure (2005, Le Souffle d’Or), which presents a method for all snow sports lovers who are also in search of an inner meaning.

An initiatory novel told in a lively way, close to daily life, which will not leave lovers of virgin nature, mountains and ski sports indifferent
Thias, passionate about free riding and always in search of new sensations, explores with his friends an unknown off-piste route. During the descent, Thias finds himself alone, lost in the fog. Trying to find his colleagues, meets an old man who, in the confines of a small isolated chalet, leads him to take a fresh look at his relationship with the mountain and with himself.
This trip in the mountains turns out to be a completely different journey: through philosophical discussions, extraordinary spiritual and physical experiences, Thias learns to listen to his most personal sensations and gradually realizes the nature of his being.
Full of twists and turns, this story based on a real-life experience is an open door to listening to ones inner-self and to nature, close to shamanism.

In summer, Thias takes his students to the mountains in order to help them reconnect with nature and at the same time with their very own nature. Helping them face their difficulties in front of the void, Thias creates in 2009 the Stop Vertigo method and publishes How to free oneself from vertigo (2009, Le Souffle d’Or), thus becoming one of the specialists in the treatment of vertigo and acrophobia.