What the convention comes down to
The ski trade sorts its shelf with a handful of words, and everyone uses them.
Piste and carving describe a narrow ski built to hold an edge on prepared snow: small waist, small radius, quick from edge to edge.
All-mountain describes the middle, and is the widest-used and vaguest of the three: enough waist to cope with soft snow, enough edge to be usable on hard.
Freeride and powder describe a wide, often rockered ski meant for soft snow, at the cost of everything on a piste.
Touring cuts across all three, because it describes how the ski gets uphill rather than what it does coming down — a touring ski is judged on weight as much as on shape.
Snowboards use a parallel set — all-mountain, freestyle, freeride, splitboard — with the same absence of definition and one extra axis, the camber profile.
What it does not promise
It does not promise a dimension. A listing can call a 78 mm ski all-mountain and a 96 mm ski all-mountain, and neither is lying.
It does not travel between makers. One house’s all-mountain is another’s piste ski, and the catalogues move the boundaries every few seasons.
It does not describe the flex, which separates two skis of identical width more than the width does.
It does not decide the binding. That is the waist figure and the brake width, and the category word has no bearing on it.
What it is read alongside
The ski dimensions convention, which gives the numbers these words stand in for. The brake width convention, which needs one of those numbers. No standard touches any of it.
Where it turns up on this site
Both ski shelves, the snowboard shelf and — indirectly — the binding shelf, since a ski described as freeride is a ski that needs a wide brake.
This site handles it in one way, consistently. The category word is reported as the maker’s own classification, with the maker named. Beside it, the page prints the waist width and the radius, which are what the word is standing in for. No family here is ordered by category word, and no page treats one as a specification.
The questions asked most often
Where is the line between piste and all-mountain?
There is no line, which is the point of this page. In practice the piste end sits under about 80 mm at the waist and the all-mountain band runs from there into the mid-90s, but the bands overlap and each maker draws them for itself.
Is a freeride ski useless on a piste?
No, but it is slower edge to edge and works harder on hard snow. That is a consequence of the waist and the radius, both of which are published.
Why do listings use the words at all?
Because they communicate an intention quickly, and because a shopper searches for them. They are a good index and a poor specification.
Last reviewed 28 September 2026