SfDean's four technical goals and planned approaches, 2008

Have thought a bit about it in the off season. (Obsessing about ski technique while away from the hill. What some of us Bears do best...) Brooded about the pictures in the gates during races and from last year's race camp. So here it is, my four technical goals for the 2008, and thoughts about how I can accomplish them. Your feedback or suggestions on any of the goals or tips for accomplish them are greatly appreciated.

1. Avoid Excessive Inside Tip Lead.

Why?
•Facilitates goal of consistently getting forward at turn initiation; otherwise, getting forward simply puts you on the inside ski.
•Improves lateral balance, compared to extreme scissoring.

Possible approaches:
•Reduce counter as the primary means of initiating turns, including use of different approach “screw down” promoted by the MSR guys at turn initiation rather than counter or ski into counter late rather than using it for turn initiation.
•Pull inside foot back sharply at turn initiation.
•Try to brush inside buttocks with inside heel
•Lift inside toes to create ankle flexion/foot retraction
•Push/rotate outside ski through turn.
•Drive outside hip forward?
•Align inside hip with outside foot.
•Use level shoulders/hip angulation instead of counter to achieve high edge angles

2. Keep shoulders more level.

Why?
•Avoids actual falls in high edge angle turns (contrast slalom training at Sugar Bowl last year)
•Adequately pressures outside ski for optimal turning
•Puts shoulders/pressure more forward and out (good) than inside and not forward (bad)
•Is a symptom of proper/improper angulation

Possible Approaches:
•Stay aware of inside shoulder—keep level.
•Think of brushing gates with the inside hip/doing a side crunch at gate clear (esp. at the top of the course).
•Keep inside hand in view.
•No leaning in with the shoulders. Only lean from the knees down. Drill – ski down keeping both pole tips on the snow throughout the entire turn. (Deb Armstrong tip from her Web site)

3. Commit powerfully forward at turn initiation and at every break over.

Why?
•Bends the shovel of the ski for tighter carved turns, less skidding
•Without it, every breakover puts me in the back seat

Possible approaches.
•Practice starting all turns on the balls/toes, finishing on the heels
•Stay aware of forward shin pressure on boots
•Work through Rick Schnellman’s Jump Start Progression exercises, to promote fore-aft balance awareness
•Pull the feet back and flex ankles on EVERY breakover, free skiing, all year—by the time I’m in the race course, if it isn’t automatic, it’s too late to start “thinking” about it.
•Think elbows forward—that’ll pull my hips forward, not just get my hands out, with butt back.
•Think about initiating the turn with the big toe tip of the outside ski
•Become aware of ankle flex, to create that forward position.
•Make sure to avoid excessive inside tip lead (goal #1 above) so that forward commitment works to make an effective racing turn, and doesn’t just put me on an inside ski.

4. Develop a consistent, powerful recovery turn.

Why?
•I ski an overly aggressive line, and that means occasionally (ahem. OK, often) getting late. I NEED a recovery turn to be able to get back on line.
•Knowing that I’ve got a recovery turn means I can go for it—mentally committing to being fast rather than “trying to stay in the course.”
•I’m thinking of a new strategy—finishing all the races, with the waxed side down, and the equipment attached. Just for a change, you know. Variety.

Possible approaches.
•Work on an emergency, bases-to-the-sky, high edge angle turn with pressure on the tails late, but without putting the inside hand on the snow, which has caused skip out/loss of outside edge pressure in the past.
•Work on developing a consistent, powerful pivot entry for turns, and aim high enough across the hill (finish the prior turn) to make it work.

Okay, let me give it a try...

...starting with what I think are the gimmes and then working backward the ones that are harder to discuss:

- #4, come up with a consistent, powerful recovery turn. Yes and no. I think it's pretty obvious that if you want to go fast, you have to red line it, and that means going over the red line every once in a while...or maybe a lot more. One of my coaches/teammates said of Jens Byggmark "He almost goes out on every turn, but when he stands up, he wins."

I wouldn't think of it as a recovery turn, however, because that sort of implies a pre-programmed response that you pull out of the bag when the train leaves the rails. I think of it as a recovery move, and the basic skill is what Ron LeMaster talked about the other night, which is that one of the characteristics that the best racers on the WC have is the ability to improvise when things go south. That's a general athletic skill, having to do with flexibility, quickness, and so forth, and Ron made a lot out of what great overall athletes we now have on the WC. Most people think of tennis as a preprogrammed series of dance steps; Peter Burwash said "Tennis is a series of controlled emergencies", and the same can be said of ski racing. There are lots of ways you can develop the ability to recover off snow; on snow, you already know what they are...lots of free skiing, in tough conditions, changing snow, high speeds, low speeds, you name it.

You also talk about recovery as a makeup for the fact that you often get late. You know how it is with skidding...Q: How do you stop skidding? A: Don't start. Same is true of recovering from a bad line...best cure is don't get there in the first place. Yep, I know...I just talked about redlining. But if it's happening a bunch, let's face it, you and I are not Byggmark, so it's best to figure out an approach, technical and tactical, where you don't get off line. I suspect this is happening to you in SL, maybe GS also, which is also true of yours truly...which is why I'm a speed event specialist. You can get off line in SG and DH and still go fast; in SL and GS, you're usually out.

This is probably going to take more than a few words, so lemme stop with these good words on #4, and break it up into several posts...

Moving along smartly to #3...

...Commit powerfully forward at turn initiation and at every break over.

Can't argue with you there, or with your reasons for focusing on this vital skill. I think most of your methods look pretty sound, too. Just be aware that it's possible to be too aware of all of these keys. It's like my tennis coach told me: "Don't think your way through a match, play your way through a match." So skiing is sort of like the tennis mantra of "Watch the ball, hit it hard, and don't think." Early season, you want to focus consciously on your methods...but you integrate it into your skiing through a lot of free skiing so that after a while, you don't have to think about it.

There is a drill that we did in our USSA Level 1 Coaches Clinic last year that really showed me why you want to press forward at turn initiation, and I think it's on the F1 and F2 DVDs, but I'll try to reproduce it here.

The USSA breaks things down to their simplest essentials. Basically, you can only be going in one of two directions down the hill:

- Straight down the fall line, in which case you are skiing in the natural athletic position, which one of the J3 coaches described as "the position you would take if a bear jumped out of the woods at you." You want your weight distributed more or less evenly front to back on your skis...but because the hill has a slant, you have to press forward. Got that?

- Across the hill, or somewhere other than straight down the fall line. We used to call this "traversing", the USSA calls it the "parallel stance" for whatever reason. You already know what this is like: skis on edge, balancing on the inside edge of the downhill ski.

Guess what a turn on skis is? Nothing more than going from one parallel stance to straight running in the natural athletic position to the next parallel stance on the other side. This is how the USSA teaches kids who are athletes but not skiers to turn:

- Do the parallel stance thing.

- Time to initiate the turn which we do by:

(1) Flattening the skis. Everybody knows the "little toe of the downhill foot" thing. The USSA makes it a little more active but thinking "little toe of the outside foot, big toe of the inside foot, roll 'em over together" while...

(2) Moving to the natural athletic stance, weight on both skis while pressing forward because the hill is falling away...outstanding we not only initiated the turn, we are now in the fall line, so all we have to do is...

(3) ...go to the next parallel stance by continuing to roll the edges over and pressuring the new outside foot.

I was working with one of my teammates, and it took me all summer to figure out what was going on with his turn. Basically, he had an okay turn, but often struggled with the turn initiation and turn completion. Know why? He couldn't traverse without losing his balance. So we did a whole lot of traversing, which the USSA does with all the newbies, and once he got that down, we went to the preceding drill. Try it, you'll like it...

Now let's try #1...

...Avoid excessive inside tip lead. I disagree with a bunch of what you've got going here. Yeah, I know...everybody used to ski with this really extreme counter, which is what developed the heavy inside tip lead, and then we discovered it was kind of contraindicated with the new shaped skis, and everybody got really anal about pulling the inside foot back, keeping the hips square to the skis, and all that good stuff.

I'm not gonna disagree that excessive inside tip lead can lead to the Bad Things that you discuss, like getting inside and back. If you think of a static, countered stance, that's very true. All I can tell you is that one of my teammates/coaches and I have been working on a little different way to look at countering and turn initiation and all that good stuff. One of our other coaches at Team Eldo is Broc Thompson, who has been the top tech skier in Rocky Mountain Masters for the last three seasons, and was a triple gold winner in the Nationals in Aspen back in 2004 or whenever that was. Last year, he decided to get into some FIS races, at the age of 39, and he's now down to about 50 FIS points in slalom. So whenever he talks, we listen.

Last year he started doing this move that's the opposite of what you describe, where you said start square and ski into a counter. What we're doing is starting with a slight counter and then squaring up through the turn and driving the hip and the ski actively through the arc. Whenever you pull this move, whatever tip lead you need or don't need pretty much takes care of itself.

The hips, I'm beginning to believe, are often the key to high end skiing, see next post...

Finally, for #2...

...keep shoulders more level. I've started to rethink this one, too. What we're basically trying to do is balance the forces on the outside ski, and sometimes level shoulders help that, and sometimes they don't. What I'm saying is that it's possible when you have a lot of force on the ski and/or it's a relatively tight arc, trying to hard to keep the shoulders level can actually make you high-side the turn.

I was talking in the last post about starting the turn with some counter and then skiing into a squarer hip as the turn progresses. Along with that, my teammate and I have been working on starting the turn with a fair amount of inclination/angulation and then skiing out of that angulation as the turn progresses so that you don't overbend the outside ski.

It's a little hard to visualize, but it works. The thing that we've been doing to make it happen is thinking about the control in a turn as coming from the hips. At turn initiation, yep, you gotta get your feet out and all that good stuff, but a lot of times, if you just think about moving the feet, the hips don't move and they end up back and to the inside of the new turn. So we've been really working on thinking about moving the hips down the hill and forward at turn initiation to get the body mass to a place where it can effectively use the forces against the new turning ski and keep the balancing act going...and then actively moving the hips forward and through the arc of the turn to complete it. Want a demo? Just schedule some time with Team Eldo...

USSA Parallel Turns Drill?

SkiRacer55 - Are you referring to the Free Ski Parallel Turns (Progression) drill from USSA Alpine Ski Fundamentals II cd (F2) or Parallel Turns drill or Parallel Position drill from USSA Alpine Ski Fundamentals cd (F1)?

http://athletics.ussa.org/alpine/alpine_fundamentals

Wow, SkiRacer55--

Great stuff. Lots to think about and to try to digest. When I'm on the hill (I hope, in about 9 days) I'll try approaching the turns/transition in thinking about how you put it--edged in traversing to forward athletic position to edged in traversing.

Over the years, I've given a lot of thought to counter, the plusses and minuses. It's great for increasing edge angle, stacking skeletally, creating an upper body/lower body separation for adding angulation to turns, and in a tuck turn it naturally loads up the front of the outside ski and generates a bigger edge angle when you have fewer other tools to work with. When you finish a turn by skiing into counter, it also functions nicely as a natural anticipated position for launching the next pivot entry turn.

When you get locked into exaggerated counter, though, there are issues with excessive inside tip lead, and an extremely countered a position complicates independent for-and-aft and lateral balancing, compared with just using hip angulation without counter. I'll play with your idea of starting the turn with slight counter and then skiing into the turn with squarer hips, effectively accelerating the outside hip/ski into the turn. That's consistent with some of the things they've been talking about over at the MSR site, and I think it's consistent with what Milos Tichy was teaching in the Tichy racing camp I took last year. (Although, full disclosure, he's big on starting with a lot of counter, and I was never sure what FWOOSH, as he made those hand gestures about how I was supposed to accellerate into the transition at slalom gate clear, actually meant....)

On the recovery move thing, I'm really working a lot more this year, off the hill, on agility, balance, and total body fitness, with a lot of emphasis on complicated multijoint exercises and complicated balance challenges under a load. I'm working with a trainer now, and that means focusing more on the areas where I need improvement. And I'm actively working to increase range of motion in several areas where I can improve flexibility. I'm hoping the general increase in fitness, balance, and athleticism will pay off on the hill.

Anyway, thanks for the thoughtful posts--very helpful stuff, and I hope to be able to use some of it on the white stuff before too long.

Happy Thanksgiving, all, and think snow.

SfDean.

By George, you've got it...

....I think. Right now, I can't find either DVD, but you sound like the Voice of Authority on this one, so...yeah...

Happy Turkey Day...

...to you, too. The answer to all your prayers is simple: come to CO, ski with Team Eldo, and finish up with the Loveland GS/SL weekend in December. PM me and we'll make it happen...