Balance inefficiency in the last 1/3 of the turn in advanced to expert skiers

 

 

Of all the Si says here, what are the topics that most interest you to "get to the bottom"?

Easy...SI is making a whole pile of assumptions and is ultimatley dead wrong. 

SI clearly does not understand concepts of fore/aft balance, virtual bump, anticpation, and just the whole world of advanced skiing in general.....3D vs. 2D.

Lots of threads on this.

No.  You are generalising far too much, sure, out there somewhere is a guy who is dumping speed at the end of the turn to slow down...he may do that by sitting back...blah blah.

But when you understand the issues associated with skiing on steep terrain, and understand VB effects, you will understand why allowing the COM move back relative to the BOS is needed to maintain fore/aft balance.

Fundamentally you seem to hold on to some beleif that their skiing is wrong becuase it does not fit within your model of what good skiing should look like.  My advice is to re-evalutate your model.  I would suggest you are applying intermediate principles and "rules of thumb" to advanced expert skiers and struggling to undserstand why it doesnt work.

Go back to your text books and understand what simplfying assumptions are made for intermediate instructors looking at intermediate skiers...understand what those assuptions are, and why they work in that context.  Then ask yourself do these simplfying assumptions hold true for experts on steep terrain?  I think you will find the answer is no.

whats the question?

Good topic here, first I would address the break down of the turn. And I would not talk about 3 parts in a turn, but only two.
Reason for that is:

The turn shape has changed more and more into an oval,
The second part is just as important as the first one (or the last third) cause that is when gravity kicks in real strong as you go against it and thus makes it the most important part of the entire turn to stay on top of it and in the best possible position.
That is where the normal skier wants to turn away from the steep and the forces, he is getting off the outside ski which then stops turning and starts skidding and well panic is perfect.
The completion of the turn is essential. if you say the third part is already the one where you prepare for the next turn then you may get out of your position too soon. Planning ahead yes, but don't forget you are still turning.
If you brake it into two parts you will understand more clearly and in a more simple way that you need to perform those two parts in order to execute a turn.
The best suggestion here is to always go from easy to more difficult terrain, it is perfectly ok if you do your black diamond tomorrow.

Stroller

If the skier is, indeed, fearful and leaning back toward the hill or other defensive movements, there are two things to do.  (1)  Understand the correct movements, and (2) practice, practice, practice on "safe" terrain and gradually increase the speed and/or difficulty of the terrain.  The skier must be able to self-coach to the extend of knowing when they're doing things mostly right vs. making their usual mistakes.  When the skier makes his usual mistakes, he needs to stop, reflect on what he's doing, and start again making the correct movements.

The skier needs to understand that there is no way to get the lower half of the turn right if the top half isn't skied right.  The top half (top third?) of the turn MUST be skied right to have a chance of skiing the bottom half right.

 If Si or anyone feels a reluctance to commit or release to the fall line and instead "lean in" or "lean back" or "brace", the problem is not so much technical as it is psychological.  This problem can be overcome with repeated exposure to these fear inducing situations.

Oscillate back and forth between less challenging and more challenging terrain to condition the psyche and increase the comfort zone.  As long as the proper turn mechanics exist on easier terrain it should be relatively easy to condition the psyche to remain offensive in more challenging situations.   Be sure to practice on steep sections where there are no serious consequences should a fall occur.  Also begin with shorter steep sections and work up to longer ones.  

Develop an offensive attitude and the rest will fall into place.

What Bud said, !

Good skiers learn sound fundamentals in comfortable conditions, then spend a lot of time practicing and perfecting those fundamentals on progressively more difficult situations and conditions.  You don't improve very fast by repeating bad habits in uncomfortable situations. 

Proving once again; it is not the arrow, it is the Indian. 

yeah reading though everything but stroller still never posed a question I whole agree with bud that psychological problem become a technical problem the minute people stop moving down the hill. With out movement its impossiable to stay in balance.

The question is:

 

How does anyone overcome this reflexive behavior to a perceived fear of falling or speed?

The short answer is to get used to steeper pitches and higher speeds ; bud has some good ideas.

 

There is something to be said for numbing yourself to the adrenaline-induced fear that sets in for a variety of reasons.  On the other hand, I'm not so sure I got to be fast, and aggressive on steeps by numbing away my fear.  For me, it took a lot of years until I felt certain that I had enough control.

What I will say in response to what the OP said about the 2/3 part of the turn, I feel that a lot of skiers experience a loss of control in the phase of the turn starting around the fall line, passing well past through the 2/3 spot.  They recover this slight loss of control by the time the turn is over through corrective measures, many of which they are unconscious of, and by turning out of the fall line and slowing down, control comes back.

By loss of control I generally mean they lose their edging, the skis are washing out, their weight is falling back a bit, maybe falling on the inside, etc.  They have just enough control that as they come across the falling they are able to regain control back.  This tug and pull between control and loss of control in every turn literally becomes part of what they learn to experience in skiing and they subconsciously expect that feeling in every turn.  Unfortunately that is also why the prospect of a steep hill scares the holy crap out of them and they can't understand how another perfectly sane person can ski the same pitch with seemingly no care in the world.  Having a false sense of reality is the definition of insanity by the way.  

So one school of thought is that this little temporary loss of control in every turn is totally ok if you learn to trust that you will gain the control back a split second later.  I think there is something to be said for that.....sometimes.

On the other hand, I feel that the reason a lot of skiers experience that momentary loss of control at that phase of the turn has more to do with deficient technique.  Most of the success of the turn is determined in the first 1/3 of the turn.  That's where the turn is baked.  After that they are just eating the baked result until they start to initiate the next turn.  If they don't initiate a turn well, then the result will be that loss of control that they just have to get through until they can slow down enough or turn across the fall line enough to feel safe again.  The unfortunate thing is that by the time they reach that phase of the turn, its too late to do the things that should have been done to make sure they would be in control here.  This adds to their unconscious feeling of helplessness, which is what creates the fear.

If you make your turns like that most of the time, you will become accustomed to that little temporary loss of control and it becomes unconscious.  But your unconscious mind still knows and that's why it hits you with the adrenaline when you're heading to a steeper hill where this little loss of control aspect might be more serious.

Eliminate that little loss of control phase and your unconsciousness will ease up on the adrenaline.





Edited by borntoski683 - 11/3/09 at 9:48am

 bts;   how?  what is the key to starting the turn right then?

 There is no magic pill Mango.  A whole range of issues, many of which have been discussed many times on this forum.

 lol, damn I thought maybe I'd get you to let the secret out! 

In his new book, Ultimate Skiing, Ron LeMaster has a section called "Balance and Toppling" where he says:

"If the force on a body passes outside its base of support, the body will be out of balance and topple...That might sound like a bad thing for a skier, but as we'll see in chapter 9, the ability to deliberately topple and recover with precision is an essential skill that sets expert skiers apart from the rest."

That's something I subscribe to, and Ron does his usual good job of showing/explaining why he believes that skiing works that way.  So there's a whole logical discussion that says that imbalance in the last 3rd of a turn, or so, is not an error, but something you want to strive for.  So if you believe all that stuff logically, how do you next convince yourself to actually go out and hang it out and be unbalanced?  To an extent, I think you're either predisposed to toppling or not (I like toppling...), but I also believe you can learn to like anything, including toppling, if you find out that it works. 

 

So I think that's the answer.  Go out and topple, see if you can recover, and see what happens.  Once you figure out that it works and, additionally, it's fun, then you need to work to make this the instinctive behavior.  One of my coaches last winter was talking to a couple of us about this phenomenom.  Learning can be a tough thing if you think that it's always going to be an incremental affair building on what you already know.  If, however, you are going to make a fundamental change (I didn't topple before, now I'm going to...) you need to know it will work, believe you can do it...but kind of before you can actually do the new thing, you've got to turn your back on/unlearn the old thing, which is basically the mental discipline to say "Been there, done that...it didn't work, I'm not going through the same door any more..."

Ski Racer, I agree with that, but toppling towards the next turn is not the same loss of control I was referring to, where the skier is falling back and to the inside of the previous turn, which by the way will also make it harder for them to setup toppling in the next turn.  

And in fact I do not really feel that toppling into the next turn needs to feel at all like a loss of control any more than stepping down from a ladder.  

Loss of control is really not about being weightless or not.  Its more about how the skis wash away when you needed them most to not wash away or having an undesirable loss of balance in the "wrong" direction.  I would not view toppling into the next turn as being an undesirable loss of balance in the wrong direction.

Also there is something to be said for learning how to topple into the next turn WITHOUT losing your ski's connection with the snow.  That is why moving your balance onto the new outside ski early as your body topples is so important.  Hucksters that huck themselves towards the direction they are toppling will actually experience a momentary feeling of loss of connection, perhaps loss of control  if you want to think of it that way, in the early part of the turn before the skis catch up to them.  This is not nearly as profound as what happens around 2/3, from skis that are washing out.  Some skiers can really get used to that feeling of disconnecting and reconnecting to the snow and feel perfectly in control, I agree.  However often times its also possible to execute the turn init even better so that the connection is not lost nearly as much as some might think.  

I also think that disconnecting and reconnecting that way in the first half of the turn does make it more difficult to end up balanced in the last part of the turn.  Its like throwing darts at a target instead of walking up to the target and pushing the dart into the bullseye.

It would seem "toppling" would be useful in steep terrain. Almost a have to have move in certain circumstances.

Okay, let me try this again, because the last one didn't take.  Yep, I don't disagree that you can topple and still have the skis connected...in fact, this is the sensation I'm looking for.  Re washing at the end of the turn, yep, not a good thing.  One thing you can do to get somebody out of this is to make him or her do a bunch of good old-fashioned traverses.  It teaches you to get enough of an edge angle to lock on the edge and balance on it.  In my USSA Level 1 coaching clinic, our clinic leader said that there are kids coming into the USST system who are good athletes but relatively inexperienced skiers.  So they often spend an entire morning making them do traverses until they can hold a clean edge across the hill.  Then they teach them how to connect traverses by going from the traverse to a natural atheletic stance (weight even on both skis, press forward, let the ski find the fall line), and then go to the other traverse.  Try it, it often works wonders...

Ski Racer, These 2 drills are presented in my Basic Edging DVD.  I call them Falline Finders and Steppers. 

And LeMaster has it right.  Transitons are all about creating a state of imbalance that causes the body to topple into the new turn.  Exploiting the existing turn forces to do the work of moving our CM into the new turn for us.  That's exactly what ILE and OLR transitions do. 

BTS, from your reports (somewhere in another thread) it sounds like Greg Needle and the US Ski Team are starting to focus in on the virtues of ILE. 

To be fair, Greg didn't expound too much on that particular point about ILE as opposed to OLR.  He was more focused on the other points I mentioned, but he did describe briefly an extension early of the new outside leg to establish early strong connection on it, which to me is most like ILE.  But overall that was a small passing comment during an hour long presentation that really focused more on the other aspects.

BTS, when I was on the glacier in France this summer teams from all over the world, including many national level teams, were pervasively working on that early (pre neutral) extension.  Retractions were few and far between. 

Coolness.  If I remember back to the original posting on this (a hard thing to do if you're in Masters Men's Class 7...), part of the deal with handling the "washing at the end of the turn" problem is the fear thing that causes skiers to lean in and back, taking the pressure off the outside ski and causing it to wash.  Once a skier gets the idea that a carving ski that you can direct where you want can control speed at least as well, and maybe even better, than windshield wiper turns, you can do the tactical exercise of "ski fast on a slow line", which I use a lot.  In other words, find something steep and wide, with no traffic, and make big, round GS turns where you can come well out of the fall line, then rocket across the hill on a pretty steep traverse, then make another big, round turn and rocket back the other way.  As opposed to making great carved turns close to the fall line and risking having the skis accelerate away from you. 

This also teaches skiers that momentum is your friend. Or, as a friend of mine used to say, "If you're not turning, go faster."  Momentum, properly controlled and applied, is an external force that you can use to get your skis to turn you.  If your momentum is suboptimal for the situation, now you need internal (essentially muscular) forces to make the ski turn.  Which isn't bad...there are times when that's the only game in town.  All things considered, however, as a (ahem) Chronologically Challenged alpine racer, I'd prefer to have the skis turn me...

 Rick,

It is unnecessary though to make the toppling feel like falling.  Same thing happens on a bike making serpentine turns -- the bike tilts, but you don't feel like falling.

 SkiRacer, would you mind writing up a summary of LeMaster's presentation last week?

I'm not sure I can do it total justice, because I didn't take notes and...I'm not Ron.  I will say that a bunch of it clearly reflected his thinking in Ultimate Skiing, with some recent additions.  I suspect he's going to put this presentation on his web site eventually (we in Boulder are usually is "test" audience for a new presentation), so what I'll do instead is give you the stuff that was most thought-provoking and useful to me...in my terms.  Ron describes himself as an "empiricist", where he observes the top skiers in the world (not all racers, as you'll see from his book) and tries to understand what they're doing and how they're doing it, in terms of physics, anatomy, and the tools we're using.  So here were the items, and this is my paraphrasing, that meant the most to me, and that I'm currently experimenting with in my early season skiing at Loveland (I'm a Masters racer, and most of us here in Colorado are trying to get our turns, balancing, equipment, and so forth, dialed in via drills and free skiing before we can actually start screwing gates into the snow):

- You saw what I said in the above post, in this thread, where I quoted from Ron's book re toppling.  That was a real key thing for me, because we've all been doing it for years, but it makes me feel better hear that toppling and recovering makes sense.  The way I'm going to explain that concept to my teammates this year is via the idea of "disconnecting and reconnecting."  When you topple, you disconnect the torso and the feet, which is why having the hips/spine area be loose and function as a universal joint is essential.  Then you reconnect the feet/skis and the torso in the carving phase of the turn.  You could look at "disconnecting" as uncontrolled, I prefer to think of it as you being a skilled enough athlete to manage two parts of the body that are doing two different things:  the body wants to topple to get to the inside of the turn, the feet and skis are heading outwards toward the arc of the new turn.  Managing these two activities isn't simple...it's like patting your head and rubbing your stomach...but it is a skill that can be learned...especially when you see the benefits, which are that you can now get the body against the ski, not over it. 

- As a corollary of the above toppling phenomenon, the idea of using the inside leg as a support for toppling.  Here's my stuff from a similar thread in this forum:

http://www.epicski.com/forum/thread/87190/wc-ski-technique-impressions-from-soelden-gs-opener/30 

 

See what I said re the Jessica Kelley sequence. 

I've been trying this a bunch early, and I like it a lot.  It takes a lot of good fore/aft and side/to side balance to make it happen, because you have to have a real subtle feel for moving just a little to the inside ski and then almost immediately moving to the outside ski, but I like the balance aid that you get...makes you likely to commit more. 

 

- This is one that I'll have a hard time describing, but I think essentially what he was saying is that WC coaches are talking about the actual carving part of each turn as being very brief in time and very short in duration.  I don't really think this is the stivot discussion so much as it is two things:

- (1) He was showing that at the very top of the turn, it's hard to get a huge edge angle and pressure, and maybe it's not really necessary.  I think what he's saying is that true carving has a fairly big edge angle and pressure to it.  At the top of the turn, the edge angle is relatively low, which is okay, because (my terminology), the ski is tracking lightly on the edge.  It's when you get to the fall line (hopefully) that you can search for max edge angle and pressure, through a combination of internal (essentially muscular) and external (essentiall, momentum, gravity, the pitch of the hill) forces to max the true carve right in the fall line, where it's fastest. 

- (2) At the bottom third of the arc, where you're coming out of the fall line, you also want to be easing off on the pressure and rolling off the edge to a neutral ski...tracking out of the turn, in other words.  This is my greatest sin, and why I can be slow in the course, which is that I often enjoy my turns so much that I spend half my life in them.  Once the ski has turned the corner, track out of the turn, don't grind against the combined forces of momentum and gravity. 

- You'll have to read the book to get this one down pat, but there's whole discussion of the edge angle (angle of edge in the snow) and why that's good (more angle with the right amount of pressure equals a tighter carved radius of the turn) and the platform angle, which is, and I'll quote from the book so I don't blow it:

"The ski has to penetrate the snow, cutting a platform that will support you, and gthe angle between that platform and the force you apply to it, the platform angle, must be 90 degrees or smaller. "

I really can't do it justice without the accompanying stuff in the book, but what it got me to think is something I've been trying to explain.  You hear all this good stuff about "Ya gotta have big edge angles", but nobody ever says why this is a good thing.  Per the above, shaped skis don't do much if they're flat on the snow, they only start making sense when they're up on edge.  He has a chart that shows, for example, that on a 12 meter ski, a 45 degree angle will let you carve a turn of 8.5 meter radius, while a 60 degree angle with the same ski will allow you to carbe a 6 meter radius turn...useful stuff to know if you want to (a) stay in the course where it's offset and (b) keep the carving portion of the turn closer to the fall line. 

The platform thing concept, I'm not doing justice to.  But at least a simple component of it is, something we've all taken for granted but probably never thought about, which is without a sufficient platform, the ski's going to slip down the hill.  The way I've been feeling this is that there is a totally flat ski, which, of course, is going to slip if you're at all across the fall line, and a really BIG edge angle, which will provide a suitable platform.  But there are also angles in between that aren't big enough to provide a sufficient platform...so you'll essentially skip off the edge sideways, reengage the edge again, skip off it again, and so forth, until you end up in the harbor chop below the gate.  That's something I have a lot of experience with, and plan to eliminate this year by...making sure I have the optimum platform angle. 

Let me leave it at that, those were the things I came away with for what I'm doing, and again, my paraphrase, so my apologies, in advance, if I've misconstrued any of Ron's intent...



 

 I just ordered his book.  Thanks for what you did write.  I'm sure it will be interesting.

What are ILE and OLR?