The Ultimate Carving System - Page 6

I ski trees often and they are fairly dense. I do not ski them fast for safefy reasons.

Not sure what big and steep are but I've skied The Face and Gunbarrel at Heavenly many times.

The 5 meter width is no problem but I'm not sure about the 50 degrees as I don't know how steep the slopes I ski are.

I use the same movements to different degrees all the time. They produce a carve or a brushed carve (in a brushed carve the tails do not displace more than the tip).

There is no active rotary taught. When looking at a PMTS skier cresting a bump or otherwise performing an air turn the redirection is caused by tipping (when flexed) and unwinding of counter acting movements. If the skier has set things up correctly before the turn the redirection happens automatically.

Max I have no problem wiht that, and please don't feel like we are ganging up on you. At least I'm not trying to. It is just as I tried to explain in my Pm the other day. Just because a view point is different, it does not mean it is wrong. Assess things by the outcome measured by intent. Some times though, in order to see a varying point of view we have to lay our preconcieved notions aside. A good teacher will encourage exploration and questioning and accomodate differeing viewpoints, and a good student will seek the same. Later, RicB.

Max, I'm not picking on you here, as you have said that you are not an instructor and follow what HH tells you exactly. So, how 'bout some of you other PMTS peeps out there, any PMTS certified instructors, how is it possible to "unwind counter acting movements" without turning movements of the lower body (who cares if it's active or passive)?

Again, Max, I not trying to pick on you here, but it brings up an interesting question: Is it possible that the non-instructor PMTS students are not quite understanding the explanation that is given them on movements? Are you students possibly misunderstanding the explanations that are given you with regards to passive rotation?

IMHO unwinding is a pure form of allowed rotary, which is a result of the release of the previous winding, which is a controled form of rotary. Stored energy we call this in tai chi. Later, RicB.

I hate to get into the middle of this ... aw, hell. I am not an instructor or a PMTS grad, for that matter. That being said, ...

My understanding of rotary in PMTS is that "it happens, but it's a result, not a cause". In other words, HH seems to feel that it's more important to focus on the, well, primary movements that themselves will result in rotary, rather than teaching rotary directly. These "primary movements" are axiomatic, in that they are useful for a whole range of skiing skills, many of which result in rotary.

So it is not true that PMTS distains rotary, it simply doesn't teach it directly. It takes the position that focusing on rotary itself is harmful, while focusing on the primary movements (that result in rotary) is more important, and, for that matter, a lot easier to teach. I believe he thinks that it's hard to teach how to control rotary, but easy to teach the control of the skills that result in rotary. Subtle, simplified, efficient, gives results.

Don't take any of this as received wisdom, just my perception.

By the way, the forum better buy some more disk space, because the new HH book is coming out in a few weeks.

That is exactly what it feels like to me. Releasing stored energy.

That's cool, Max. No hammering from me.

I hope it continues to work for ya

Max, respectfully, if the redirection is a result of "unwinding" there is no separation of upper and lower body.

If you twist the upper body the skis will go on edge -- but the upper body twist is something that is not aspired to.

In terms of dead-end moves, this upper body rotation is equivalent to the stem. It needs to be unlearned in order to establish true upper and lower body separation to allow for more versatile movements.

Such rotation is is not taught within the CSIA, although some drills involving such upper body counter-rotation can be used to introduce someone to edging. We prefer our upper bodies to be much less involved in redirecting our skis than it seems is being suggested here.

The Des Lauriers book has stated that the phantom move will work even when airborne, without these counter-acting or counter rotating moves. Call that what you will, but it's surely not passive rotary.

Passive rotary as I've come to understand, occurs when the skis turn in one direction, repointing the feet and rotating the femurs for you. All you have to do is let that happen, don't struggle and don't assist.

There is nothing passive about airborne or low edge angle redirection it is quite active.

If it DOES happen as a result of upper body rotation then the feet/legs are surely not the prime movers. PMTS claims that initiation of turns with the upper body is not effective -- how has HH reconciled this? What new term has he defined today to remove this paradox? (Sorry I couldn't resist.)

I don't know BigE. I think you can store torque or twisting energy without twisting the upper body, by letting the skis, feet, and legs turn and/or "rotate" further across the hill than the upperbody. While the still upper body is anchoring the windup, the lower body is skiing into counter. Make sense?


We store energy two way in tai chi. By compression (flexing under pressure), and by torque (winding and then unwinding). I think both of these are utilized in skiing. Later, RicB.

RicB,

Not on your first turn, and not if skiing slowly! There is no unwinding without unweighting.

And there is no unweighting in PMTS. I know, HH told me.

BigE,

I think you misunderstood. There is no upper body rotation into the turn. I said the redirection of the skis was a result of tipping (while flexed) and counter acting movements (which are to the outside of a turn). Plenty of separation. No upper body movement used to turn the skis.

The counter acting movement makes the skis tip more. Thus, an upper body movement has affected the edge angle. That is not separation, it is opposing torque -- equal and opposite actions about an axis of rotation. Twist the top one way the bottom twists the other...

It's rotation of the upper body to the outside of the turn that gets the skis on edge. We do a drill that does exactly that in a tuck. We do not recommend that the student continue with that movement pattern. It's just one way of many to introduce edging.

From my perspective, these described movements are accomplished using rotary skills. I understand that PMTS and HH would disagree, but that's how I see it. Rotary skills are those that rotate one part of a skier's body with respect to other parts. You are thinking about tipping (or untipping) your skis, but to do that, you rotate the femurs in their sockets. Rotary skills aren't all about overwhelming the edging with rotary, but controlling rotary and being precise about its use.

This is one reason I don't understand the vehemence about rotary expressed by PMTS.

Do many skiers use too much rotary and too litting edging? Absolutely! Do I help them get more of that under control? You bet! One way I do that is to go to the extremes: here's all rotary (pivot slips) and here's none (carved arc), for example. Then, dial towards the middle.

FWIW...

BTW, Max, I want you to know that I personally appreciate your participation here, and I, too, hope that you don't feel "beat up." There's a lot of interest in understanding things, and that often requires debate, research, and references. Thanks.

I think a PMTS instructor would argue that its easier for both the instructor and student to avoid teaching/using active rotary because the skier gets plenty of passive rotary from counter and tipping with a greater degree of control.

I wish I had the in depth knowledge to give you guys the biomechanical reasoning behind this issue from a PMTS perspective. I've heard HH and the other instructors talk about it but I don't have a good foundation in physiology so its mostly greek to me. I was trying to maintain mental focus while they were discussing it but my mind kept wandering trying to decide beer tasted the best.

Do you ever do a hockey stop? If so, how?

Remember, rotary skills are not only about increasing the twisting of the feet/skis, but actually controlling it. I think that this is a fairly signifcant component of what PMTS teaches under the auspices of "eliminating rotary."

The source of disagreement is that rotary isn't a Primary Movement, it's an outcome. I posted as much about 10 posts ago. It's a matter of focus about what's believed to be a better way to go about teaching skiing. As simple as that. The "vehemence" has to do with a total misunderstanding of PMTS by those who haven't RTFA, so to speak, and are off in the wild-blue yonder about skiing that doesn't contain rotary. Well, they're wrong. PMTS results in rotary, just like any skiing does. Again, it's a matter of emphasis about what's more important to be taught: rotary itself (seen as a "dead-end" bullet point in PMTS) or other skills whose outcome is rotary (seen as more universal skills in PMTS).

Rotary aside, I understand there are more fundamental differences between PMTS and whatever-you-want-to-call-the-alternative, but I'm not qualified to speak about them.

IMO, and other CSIA members that have posted here, the right amount of counter is as much as gets developed by the legs turning under you. It's a "let it happen"/"let" sort of thing. That is how we would view separation and counter.

Unwinding will happen as you unweight, but not because of separation, precisely because of the opposite: the body has been torqued and the energy is being released. Unavoidable and sometimes desireable. But one cannot always rely solely on this passive unwinding/rotation to turn their skis.

For what it is worth, I really don't think you do too. You may think you are not actively rotating, and people may say you are not, but I suspect there is active rotation of the lower legs going on. That's the beauty of coining phrases like "passive rotation".

As HH says, students are the worst judges of their own movements.

What the hell, let me get myself in deeper ...

The Holy Grail of the Harb universe (or cult, as you may have it) is Balance. Everything is about balance (starting with his obsession with proper equipment alignment and so on). A Primary Movement is one that has a direct effect on one's balance; therefore balance can be maintained by managing the primary movement. "Rotary" is deemed not a primary movement because of it's complex, indirect interaction with balance that is not directly or easily managed. Observe that PMTS has "counter", but it's counter-balance, not counter-rotation (illuminating, no?).

Harb observes that experts are primarily concerned with maintaining proper balance, so teaching skills that are likely to allow you to manage balance is the doorway to expert skiing. Maybe it's just as simple as "if you're in balance, you're not falling down; if you're not falling down, you must still be skiing". Sounds like a pretty good base.

If you look at Harb through the lens of balance, you can start to see why he focuses (bad, pun, I know) on what he does. Not so unreasonable, after all.

That is formally known as Harb's Observation: "Perception is seldom reality".

Clarification. PMTS has counter balance and what is referred to as counter acting movements. Counting acting movements are a subtle version of counter rotation. More of a holding the torso in position as the legs rotate into the turn ending up with the upper body pointing to the outside of the turn.

Phew - it looked the thread was going to get derailed there for a while. Good job team to keep it from flaming! At the risk of rehashing I want to clarify the above remark.

The key difference sited is not as dramatic as it might appear. Within the context of a carved turn, there is no difference about the proper application of rotary movements between PMTS and PSIA (at least as far as I can see). Where you see Harald removing excessive rotary from skiers, you'd likely see similar quality PSIA trained instructors doing the same thing. As JohnH has noted, mere PSIA mortal instructors are doing this.

I think you've defined a brushed carve as a skidded turn with equal tip and tail displacement. I had been thinking that one key difference PMTS and PSIA was that PSIA believed that some skidding in some situations was useful whereas PMTS believes that all skidding is bad. It looks like the brushed carve concept kills that idea. Plus I'm having a hard time understanding the skills focus difference between a brushed carve and a wedge christie (i.e. to develop the ability to skid the ski while pivoting under the feet).

When you look at the PSIA visual cues for rotary movements, you will see caveats like "appropriate" and "matching ... tipping" that look an awful lot like "not excessive". I believe that the roots of the "active rotary" concept come from straight ski based technique. Harald is correct when he says that this should not be a part of modern ski teaching. In my opinion, rotary has been reduced but not eliminated from modern ski technique. Harald is entitled to his opinion that skidding and purposeful redirection of the skis (is this a fair translation of active rotary?) do not belong in modern high level skiing. However there have been several strong contrarian examples posted in this forum.

The most obvious example of this is competitive mogul skiing. It seems obvious to me that competitive mogul skiers are using a lot of what PMTS would describe as "active rotary" in the bumps. Despite Dan DiPiro's complaint that PSIA does not support Mogul Skiing Techniques, this use of rotary does not conflict with PSIA guidance on rotary movements.

In my opinion, after you dig through the conflicting terminology, there is not a lot of difference here that has any practical use to the mainstream student population. My humble opinion is that a big part of excessive rotary comes from an adaptive response to having one's weight too far back and that this problem has been exacerbated by the increased performance of modern skis. This differs significantly from the problem being a result of dead end teaching methodologies. But it is part of my advice to new posters on carving.

And, so that you know what I would say about this... I would call that a "rotary skill". FWIW.

Trees: I used to ski fast through dense trees with no rotary movements, if you mean actively applying a torque to the skis using my body about an axis that is perpendicular to the ski bases.

Big steep Bumps: Again I used to, Occasionally I would get stuck between two of them though. I haven't seen any big steep moguls in a few years though.

Steep narrow chutes: Used to be one of my favourite things to do.

Thankyou. The older I get the better I was.

I think I see a couple of points of misunderstanding.
PMTS from what I can gather does have rotary that includes the fact that the thighbone is rotating in it's socket, and that the skis will move in a rotary fashion. It just doesn't have the skier applying torque to the skis directly to get them to rotate.

To illustrate how a non-carving novice-intermediate skier can affect a rotary movement without using active rotary just imagine you tip the ski (edging) and put a lot of weight on the tips (pressure). The tip digs in more than the tails and the skis rotate. Hockey stop - no problem.

The Unwinding (counter): tip the skis, presure them to make them turn, use the counter to unwind your legs, but not to the extent that you are twisting the skis, just to the extent that you are keeping up to them.

I think Max, that you are pretty close to the main difference between PMTS and most everything else: PMTS eschews having you twist your skis around by applying torque between your body and the skis about an axis perpendicular to the plane of the ski.

bsather,

Every ski instructing organization thinks that the holy grail of skiing is balance. Believe it or not, if you are well balanced, you can pivot and remain in balance.

In my opinion, one problem of guest centered teaching is that a guest can, and will, ask for things far above their head. If you look through the threads on guest centered teaching, you find that many folks claim they get the student to but in to what they REALLY need. It gets pretty darn boring for the student if everytime they take a lesson they are convinced to work on balance, when they really wanted to do something else.

When they show up for HH's instruction, they've already bought into it. Makes it quite easy.

Max,

If counter-acting is "counter that is developed by the turning of the skis under the body" then I have not issue with it. But I do have an issue if the body is twisted into that position or it is "held" in place.

Upper/lower separation allows the legs to turn. There should be no struggle to hold or keep the upper body in place while the legs are turning - counter just happens develops.

To my mind, counter acting has more implications. Isn't it suggested that one should apply counter-acting movements early in the turn to assist edge engagement? ie. twist the upper body outwards a bit?

BigE, regarding counter acting movements...I'll never be able to do as good a job explaining it as Jay did here.

Counter Thread

Max, Thank you for the link. It warns of the same implications that I did -- using the counter balancing/acting movements to generate edging! It then oddly suggests to do so in the high C part of the turn. I hope they meant allow the c-balancing/acting movements to develop!

If I was skiing PMTS style, I'd want skis with an awfully small turn radius to ski trees and bumps since there's "no rotary".

Some carving advise:
If you want to carve a turn, but the skis are too stiff to decamber at your current speed. Just use one ski, the outside one, you will only need half as much momentum.

If you want to tighten the radius beyond the sidecut radius, pressure the front of the ski and drive the skis forwards, and when your feet reach the apex, drive yourself forwards to catch up with them.

Do both of the above.

You can make all kinds of turn shapes by applying edging on the inside ski while not applying quite as much or any on the outside ski. If you've never experimented with the effects of differential edging, it can be fun to play with.