Regarding Tipping

Like many movements used in skiing it takes some time to get used to the flexing/tipping combo.

I don't think height makes much of a difference. I'm 5'11" and plenty of the guys at the camps have been taller.

Tipping is more effective from a lower position as it increases the amounts that the femurs can rotate in their hip sockets.

Since you have the essentials, you can see that pivoting occurring in the photos of HH static "counterbalancing" on the tipping platform.

BigE,
Are you sure about that?
I just stood up, put my hands on my desk. and turned my feet 90 degrees to the left keeping my pelvis perpindicular to my desk. Then I began to flex at ankles, knees, and hips. As I flex lower my pelvis begins to rotate to the left. No matter how hard I try, I can't keep it square to my desk.
It seems to me this would indicate it's easier to tip from a taller stance.

Who said turn the feet?

Just keep them straight, and "do the twist". As you go lower, you can get higher angles.

He is working on his pivot/redirection at his desk!

He's in good company!

Round turns,

What flexing does at the end of the turn is release the ski from its turn so an extension can be made into the new turn. It allows a quick transition compared to an extention or up move to release and flatten the skis in the transition.Your up movement could be replaced by a diagional extension toward the new turn and it would be a lot more efficient.

RW

Flexing will allow for a more active movement of the Center Of Mass over the skis at the transition from one turn to the next. But it doesn't necessarily mean that you have to use up that entire range of movement! I prefer to think of it as a "softening" of the ankle/knee/hip chain and allowing the body to move over the skis while utilizing the tipping movements to actively tip the skis on edge high in the turn. If you stay tall and tight, the tipping movements are more difficult to obtain.

If you feel like flexing to initiate "crowds" you, as it did me. Try standing your boot cuffs up ("Back" on the forward lean adjustment.) and taking out the spoiler. I found I could maintain a taller "feel" while still accomplishing the movement.

After much trial by fire, I do agree that tipping the skis early is best accomplished by flexing. But I had to stop taking that statement at face value. There are other variables invoved. If you are a skier who levers forward onto the boot tongues while flexing, you'll have to break that habit for this to work. If you give away the hips at the end of the turn and sink to far, you'll have to remedy that first. Simply "Flexing at initiation" isn't going to be a miraculous catch-all.

"That's my 10 cents, my 2 cents is free..."
Spag:

Since you have been up-unweighting all your life you are not going to get rid of that up-and-down movement quickly. Also, relesing the previous turn by flexing the old outside leg does not mean that you should not start to extend the old inside ski before both legs are equally flexed. Its a matter of relesing and you can extend the othe rleg if you like straight after. This came up in several discussions conserning WC GS skiers freeskiing last year. Its a matter of what you want to do and how efficient you need to be in that turn. The down side with flexing deep through the transition is that you are in the back seat at that particular moment, which is not a problem since you are unweighted ala Benni Reich video, and it wears you out quickly.

Edit
Yes, there should not be much difference between short and long skiers when it comes to the movements. Dont forget that as you are flexing you should be unweighted otherwise you need to brake at your waist to keep you out of the back seat. Im 6 foot 2.

BigE,
Further experimentation has taught me the error of my way. Yesterday I turned feet to see how far I could rotate femurs in my pelvis. By turning feet first and then flexing the flexing forces the pelvis to turn. Standing straight up with feet facing forward and trying to move knees left or right allows very little rotation. By bending knees first and then (or simutaneously) moving knees left or right I get much more rotation.

Thanks.

This is a very common trap to fall into: "By bending knees first and then (or simutaneously) moving knees left or right I get much more rotation"! Why do you need rotation? When you rotate your femurs (pointing the knees) you simultaniously push the hips in the wrong direction, towards the outside, allso called hip rotation. This is bad bad bad. Root to all evil. Tail wash. Crappy skiing all together. Thats why the only thing you should and need to do is to flex or extend eather leg and start falling towards the inside. Tip towards the inside. Once you do that you can start doing adjustments with a bit of angulation, counter, knee pointing etc. but not before you set the gross parameters of inclination and that you do by tipping. If you do everything the way HH explains in his book everyone can be an expert skier you will become an expet skier. Only start using femur rotation once you are an expet skier. Maybe you are and I should shut up.

The only time you can use knee pointing is in combination with tipping or if you are doing short turns with upper body moving straight down in the fall line. Like when you are skiing moguls. By pointing your knees one way you offcet the hips towards the outside but in the next fraction of a second that becomes your inside and as you do this consecutively there will be a pattern of turns feeding on each other keeping your hips in the right place, inside the turn. Its like upper body counter changing to antisipation after the transition.

TDK6,
My little experiment was only a static test to see whether I could rotate my femurs more or less with straight legs or bent legs. I wasn't trying to say it had anything to do with how I ski.

In general I'm a believer that there is often more then one right answer, and it usually begins with "it depends". For skiing this is especially true and some of your posts, in particular, have reinforced this idea. To be clear, take that as a compliment. In fact every post in this thread is from some of my favorite participants.

Perhaps your hips rotate, but my hips don't rotate when I rotate my femurs. That's upper/lower body separation.

Sure you do. If you look at only your knees and your hips it doesent matter if you point your knees towards the left or if you rotate your hips to the right. If you extend your scope to include your lower legs and feet you can see that in ref to your feet your hips stay in place if you point your knees. In skiing this would result in edgeset and turning left which would put your hips in the wrong place. Outside. That is the reason we should start our turn by tipping, coutermovement and counterbalance and not by pointing our knees = rotating our femours. If you are advanced level, which you are you can do all of this at the same time. Simultaniously. From an instructors stand point everything cannot be judged from our own ability to perform tasks. We need to put ourselves into the students situation and try to figure out how they can perform task at hand at their skill level.

Upper and lower body separation is not "I can rotate my femurs without rotating my hips". At least I never saw such a definition. Im sure it includes lots of other things as well.

Yes it does matter. A lot. There is a hill to consider. Changing the orientation of my pelvis to my direction of travel is far different than pivoting the legs. Opening my hips to the outside of the turn is far different than pivotting my feet.Pivotting my feet changes my steering angle - twisting my hips does not.

No. A pivot slip shows that the move can be made without edging.

Rotating the femurs in your hip sockets is not out of reach. You can practice it at home standing in socks on a slippery floor or on carpet and two sheets of paper.

Pivotting is rotating the femurs in their hip sockets. Pivotting is done under a stationary upper body, which includes the hip, and shows upper and lower body separation.

Inability to keep the hips steady while pivotting shows poor upper/lower body separation. Separation is one of the cornerstones of Canadian skiing.

BigE
I was wondering what the heck you were talking about but now I see that we have a totally different definition to pointing the knees or femour rotation as some would call it. You are talking about pivot slips, Im talking about turning as in carving. I limit the knee pointing term to my knees, you include your feet into the same definition. You put paper underneath your feet on a slippery floor, I stand solidely on the floor without any movement of feet. Thats why you call it upper and lower body separation becuase your whole lower body turns. Mine does not. My knee pointing triggers an kinetic chain that tips my skis on edge and applies pressure on the front part of my boots in same direction as Im pointing my skis. Since Im tipping my skis on an edge and they exted far out front and back of my boots my feet do not follow my knees. This is a common way to teach carving. IMO a bad way but still common. That offcourse has nothing to do with your pivot slips. I rest my case, we are talking about a different thing all together.

Sorry if I sounded rude but I had just been watching our first ever school bloodbath on the news. Fact is that you are on the right track with your small experiments at your office chair. I do the same. We should make a video library of skiing movements in front of our office desks. Thanks for you good words on my postings.

When I read your post, it suggested that it is not possible to keep your hips straight while tipping and allowing the femurs to rotate. I used pivot slips as one example of upper/lower body separation.

The femur rotation I am talking about is not a "knee pointing" that drives the skis onto edge. It is also not equivalent to turning the hips to the outside to drive the skis onto edge.

The femur rotation I am talking about is a secondary move that happens in support of tipping. I thought that was clear when I reference photos of Harb.

BTW: none of this changes post #3. The OP wanted to know about amount of tipping with respect to flexion. You can tip more when flexed than when upright, because the femurs can rotate more when you tip the feet.

I do not understand? Can you please explain a bit more in detail. What has femur rotation to do with tiping?

As you tip more and more, your shin tries to stay perpendicular to the plane of the tipped ski. That moves your knee outwards. Since your knees don't bend sideways, that means your femur must rotate in the hip socket. That is how the base of the kinetic chain is used to cause pivotting.

In the opening post roundturns feels that it is easier for him to tip from an extended position than from an flexed position. My hunch is that he does not refere to what is the quickest and the most efficient way of tippin but rather what he feels is easiest due to what he is used to. Max answered correctly that the flexing/tipping combo like any other new movement pattern takes some time to get used to and that sums it up pritty much totally but we must not forget that there are at two ways of doing it and there are combinations as I mentioned in above quoted posting.

Tipping might be more effective but that does not mean that the turn or the outcome of the increased edgeset is more effective. You cannot isolate one movement like that in the context of outcome of bigger scope without taking in consideration everything else. To efficiently tip you need to counterbalance, counterrotate, point your knees and pay attention to stance width. I personally find it very tiring to ski down a 8km long read run in the alps by OLF. Skiing a 30 sec SL run is completely different.

It does if the tipping was the inadequate component, which the title of the thread suggests. Also, tipping is the most essential movement. Fail to tip well after going flat and the whole turn gets compromised.

Sure you can. We do it ALL the time. Then, hopefully, we integrate the isolated movement into the student's skiing, in the right context with the right dynamics.

You make this sound so hard, when only flexion/extension really needs to be added to good tipping to produce a decent turn.

When that is done properly, you do not have to pay attention to stance width, or "pointing your knees" or even counterbalancing. Those are all secondary effects controlled through the kinetic chain and the desire to maintain balance. Counteraction/counter-rotation is the only element that *may* require special attention, or it may not. That depends on the skiers need.

Unless OLF is done for very short turns with very high edge angles, I do not find it tiring. I see no reason to limit the use of OLF to SL turns. For longer radius turns, just flex slower. Slowly lowering the outside ski pressure means a slower edge change and a slower development of lesser edge angles. Result: A longer turn from combining tipping and flexion/extension with different duration, rate, intensity and timing.

Wow, do I need some snow.

Yeah, snow please...... But, if you rely on OLF, how do you traverse without getting in the back seat? Because a traverse is an extention of your transition and if you use OLF then you are in a flexed position, on the toilet seat, for a very long time. That is tiring. That is not good skiing.

I agree, that is bad skiing. But you don't have to flex alot to change the balance point. The range of flexion/extension is decreased in the longer turn, so you well avoid flexing very deeply. You will go "up and over" instead of staying very low through transition.

TDK,

All that is really needed for an OLR is to "relax" the old outside leg. It doesn't necessarily need to be flexed a lot. If you were previously standing on that leg and you relax it, then the other leg takes your weight, which shifts your balance in such a way that crossover will happen. I agree with you that deep flexion during an OLR release can be tiring for long periods of time. I find it very tiring to do for long periods of time. I feel that deep retraction is more related to certain situations where more of a cross-under transition is desireable, or perhaps in terrain that merits it such as powder, bumps, etc. But OLR release does not in and of itself require you to flex deeply, Its simply a very fine distinction between whether you are actively pressing the old inside leg to push yourself over(ILE), or allowing Forces of physics to do it for you by releasing the old outside leg (OLR). Deep flexion is not always neccessary for this. There are other good reasons for deep flexion during release though.

BigE (and Borntoski683), we finally agree on something.... let me quote myself for the third time... posting #10 in this thread....

Well note that you can un-flex or "extend" your old inside leg in two different ways that are hard to detect when MAing another skier, but not so hard to feel if you are the skier.

You can do it in such a way that the extension itself is contributing in some way to move your COM across into the new turn. That is ILE. Or you can extend it in such a way that all you're doing is supporting your weight more on it then you were before the OLR, and then allowing pure physics to topple your Com across, that is pure OLR. But you still have to extend that leg as your COM topples across, just to keep it on the snow with your weight on it.

In my view, there are times to use full OLR with very little or no ILE. There are times when maybe a pure ILE would be desirable. There are times when various shades of grey in between might be desirable. I find myself in the shades of grey most of the time. I personally think that you can almost never get too much OLR. The question is about how much ILE to use. Too much ILE and you could end up pushing the tail out more than you want if you aren't careful. Not enough ILE and you might not transition fast enough to suit your purpose.

I can't think of any hard and fast rule that says you should not extend your old inside until the old outside is already equally flexed. I agree with you there. There are countless examples of great skiing that does not function that way.

I also feel that if you find yourself with both legs flexed, then you are in a weak position with your weight loaded on your quads UNLESS you are fully unweighted at that moment. But if you are standing on your skis, supporting your weight, and your quads are flexed, then its harder on your body. You have tried to say this also and I agree with you completely. That is one reason why using ILE to get your new outside leg extended sooner provides a way to transfer from one extended leg to another extended or near extended leg, with as little time as possible having both legs flexed.

The trick is to do that without rushing to your new outside ski with too much ILE(which might compromise the edging of that ski). Have to be careful not to let it turn into too much of a "pop" extension also, which will result in unweighting at the wrong time.

Good post BTS,

but ooooh maaaan, this post did not need this paragraph. There are *so* many ways to mess up what this parargraph suggests. Add to that it's confusing the HS out of me.

"To much ILE and you are pushing out the tail more than you want to."?

There's no tail push in ILE.

In my books, OLR means OLR -- the CM is released because the outside leg is relaxed. In ILE, the CM is released becase the inside leg is extended. (Call it toppling if you must, but really, it's just release). This grey area is where I have considerable trouble.

Take the transition speed thing. Isn't what is actually slowing the transition that both skis are weighted? Then what you are calling a mix of ILE and OLR is nothing more than simultaneaous extending and flexing.

If so, this is not a release at all, because the CM is not released. It is moved across the skis by altering the weight distribution between the two feet. It is two footed skiing.

In this sort of skiing, the CM is released ONLY when the edges get released --ONLY when the skis go flat.

Welcome to the basic parallel turn.

No doubt, I've misunderstood something, so please let me know.

Cheers!