MA Request  

What skis are you on?

SMJ,

As you know-I'm no instructor-but I know well where you're skiing-

You look fine on Exhibition (of course)-on Competition (that's upper comp right?) you seem (to my very untrained eye) to be skiing the end of your turns on your heels (I do it to in speed cotol situations)-but, a very good skier buddy gave me some early season advice to ski more on the balls of my feet all the way through the turn-and gave some tips on staying balanced over the ball (the forefoot) of my feet as well. Can't say I always manage it-but when I do it seems helpful-I feel much more balanced and strong even in medium radius speed control turns on upper comp.

I found keeping the inside (or uphill) ski back a bit during the belly of the turn and attempting to balance more on this foot as well helped keep me more centered and more on the balls of my feet in general (which lead, I think, to much less tail pushing and better fore-aft balance).

Don't know if any of that helps (or if it's even sound advice)-

Turns look generally very good btw.

Liam

In the second sequwnce, Your speed control is coming from pushing the tails of t\he ski down hill and skidding as opposed to making a round turn. A pivot to a skid. You are also moving straight up. Instead use more angulation and less inclination and get on the new edges earlier in the turn, then leet the turn happen as opposed to flattening the ski, pivoting and skidding

Hello SMJ,

I'm no instructor, but to me you look a lot like ... me, so maybe some of my experience will help.

In the steeper section in particular, I see you finishing your turns with your centre of mass up-hill of your skis, basically getting your edge angles by inclining your whole body into the hill. You also tend to rise up at the start of each turn, so your skis are very light during the top part of the turn (no snow flies), and then you come down hard on your edges at the end (lots of snow flies). You flex your legs at little at the end of each turn to help take some of the pressure off your down hill edge and stop it getting away from you, before popping up to start the new one.

So your speed control is coming, basically, from pushing your heels out and down the hill. To make the movement your skis have to be light, so your turns basically go: pop up, change edges, push heels, edge skis more, flex down. This is a movement pattern I use too, especially when the slope gets steeper, but it means you're fighting gravity at the end of the turn, when its harder, rather than controlling your speed at the top when its relatively easy.

So what should you work on? Flex rather than extend to start your turns, and focus on getting your balance firmly over the new outside ski before the skis go into the fall-line. That will scrub speed in short turns and get the skis into an arc before they start to load up. To get your balance over the outside ski before the fall-line you will need to counter balance more - move your hips into the new turn but keep your torso over the outside ski and facing out of the turn.

Exercises that might help: Try to carve railroad tracks at the slowest speeds you can manage. To do that requires very strong counterbalance, so it will help you develop it for faster skiing. Try skiing slowly with both pole tips dragging in the snow at all times to keep yourself flexed (note this allows you to extend your outside leg, but only during the belly of the turn). Try focussing on your pole touches - they're a little weak and uncoordinated right now - reach down the hill to touch the pole before your release your edges. Helps keep you countered and your CM downhill of the skis.

Also, how are your boot? A pop and heel push can be a sign of an alignment problem - I'm not good enough at MA to judge from your skiing, but if you feel you can't get off your old edge without an pop movement, it could be an alignment issue.

You've got inclination and rotation going on here. Inclination to get to an edge, and rotation to move the skis across the direction of travel so they'll get pressured.

The issue with this much rotation is that even if you get a "swooshy" feel, the swoosh is from the rotation or your entire body.

Here's a drill to try: Keep the shoulders level, and pick a target at the bottom of the hill. A line drawn from the target to your chest should be square to your level shoulders at all times.

I'll bet it'll be easier to do that drill if you flex as opposed to extend to release. Once you release, skis go flat, so simply keep tipping the skis to the new edges, stay atop them and don't push them out. (that's where doing RR tracks will help).

Let the legs follow the skis and keep the upper body facing dowhill and out of it.

Later, the upperbody will do other things, but first, I recommend working on getting some upper and lower body separation happening, so I'd recommend the mantra: "ski with your legs".

SkiMongoJazz, its not all bad . You have a good forward aft body position and I like your arms and pole plants. You also seem to have a good rhythm going and you have speed.

Now the bad stuff ! Dont worrie, nothing you cannot fix. As others have pointed out you skidd a lot. Some call it tail pushing but I would rather call it hip rotation. Thats where the bad stuff starts and thats what you gotta fix. As your hips rotate out in the turn you lose valuable edge angle as your skis flatten out and skid exessively. It all comes from your ingrained technique to overstear your skis with your hips in order to turn. You up-unweight to initiate your turn and that in itself is not bad but in this case it is since you unweight your skis and send your hips out into the turn dragging your feet and the tails of your skis with them. The reduced edge angle helps the skis tails to swap out and your skidd like a wind shield wiper. Swosh swosh swosh swosh etc. What you need to do is work on upper and lower body separation and find out what is "upper body counter" and "angulation". They are both movements that will bring you away from hip rotation but there is one more thing you need to fix and that is how you initiate your turn. Upper body counter and angulation are only movements to keep your skis on proper edges and to make you maintain your balance over your outside ski through out the whole turn. Try to use less hip rotation to initiate your turns and manage the skid with counter and angulation through out the whole turn and make round evenly skidded turns. Practissing carving and rr-trax would be beneficial since you would find out how to turn without using any unweighting move and how to balance over edge locked skis in the upper C part of the turn. That by the way is what carving is all about. On terrain you skied on carving is fully possible for your level.

It's basically the same. Watch how your whole body tips. Inclination with no angulation. The best drill I can think of is the one where you lift your inside hand high and touch your boot with the outside hand then touch both boots at transition and reverse. feel the muscle stretch along your side, now try and get that same feeling in your turn. Also get yourself countered early. both of these will dramatically improve your ability tog et and keep the ski on edge early

It is better, yes. In particular in your right turn (towards camera) you look pretty fluid through the belly of the turn and the snow flies off your skis there, rather than at the bottom of the turn. In your left turn, though, you still "freeze" and skid a little at the bottom of the turn. Look particularly at the left turn as you pass the camera in the second clip and compare it with the previous right turn.

I actually think this clip makes it clearer what the thing you need to work on most is. There's a distinct extend-to-release pattern in your skiing that is visible in all three clips once you know it is there. If you're in doubt, watch your knees - they flex down at the end of each turn, and extend up at the start of the next as the skis release. Go back to the turn where you pass the camera in the third clip - if you freeze right there you'll see that you're much taller just after you've release that turn than just before.

I'm not sure anyone really qualified will agree (WARNING: Commenter is a mere student. Do not take seriously), but I think the biggest improvement you could make is to think flex-to-release instead of extend-to-release. Your skiing is much less skiddy on the gentler slopes because you can afford the time "in the air" waiting for your skis to settle back onto the snow before edging your skis to complete the turn. When it gets steeper, though, you need to push your skis out from under you while they're unweighted to get them across the slope when you "land" back on them to control your speed. You need to then flex at the end of the turn to absorb the forces that build up as a consequence without the skis skidding sideways uncontrollably.

If you flex to start your turns instead, you'll be able to set the skis on edge early on, with your weight on them, even on a steep pitch, and thereby scrub your speed or pull it into the new turn. This will require counterbalancing movements much earlier in the turn, which will make your counterbalance later in the turn much stronger, getting rid of that inclination that shows up at present on the steep slopes.

I guess we should all have asked, what it is about your skiing you would like to improve?

Most of the suggestions here will change your technique to something quite different.

Is your goal to learn a race oriented technique/focus on skiing arc to arc or is your goal to reduce rotation or is it convert it to pivotting?

Lots of good stuff here already...at least 2 yrs worth.

Once you work through most of what you read above me...think....

EARLY edge, not late edge. I like to think of edging as a five count.

1 2 3 4 5


where one is entering the new turn and 5 is leaving the old turn.

MAX edge should be at 3 on most of the turns you were making. Your edges appeared to be maxed out at 5, then you flip directly to 1 and progressed back to 5.

What he said...

...as in, widen your stance so you can get better angles. Then get bigger edge angles/more pressure at the top of the turn. Run some gates, that always helps to dilate your pupils...

Wouldent you think that high angles are kind of out of reach at this level for OP making your suggestion to widen the stance a little out of context. That would also put him on his inside ski insted of balancing over his outside ski! What do you think? Dont you agree that high enough angles can be reached with stance width in clip?

Um...

...no, I don't think it's too much of a stretch. As they say in the Air Force, Aim High. One of my big speeches to my teammates this year is, if you're gonna change, make it a big change. 2% changes aren't going to get you very far. A wider stance isn't automatically gonna give you bigger angles. Ted Ligety gets some major league angles with a fairly narrow stance. But for most of us, widening the stance gets the inside knee out of the way so you can incline both legs to create a big edge angle. Stance width in the clip might work, but why not try something new and exciting? Wider stance will only put you on the inside ski if ya ain't angulating...feel the pinch at the waist, stand against the edged ski...it's the same as with lower edge angles, only more so.

One of the things that helped me a bunch was when one of my teammates said "Good skiing, Richard, but you're kind of floating your turns. Don't be afraid to set an edge and really put some pressure to it early on." Good advice. If you think of a turn as C shaped (or a parenthesis...doesn't really matter), the whole idea is to get pressure at the top of the C, where the ski is actually pointed away from the direction at the end of the turn. At the bottom of the turn, you have momentum plus gravity loading up the ski, and that's when you want to take pressure off. At the top, however, the ski is relatively light, so you have to apply some moxie to get things moving. Edge and pressure decisively before the ski enters the fall line, manage the pressure in the fall line, take the pressure off, get off the edge and go to neutral as you cross the fall line...repeat, as needed....

I have never before offered advice here, but I made huge progress this year when I discovered that the forebody of the ski is where the action is. Do whatever it takes to get yourself up there. It's a whole new world of enjoyment and control.

Widening the stance doesn't create angles. That's a myth based upon incorrect analysis. If this skier widens his stance, the way he tips in will simply cause him to have more problems with early engagement and end up putting lots of weight on the inside ski. Instead he needs more angulation and more counter to balance properly

If you ski with your boots completely glued to eachother you will not be able to create much angle.. Widening ones stance makes it possible to angulate more..

That's true, but "narrow stance" doesn't necessarily mean "boots glued together", because there are two dimensions in which the boots can move apart: "vertically" by flexing the knee, hip and ankle, and "horizontally" by spreading your legs. To get angles you need to separate your feet vertically, but not necessarily horizontally.

The advice "widen your stance to get edge angles" IMHO isn't that useful for most skiers, because the last thing they need is horizontal separation between their feet. If you're a top GS racer it might speed your transitions up a little (this is debatable IMHO) but the OP is not at that level.

Simon

Advice from the peanut gallery:

Forget about speed control. Speed is good.

I like what BigE said
Two things I also would recommend you try keep your upper pointing down the hill, and instead of coming up over your skis and tipping over them, just flex the old outside leg to allow yourself to come through without going up and down.

Now to add a bit. Try to just tip the skis and don't try to turn them. Just tip them onto their edges and instead of trying to turn them with your hips and legs, just keep a controlled downward pressure on them and try to keep the edges from slipping out. Let them turn as far as they want to; don't make them turn farther. Start at first going mainly straight down with only slight tipping and as you get the hang of it tip more and you will be cutting accross the fall line more (without trying to). Then work on tipping to really big angles.

Hope that helps.

What they need to learn is long leg/short leg which is easier to do with a relatively narrow stance.

Unfortunately, what really happens is that most people that widen their stance end up using the inside leg as a support. So yes, bigger angles are developed but too much weight ends up on the inside ski which defeats the purpose.

I find that just the opposite is true when properly balanced over the outside ski.

Time out...

...all I said was...or if I didn't say it explicitly, what I meant was "Try a wider stance." You don't wanna do it, don't do it.
As I pointed out in my original post, Ted Ligety does pretty well with a narrower stance. And, yup, a wider stance doesn't buy you anything without the vertical separation short leg/long leg thing going on, and without balancing cleanly against the outside ski...as I also said in my post. All I said was "try something different." Which is the way I coach. If it doesn't work, we'll try another toy, like maybe Schlopys or the Chicken Wing drill....or maybe good old fashioned outriggers.

Trying a wider stance was just one way to think about avenues to creating bigger angles/more pressure at the top of the turn...which was the essence of the change I was *recommending*. If you don't want to make that change, that's cool, too...it's your skiing. As Ron LeMaster once said "I'm not an absolutist." Words to live by. I'm not talking about what technique is or is not, I'm just talking about an initial approach I'd take in working with the skiing/skier from the video. I've conveniently forgotten where this thread started, but to the original poster, if what I said floats your boat, give it a rip. If not, do whatever works for you...

Uhhhh, no.

The closer the legs are together horizontally, the closer they have to be vertically (assuming relatively flat snow - e.g. not moguls). The wider the legs are apart, the more easily they can have different degrees of bending to achieve different lengths. Try it standing up at home.

I'm not an instructor, but I just got new boots so there you go. I just tried the dryland tipping as suggested by therusty and I find I tip more with a narrower stance, BUT it does require more cooperative movement with the rest of my body, which feels good to me. And I think that's what some of the drills suggested by the narrower stance/long leg, short leg proponents help one achieve. Also I like skiing with a somewhat narrower stance so maybe my body is more used to moving that way.
Peace, Herb