Unconcious Programming
I realised that last year the boys were complete beginners and within two weeks they were handling everything well – blacks, bumps, slalom and off-piste. They had learned through a process of having natural movements encouraged and developed – unconscious movements for the most part. This gave them great freedom very rapidly – but they didn’t have any continuation afterwards. They also didn’t have any abstract “ski technique” such as snowplough to rely on. For this reason they stood on their skis and at first felt completely lost. What I should have done was repeat the same process that they learned with – that is to support them physically and ski with them – moving their bodies and letting them feel the correct sensations while secure. I’ll do some of that first thing tomorrow morning.
Gulsam is obviously very tense – the locked-out leg gives that away! Snowplough and tension don’t make a good mix so this turns into a drama when conditions become a little bit more challenging. We worked on sideslipping with a view to getting Gulsam much more comfortable travelling sideways and eventually initiating a pivot from the uphill edge. It will take some practice to bring it to this level because tension is hard to break – and so are defensive habits.
Everyone initially worked on moving the “Centre of Mass” because this is the most important thing is skiing – it’s what drives everything else. Gulsam was making progress with this and was even able to use some measure of pivoting with it on good terrain. Taha moved strongly but with a tendency to drop the shoulders into the turn and shove the hips towards the outside of the turn instead of the inside – especially when standing on the left leg.
We discussed “listening” to the body – the legs in particular so as to become more aware of all the tension and leaning against ski boots. Everyone realised that they had not been listening and that they were not aware of the levels of tension. Rather than try to change anything I asked everyone to just ski and observe for a while – to improve body/mind communication.
Some of the early exercises we did involved skating – driving the Centre of Mass inwards towards the centre of the turns. Mete at first was stepping his skis the wrong way “converging” but was able to quickly correct this to make them diverge when this was pointed out. Skating gets the hips in the right place, improves timing and builds confidence for standing on one leg at a time and helps to loosen up the leg actions. I had tried a few jumping exercises early on to encourage leg movement and prevent any tendency to create snowploughs. By the end of the day the boys were moving quite fast and were turning to stop instead to braking with ploughs. They had never been taught the plough – even for braking – but they figured it out for themselves. The fact that it has never been encouraged means that it doesn’t dominate their movements and make them defensive.
Taha and Gulsam were shown how their hips were moving the wrong way when both walking a skiing – then this made it easy for them to understand how to move the hip correctly when skiing. Both have very strong hip rotation so this is an excellent exercise – pulling the outside hip backwards – but will take some practice. I could see the results when they were managing to do it.