Eve & Charlie day 1

Eve and Charlie started out with a warm up run so I could look at their skiing. On piste I couldn’t identify much to work on so we went over to the unpisted Bonnevie Slalom Stade and that’s where the first part of the video was taken – before working on any technique. The second part was taken after working on pivoting – but before correcting for rotation and developing angulation.  Eve’s skiing was nice – a great deal of what she has trained in the past still being in place. Her weakness lie in timing (when not confident), rotation and posture. Charlie is a strong skier but has no angulation, rotates his whole body and has little awareness of edge control. Both were hesitant, not using the forces in the turn to help the overall flow. Both were struggling with carving. We weren’t going off piste for the time being – but hopefully when things settle down later in the week we will find some good snow.

Charlie posed me a question regarding the lifting of his inside ski – so from that cue I decided to look at pivoting with a view to developing awareness of the motion of the centre of mass – particularly motion over the lower ski. We quickly went through all the basic aspects of the pivot and especially the separation of feet edges and ski edges. We do need to take time to look at the feet and their use without ski boots on and I do need to check the boot alignment for both Eve and Charlie. Now that eve has her own boots that should be easy to set up permanently now. More detail on Pivoting is here… http://skiinstruction.blogspot.fr/p/pivot.html

After working on one ski I completed the picture by showing how the legs form a single unit and the skis form a single platform for pivoting with two skis. This is always used in bump skiing and in deep snow where the skis can drift laterally. My context in this case was still the concern regarding the motion of the centre of mass over the pivoting platform – or coming over the downhill ski. This unfortunately can’t be done properly unless there is good angulation.

The wide stance pivot is tricky and requires a fairly skilful pivoting of the two skis separately – both feet across the hill all the time instead of one  sliding around and below the other. The aim here is to reduce rotation of the body and just allow the legs to be rotated in their hip sockets. This itself generates some angulation.

At this point we had to fit in some carving. Charlie couldn’t carve at all and Eve was only slightly better so we had to work on “railed” traverses in weather that made this sort of exercise rather unappealing. This also helps to cultivate the right feelings for edge control from the inside edges of the feet.

Returning to our pivoting progression and angulation – where we had left off earlier. I explained the difference between working with the pelvis and working with the shoulders. This core strengthening should be the origin of all movement of the body. We will work more on this as the results weren’t very clear when watching. http://skiinstruction.blogspot.fr/p/chiskiing.html