Crash course in skiing fundamentals – as much as can be crammed into 3 hours with 5 students and icy pistes!
Dynamics
Our crash course was mainly centred on dynamics – all a rapid input of my standard teaching process for teaching how to not be in balance. There is a tab at the top of the page for “Dynamics” which provides a comprehensive coverage of this teaching.
Feet/Adductors
We rapidly covered the use of the feet and stance on the front of the heels – bending at the hip and knee with the shin (anterior tibialis) contracting to strengthen the ankle. From there we worked on rocking the feet onto their inside edges with the subtaler joints – and activating the adductor muscles on the interior of the legs. This is to give a proper support for the dynamics. Chris still had a strong urge to twist his foot and ski into the turn so we later took a rapid look at pivoting to show how inappropriate and unnecessary the twisting is.
End of Turn Dynamics
Work was done on the use of dynamics to complete the turn – taking the body out and over the downhill ski and changing the support foot as the body passes through the perpendicular.
Skating Timing
Timing from skating as well as the “inverse pendulum” was integrated and there was considerable success within the group for feeling this pressure cycle.
Foot Forwards
For Chris’s benefit to stop him picking up speed when turning on steeper slopes I explained how when using dynamics the turn radius is controlled by a combination of the dynamics and pushing the outside foot forwards throughout the turn. This was demonstrated without the skis on. Chris felt the difference – but there was no time for the appropriate exercises to be used to develop this. On steeper ground the dynamics has to be more pronounced and the foot pushed forwards strongly.
Pivot
There is another tab at the top of the blog for “Pivot”.
Altogether we went through the main aspects of skiing fundamentals in a great rush but with interesting and worthwhile results. My main aim was to inspire a better way of thinking of skiing altogether and show the direction for future progress and potential.
