The session was mainly to give Una confidence and make her skiing more secure, safe and enjoyable.
Una’s instability was coming from the fact that she was intentionally trying to turn the skis. In a rapid fire succession of changes we altered this to using a skating action as a support for dynamics – to make motion of the centre of mass the driver of the turns instead. We spent a short time working on pivoting too, with the intent of showing how even very tight turns require “pulling inwards” – with the pull coming from the centre of mass!
At the top of this blog there are buttons for Beginners (skating), Dynamics and Pivot. Those links access demonstrations and more complete explanations of all the exercises we carried out and full demonstrations.
The main issue to gain confidence was to “pull inwards” during a turn, along with “falling” into the turn – avoiding the tendency to push outwards and twist the ski. The dynamics and associated down/up timing also helped Peter. Later on Peter started looking at how to prevent the hip being pulled in front of the rib cage during a turn and so create better angulation – enabling better use of the fronts of the skis. Peter also had a brief introduction to carving.
