Eilidh, Alex and Harrison had waited two years to ski so I decided to ski them rather than subject them to detailed explanations and exercises: They really needed to ski.
However!!!! I didn’t let them off the hook completely – using lots of short turns (and very short turns) on the steeper terrain to make them work hard and stay in control of their speed. The only time speed was really allowed was on the Arpette obstacle course where we raced it – creating chaos amongst the unsuspecting public. Harrison might still be disqualified for starting before I said “Go”. Tomorrow I think we will do timed slalom.
Each skier is very different and possesses both strong and weak points – so this initially made it unclear where to begin with teaching…
We did however do some work though on:
- Pivot
- Carving
- Angulation
- A certain circus act with ski poles
Technique
The video clip above captures the initial technical level of skiing. When asked how to make a turn on skis the answers included “move forward” and “lean into the turn” so we were off to a good start – BUT then everyone also contributed ” twist the skis into the turn” – which is a major error – very visible in the video and in still photos. Harrison doesn’t have a significant issue with rotation.
For this reason I began work on “pivoting” to communicate how the ski “swings” into a turn in response to the motion of the centre of mass (not with twisting) – but as nobody knew what a centre of mass is the initial results were appropriately chaotic – with interesting rotation issues…
This is what pivoting using the centre of mass looks like…
Here is what is meant by the “swing” of a ski…
Harrison’s main issue currently is a complete lack of hip angulation…
We did a little bit of work on angulation and combined it with carving – but we will look into those things in greater depth tomorrow. There was also a brief introduction to dynamics – explaining (using a ski pole trick which I’ll film tomorrow) that we are not in balance when skiing – again we will go into that in depth tomorrow. All the children were using dynamics naturally anyway – but it’s better that they are aware of it and understand it properly.