Last day and the weather started out well at 9am. We headed straight down to Plagne Bellecote, up the Colosses lift and skied to Plagne Centre. From La Plagne Centre we then went up the Bécoin lift to 2330m altitude and skied all the way down to La Roche at 1550m. Before this descent we did some work on technique for handling the steeper sections: “Feet Forward Technique”…
Feet Forward Technique
“Feet Forward Technique”… gives security through the start of a turn on steep terrain by tightening the turn radius.
Pushing the outside (uphill initially) foot forward during the turn. The foot never gets in front of the other foot – it just tightens the turn instead.
The exercise is practised with skis off and standing in ski boots. For this static exercise we use ski pole support with the body faced downhill with the uphill foot pointing across the hill and the downhill foot pointing downhill and the heel jammed into the snow. The uphill boot is pulled over onto its inside edge and pushed forwards in a natural arc.
Here is some video of exactly the same action in ice hockey training. In skiing the direction of travel would be straight downhill instead of straight ahead on the flat ice
Fred must have fallen and lost his skis about four times by now but was rapidly becoming an expert at putting them back on! We had to side step and side slip for a short section but this is a very important lesson on how to navigate any slope that appears to be too steep to ski. In addition part of skiing skill is about using the skis travelling sideways to some degree.
During the epic descent to La Roche We also worked on making the “push” of the body into the turn – using the uphill leg – from when the ski was still on its uphill edge (instead of trying to place the ski on its inside/downhill edge like during a snowplough). The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter what edge the ski is on but due to learning snowploughing at the beginning this makes people think they always need to be on that inside edge hence they develop a “stem” (pushing the tail out) action that becomes almost incurable. (Later in the long video of all three making a controlled descent Xavi was a bit confused by this and I spotted the glitch in his skiing – so we worked to sort this out – hence for his solo parallel turns video clip this was properly corrected.)
Jackson (“Dinner, pudding, sleep time!”) was missing today – probably for extra sleep time.
We stopped at La Plagne Centre for refreshments – Hot Chocolate with whipped cream for the boys and Orangina for Flo. It was my pleasure paying for them because all three (or four) have been a real joy to work with. Later when we went up the Arpette and took the main blue run back down in dense fog with water freezing on our eyewear they all skied without incident – which is testament to how solid their skiing was becoming already.