HOW TO SKI WITH BALANCE | 3 Tips for steeper slopes and short turns

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So today, we’re going to look at the topic of how fore;aft balance is really a key part in you being able to stay in control and make the skis grip and give you a nice kind of smooth fluidity down the slope. Hi, my name is Tom Gellie, I’m a level 4 instructor/examiner with the APSI, 2 x demo team member and I'm really interested in the biomechanics of skiing. I'd really like to help those skiers that are at the point where they’re really trying to ski steeper blues/blacks and when the snow gets a bit firmer and slippier, those skiers when they get on that type of terrain find that they can't keep a rhythm, fluidity and they kind of loose grip at the end of the turn. So we are really going to look at how we can help you if that sounds like you as the skier. Let's go take a look. So a shorter turn is really the type of turn we are going to be doing, so I’m going to warm up on our way to some steeper terrain doing short turns, as we can just control our speed more often with that, and it's actually in the short turn that it's much harder to get your fore;aft balance right. So we are going to start off working into some short turns. Really focus on a good rhythm, consistent, continuing motion all the way around my turns, and I'm going to start paying attention to my foot pressures. So, I just started paying attention to my foot pressures, here's the reason why. When your skiing on a slope, if we just take one turn from totally across the hill to across the slope, so 90 degrees to the fall line okay, from the start of the turn for the first half, basically the run is getting steeper, so i need to adjust my centre of mass and weight forward to be in balance, but only for this part, many people still stay forward for the end of the turn. Now from the fall line down here, almost like coming off of a skateboard ramp, you need to adjust your weight differently, so you have to go back slightly. So we have to be forward at the beginning, and then move more back on the skis towards the end of the turn to be centred on our skis so it grips, as I said the beginning of the turn being forwards matches my body to the slope, but it also helps me pivot my skis more freely, the weight being forward, |I can steer my skis easily. If I stay forward, my skis keep pivoting like this forward, and I don't want that. So to help stop that continuous rotation that's why I need to move my weight back a bit, that's why I need to feel through the soles of my feet where my body weight and pressure is. Okay, really nice bit of flat terrain to practise just moving my feet without turning and if I use a pulling motion you’ll see the skis want to come back afterwards, if I just push , they don't want to come back. The tension in the muscles pulling, pulling I ends up a little more forward. So i'm just going to exaggerate so you can see me actively moving to the heel, and how i'm going to do that, I'm not going to sit back, i'm going to use my feet and ankles and move them forward, I'm going to pull them through the turn a little bit more and that's going to get me on my heels. Really feel the tail bite here as I pull my feet through. So the fore;aft balance adjustment you're working on really helps you to grip the tail of the ski at the end of the turn, a lot of people are afraid of using the tail and being in the back seat but we're talking about a specific moment in time and a specific how to do it. So if you do it in this way you're not going to feel backseat, you're going to feel the ski grip, hold and actually push you or pop you into the next turn. So you should be able to see that in slow motion here, that the feet move from being on my side, to being almost in front of me, and that's an active movement to just stay in balance. So a feeling you can I guess use, taking your skis off on a steeper pitch. When i'm standing across the slope here I can be very relaxed, I’m sort of centred, if i stand 45 degrees down the hill you'll notice i'm more flexed in my joints, i have to keep pressure on my heel to not fall head over heels, this is the same sensation/position, I need to be in to stop the tail of the ski washing out through the end of the turn, because if i go forward from here i lose my balance, the heels of my boots come off, even ever so slightly, the icier the slope and steeper the run, the more that's going to mean your tails wash out. Alright, so on this next pitch, i'm going to attempt to not adjust my fore;aft balance, i'm not going to move to the back of my foot and get the tails to grip, i'm going to stay forward and what you should see, the tails are going to continue to drift and it's going to be hard for me to control the completion of the turn. So directly for me, that straight away feels like i lose any flow or rhythm i come to an abrupt stop, because my ski tails keep spitting and then i stop hard vs … so hopefully you can see the difference there of not adjusting my weight back and just staying forward the whole time and actively changing my weight and pressure along the length of the ski. Today i've got Carv in my ski boots, which is a digital ski coach. It is an insole that goes under my liner and it measures all these different metrics. So one metric that carv measures is fore;aft balance, so i'm going to take a run and undo the top buckles of my boots so that i really get more pure data from just the pressure sensors under my feet, because that's really where we ski through, the soles of our feet so were just going to be interested in looking at what the raw data shows us skiing down here without our boots done. So with boots undone I'm definitely relying more on balance through the soles of my feet, my body, not the equipment, so I've really got to be spot on with where the pressure goes under my feet as the turn changes, so forward, back. And a short turn happens really fast so you have to do these movements really quick and accurately. So i'm going to have a look at the video under the hood here to see what im talking about, in real time with the pressure sensors of the Carv insole, so they are saying through the end of the turn, right through here i want to be more on the tail or heel of the ski. We will go a bit further down here, bang, red dots showing up so i've definitely moved my pressure, there's the fore line coming out of it, it's moved aft and you can see the ski tail stops displacing here to help my steer, it actually stops and shoots across the hill. So taking a look at the run where I deliberately stayed forward at the end of the turn, and what you'll see is that the tails continuously displace and wash out at the end of the turn there. So even though i've got lots of edge angle and it looks like my knees tipped over ,my tails washing out and there's no grip, and the Carv insole gives me the pure data of why that's happened and it's because my weight is too far forward, and it's also interesting to notice that I have to use a lot of heel pressure of my inside ski to try and not fall over. So I think it's really cool because carv uses all this data and collects all this stuff to build online coaching help for any skier out there to improve their skiing. I think it's pretty cool. Okay so today's topic, the importance of fore;aft balance when we are skiing steeper terrain, okay we've got to move forward and aft to make those tails grip. So we started out getting you to feel your feet and the pressure through your feet. We then looked at pulling the feet forward through the end of the turn and then taking your skis off on a steep slope at 45 degrees angle to feel your posture on that slope, and then we just put it into our skiing. So i hope you guys enjoyed that information i hope it really helps in your skiing and see you next time!
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Channel: Carv
Views: 303,387
Rating: 4.9455914 out of 5
Keywords: Skiing, carve skiing, how to ski, ski instruction, Carv, ski technique videos, ski training, expert skiing, ski improvement videos, スキー, горные лыжи, 滑雪, Skifahren, Sci, ski, ski carving, how to turn, ski vlog, learn to ski, alpine skiing, how to turn on skis, ski instructor, ski lessons, ski balance, skiing balance, how to ski on steeps, Skiing short turns, short turns, steep skiing, ski with balance, tom gellie, aspen, colorado skiing, ski aspen, steep slopes, ski stance
Id: 6sdEFYz7i2g
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Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)
Published: Thu Feb 04 2021
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