Best ski tip you ever got

[litterbug]

Ooh, good ideas!

 

[mountainxtc]

Consider this: upper body instability is often a symptom of lower body issues. If your hand/pole is dragging, it indicates imbalance in the lateral plane. If you focus on improving that at the source (being balanced over your outside ski) then the hand should fix itself. Of course, there is something to be said for focusing on a stable upper body to complement this also... make sure your pole plant is coming from the wrist, not more of the (or the entire) arm, and that you don't leave it behind in the snow....

 

[litterbug]

Wow, you sure fit a lot of information into a small paragraph! Noone taught me the pole plant, so I had no idea where it was supposed to come from. What I don't know could fill a couple sets of Encyclopedia Brittanica and have enough left over for a few Oxford English Dictionaries.

I mostly understood everything but "lateral plane." Is the lateral plane the the plane dividing the front and back of the body, or the one dividing the two sides of the body?

As for balance, that's why I just ordered Rick Schnellman's basic balance and basic edging DVDs. I'm great at staying upright, but in terms of good skiing my body is only very generally where & how it's supposed to be. Time for a lesson once the whiteout stops.

 

[mountainxtc]

Wow, you sure fit a lot of information into a small paragraph! Noone taught me the pole plant, so I had no idea where it was supposed to come from. What I don't know could fill a couple sets of Encyclopedia Brittanica and have enough left over for a few Oxford English Dictionaries.

I mostly understood everything but "lateral plane." Is the lateral plane the the plane dividing the front and back of the body, or the one dividing the two sides of the body?

As for balance, that's why I just ordered Rick Schnellman's basic balance and basic edging DVDs. I'm great at staying upright, but in terms of good skiing my body is only very generally where & how it's supposed to be. Time for a lesson once the whiteout stops.

LOL, sorry for that, it's tough without meeting y'all to know how much everyone already knows. Usually I can mostly glean that from watching you ski a run

First, are you comfortably skiing strong parallel turns on blue runs? If so, get a lesson and ask to be taught pole planting. It will help in SO many ways. In fact, I might even start a thread about all of them!!

We talk about 4 planes of balance in skiing.

1. Fore/Aft: where you weight is in relation to the tip vs tail of your skis. Line going vertically up from the center of your boot (i.e. under the arch of your foot).

2. Lateral: where your weight is in relation to left/right of your skis. Line going vertically down from the middle of your head (i.e. through your nose down to the snow). So you were correct when you said the line dividing the two sides.

3. Vertical: how tall/small you are.

4. Rotational: a hard plane to describe, but basically meaning how aligned/twisted you are.

 

[bluebird]

recent one - BREATH...relax your upper body (quiet) and let your legs do the work..it helps...when i feel myself tensing up I do some semi deep breathing and my skiing loosens up and i begin to really rip.

 

[Anna]

Pole plants:

Keep your arms like CHIPMONK ARMS! (forward bent up a dash)

Then to plant and swing your poles, use a wrist flick / hand flick movement.

I think that's the best way I can describe it using our LOVELY SkiDiva terms!

Ah, heck JUST BURN THE SHED!!

 

[B.E.G.]

Pole plants:

Keep your arms like CHIPMONK ARMS! (forward bent up a dash)

Then to plant and swing your poles, use a wrist flick / hand flick movement.

I think that's the best way I can describe it using our LOVELY SkiDiva terms!

Ah, heck JUST BURN THE SHED!!

THAT visual is helpful! I think I keep my arms too low when I ski. Thanks!

 

[volklgirl]

We've always called our arm positioning "hugging the bear".

 

[snow addict]

Actually, the only time I hurt myself in a fall this season was in the lesson where the instructor was trying to teach me a smeared turn; while sideslipping, I ran over the tip of my downhill pole and did a poorly-executed cartwheel in which I fell entirely on the left side of my ribcage. Hurt for weeks!

So something has got me dropping my inside arm. I'll pay more attention this next ski-day (to the degree I can when it's snowing hard enough to fill my tracks in before I'm more than 100 yards away!).

I was told that when sideslipping it's very important to keep your poles out of your way as it may result in a really bad fall and even injury (sideslipping is often used on a steep terrain). So in this case with shoulders square and skis across the fall line my downhill arm is not exactly forward, it's kind of dropped so that the poles are pointing the other way from where I am going. but I keep it up in moguls so that to be ready to plant it whenever I need to turn.

 

[litterbug]

What the hell is burning the shed, already??

 

[RhodySkier]

From another thead

To explain the connection ... Delawhere and I were on the lift when she told me about the fire. We talked about how her FIL didn't really mean for the other shed to catch on fire. It just happened. But he also didn't not start the fire on the old shed out of fear that something bad might happen, such as, fire breaking out in a nearby shed full of flammables!

We decided we should be more like that with skiing -- just do what we want to do and not be paralyzed by thinking about the possible bad outcomes. We charged off that lift and started skiing whatever looked interesting -- black diamonds, black diamonds with moguls, trees -- things that fear might otherwise have kept us from trying.

That shed-burning incident was an inspiration. It led us to, I believe, one of the best ski days either of us had ever had. And, of course, it was hugely fun to call out "Burn the Shed!" to each other as we got ready to start down a new run.

Hmmm ... wonder what the tree-chopping incident is trying to tell us.

Burn the shed!

 

[litterbug]

Thanks!

 

[Jilly]

I've had a problem keeping my feet wide enough for the CSIA to pass my skiing for level 3. This past fall at the members convention we had a lot of time for indoor sessions as it rained one day and the mountain didn't even open. We did some talking about getting ideas across to students. As mentioned in other post people learn differently. One of the level 4 course conductors was talking about a student that wouldn't/couldn't get her feet apart. He tried many things except getting out the bungee cord.

Eventually he was watching her ski and kept hearing a noise. It was the skis clicking together at the tips. He asked his student, do you hear that noise? Yes! Well quit making it! That worked.

Well its working for me too. As soon as I hear the clicking noise, its a signal to get my feet apart.

So, the tip is - quit making that noise!

 

[Anna]

Jilly!
I had the same trouble when getting back into skiing last winter after 12 years away. I came off straights into shovels

I must say that I find the wider stance VERY easy and comfy - sport "pounce" stance almost except without the bum sticking out! Only thing is that i look very knock-kneed...

Anyway to improve posture etc etc so as to NOT look knock kneed?

 

[MaineSkiLady]

Jilly!
Only thing is that i look very knock-kneed...

Anyway to improve posture etc etc so as to NOT look knock kneed?

The dreaded "q angle" - the angle from which many (if not most?) women's femurs emerge from the hip socket. Sometimes, just a proper footbed can provide sufficient correction of this. Sometimes, boot cuff adjustment is needed. And sometimes, full canting of boot sole has to happen. Best to get your alignment checked. Correcting/minimizing this can make a world of difference.

 

[gardenmary]

The dreaded "q angle" - the angle from which many (if not most?) women's femurs emerge from the hip socket. Sometimes, just a proper footbed can provide sufficient correction of this. Sometimes, boot cuff adjustment is needed. And sometimes, full canting of boot sole has to happen. Best to get your alignment checked. Correcting/minimizing this can make a world of difference.

Agreed, wholeheartedly. I have extremely flat feet - textbook pronation, really - and my boots are canted to force my knees apart. It made all the difference in the world - no more knees knocking together, ergo no more ski tips crossing. My skiing immediately improved in a big way. I also have heel lifts and SuperFeet green wide insoles, and have had my bootfitter in Utah do some bump-outs for bunions. Huge, huge improvement. He is a certified pedorthist as well as a bootfitter, so he really knows his stuff.