• Women skiers, this is the place for you -- an online community without the male-orientation you'll find in conventional ski magazines and internet ski forums. At TheSkiDiva.com, you can connect with other women to talk about skiing in a way that you can relate to, about things that you find of interest. Be sure to join our community to participate (women only, please!). Registration is fast and simple. Just be sure to add [email protected] to your address book so your registration activation emails won't be routed as spam. And please give careful consideration to your user name -- it will not be changed once your registration is confirmed.

Overcame so much and question

Peaheartsmama

Ski Diva Extraordinaire
^^This. Figuring out how to ski in order to stay "not aft" is the most important thing anyone can do to improve their skiing and to avoid running out of steam early. Working on this never ends. And if the old habits are deeply embedded, as they probably are, it takes enormous determination to maintain a focus on doing what is needed to stay "not aft." Knowing what is needed is best learned in a lesson, and probably repeat lessons will be needed to see if gains have stuck, gotten morphed into something else, or been lost altogether.

Skiing is full of distractions. The snow underfoot changes from turn to turn, moving obstacles (people) pass too close and at dangerous speeds, people below you move into your line, the pitch alters, flat light obscures who-knows-what. When these thing happen, and they do with every run, practicing a new movement pattern that should help with staying "not aft" for the whole run is lost. That focus gets put on the back burner without the skier even realizing it.

Changing one's stance for the better means using conscious control to not let the old stance come back. It also requires that the skier feel when the balance over the skis is aft or not, because constant adjustments are required; good stance is not static.

With all the distractions, as soon as one has to think consciously about anything else the focus is lost.

For this reason, it takes seasons to replace an ineffective stance with a much better one, and to learn to proprioceptively notice when one is aft or not so adjustments can be made on the fly.

Gear can mess this process up. How high your heels are compared to your toes (a result of binding and boot anatomy), the boot's forward lean, the binding placement on the ski, and one's personal anatomy all contribute to how stance needs to be adjusted.

And then there's the issue of what "not aft" means. People disagree. Instructors disagree. So advice from multiple sources can sound contradictory. Some instructors say stay forward, some say stay centered. Some say close the ankles; others say open and close them. Some say rock from forward to aft, but just a little. It just depends on what works for each person, and who is giving the advice.

To self-diagnose if one is aft, here are two things to check.
1. If one's quads are quivering at the end of the day or sore the next morning and if the knees are aching or warm and inflamed, if ibuprophen is needed after a ski day, then probably the skier is aft.
2. If the skier can't pick up the tail of the inside ski during a turn while keeping its tip on the snow, that probably means the skier is aft and possibly also leaning inside (banking).

Being aft is often accompanied by being inside. These are a major problems for skiers who do not regularly take lessons to help keep these issues in check.

So insightful! Love how you described being aft and inside! I think I’m like that when I’m skiing too defensively trying to brace myself or scrubbing speed... one good thing is that my quads don’t burn nearly as much as they used to but I do notice some soreness in the knees...
 

Latest posts

Members online

Forum statistics

Threads
26,237
Messages
497,679
Members
8,503
Latest member
MermaidKelly
Top