liquidfeet
Ski Diva Extraordinaire
I just stumbled upon this article about the strain wide skis (for this article, this means 90mm and up) put on the skier's knees. What do people here think?
https://realskiers.com/revelations/why-wide-skis-arent-good-for-your-knees/
Some excerpts:
--Ground Reaction Force is a major contributor to knee vulnerability on wide skis that also causes skiers to change how they navigate downhill.
--Depending on snow density and water content, it takes 8 to 14 inches of snow to reduce the negative effects GRF. When you’re romping around on 6 to 8 inches, GRF is with you all the way. The wider the ski, the more GRF is multiplied and the greater the strain on knee ligaments when trying to get the ski on edge.
--Whether by instinctive reaction or conscious decision, a skier with a wide ski on hard snow defuses GRF simply by not edging.
--While being in a constant power drift helps reduce knee strain to some degree, it also entails an inherent loss of control.
--Wide skis on hard snow are a bad idea, period.
--My theory is that a ski’s width is essentially invisible to the skier’s knee as long as the ski is no wider than the skier’s tibia head, or the point of ligament attachment. When advising skiers on ski width, my homemade metric is most men can ski up to a 100mm-wide ski without feeling routine strain when edged, while for women this guideline is 90mm.
--One reason no one knows exactly how wide is too wide is that research in this field requires money, perseverance and patience to test any proposition about ski-skier interaction. Money for this purpose doesn’t drop from the sky. When Prof. Seifert sought funding from the National Institute of Health, his request was denied on the grounds that skiing was an elitist sport. Ouch.
https://realskiers.com/revelations/why-wide-skis-arent-good-for-your-knees/
Some excerpts:
--Ground Reaction Force is a major contributor to knee vulnerability on wide skis that also causes skiers to change how they navigate downhill.
--Depending on snow density and water content, it takes 8 to 14 inches of snow to reduce the negative effects GRF. When you’re romping around on 6 to 8 inches, GRF is with you all the way. The wider the ski, the more GRF is multiplied and the greater the strain on knee ligaments when trying to get the ski on edge.
--Whether by instinctive reaction or conscious decision, a skier with a wide ski on hard snow defuses GRF simply by not edging.
--While being in a constant power drift helps reduce knee strain to some degree, it also entails an inherent loss of control.
--Wide skis on hard snow are a bad idea, period.
--My theory is that a ski’s width is essentially invisible to the skier’s knee as long as the ski is no wider than the skier’s tibia head, or the point of ligament attachment. When advising skiers on ski width, my homemade metric is most men can ski up to a 100mm-wide ski without feeling routine strain when edged, while for women this guideline is 90mm.
--One reason no one knows exactly how wide is too wide is that research in this field requires money, perseverance and patience to test any proposition about ski-skier interaction. Money for this purpose doesn’t drop from the sky. When Prof. Seifert sought funding from the National Institute of Health, his request was denied on the grounds that skiing was an elitist sport. Ouch.