I COMMITTED A SKI COACHING SIN – AND PROSTRATE MYSELF BEFORE YOU
What I did NOT do, was to carefully read what I had written; I just wrote it and posted it. I sincerely apologise.
In the process I completely reversed some its meanings! A worrying aspect of this is that nobody took me up on it!
I wrote -
“You will be able to see that each of those dashed lines is drawn (as nearly as a crude sketch could get it) at a tangent to the radius at that point. It is at 90º to that radius.”
This an error– the dashed lines are the radii. It's the solid lines that are at 90º to the radius. The solid lines are the tangents.
If you had your torso at right-angles to the dashed lines, you would look peculiar in the extreme, and if you could ski like that you'd make a good contortionist!
I also wrote -
“Good skiers will have their torsos oriented in the direction of the dashed line, with the axis across their shoulders and their hands at right angles to the dashed line. “
“Aiming off”
What that should have said is -
“Good skiers will have their torsos (usually) oriented in the direction of the SOLID line, with the axis across their shoulders and their hands, at right angles to the dashed line.
You will see that the angle made between the solid line, and the direction in which the skis are pointing, constantly changes as the arc progresses. We do not want our torsos to be aimed directly in the direction of the ski tips.
And as your skis track round the arc, your torso will always be pointing a little less round it than the skis are – always a little “outward” of it.
Not “always facing down the mountain” as they used to teach in the olden days, twisting your body around and adopting “counter-rotation”, but constantly adjusting to face the direction you would continue to travel in, were you to suddenly detach from your skis.
Ideally, you want to always face where you want to go, irrespective of where your skis are pointing. I remember once getting scared going round a bend a bit too fast on my motor bike, and staring straight ahead, which was not where I wanted to go: but it was, regrettably, where I went, instead of round the bend. It's the same principle.
Skiing shapes that give you some feedback (Hands, shoulders, and hips).
Some key things to notice, in order to get some feedback as to whether and to what degree you are doing this “aiming off”, are that 1) your inside hand will be slightly further forward than your outer hand; 2) your inner shoulder will be slightly in advance of your outer shoulder; 3) if you have sufficient available attention span ( more readily available when you're skiing at self-training speeds ) you may be able to confirm that this same principle applies to you hips as well – the inner hip will be ahead of your outer hip.
Overall, your torso will ideally be “aiming off” slightly toward the outside of the arc your skis are drawing, not directly following in the line the skis are describing. Once thing it does is to have you already set up for the next arc; the next change of direction, which will in consequence initiate more readily.
So, my apologies for having inadvertently written “dashed line” where, in places, I meant “solid line”.
Except in these few inadvertent errors the blog is accurate. If I've left you confused – please do email me and we'll clarify. Sorry to have presented it wrongly.
Ski well!
Bob
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