2ski

The Lazy Fast Turn With Flat Skis

Get going on a fast traverse. Your upper body can be facing the ski tips, unlike the short turns. Because you are skiing on a reasonably flat slope, there will not be the need to edge, so you will be standing quite upright with your knees only slightly bent over the skis just to give a bit of shock absorption. This means that they will be virtually flat on the snow.

To initiate the turn you must now anticipate by rising into an upright position, and at the same time projecting your weight forward towards an imaginary spot about 12″ to the downhill side of your ski tips. This projecting will do two things. First it will unweight the back of the skis, and secondly, because your body is now facing slightly down the hill, your natural torsion will be brought into play. As the skis come round into the fall line, apply slight pressure forward on the inside edge of the downhill ski. This will help you to come round more smoothly.

If you initiate the turn with a stem you are cheating.

Try to describe a perfect arc on the snow. There should be no pushing down on the back of the lower ski to get the skis round against the fall line and therefore brake them. The basic fast turn is designed to give you a feel for accelerating into the fall line. It has little or no practical use. I use it at the end of the day when I’m trying to get home quickly and haven’t the energy to angulate and edge the skis into more precise turns.

This turn should not be used on a crowded piste.

Remember that your weight should always be slightly forward of the middle of your foot. Read the rest of this entry »

The snow is falling. We all know how you feel because we feel it too. It’s time to dust the cobwebs off the skis, check your winter sports insurance and head for the high mountains.

But there are one or two niggling little doubts in the back of your mind. Will I remember how to do it? What happens if I make a clot of myself pushing off for the first run of the season in front of my friends?

Well here’s some good news for you; this series of articles are designed to give you a new look at skiing technique. There will be no pictures of skiers with bent knees holding out their arms in graceful postures. There will be no arrows pointing here and there to demonstrate pressure points, weight distribution and ski torque. It will just be you and me out on the ski slopes.

I’d like to provide food for your own imagination rather than hitting you with a lot of teckie stuff. I’d like to cut through all the scientific mumbo jumbo that surrounds the sport of skiing, and promotes the myth that skiing technique is too tricky by half. A lot of the stuff will be a bit controversial. But that’s not a problem. It’s a useful stimulant.

Back in 1928 when he was a student in Kitzbuhel Austria, Ian Fleming said to his tutor, ‘Difficult to ski? Surely it can’t be difficult to ski? One falls over, or one doesn’t fall over. It’s as simple as that!’ He was a fit, athletic nineteen year old drawn into a sport that had just begun to lay the foundations of modern day skiing.

There were no instructors in those days; the local mountain men were merely guides, bemused at the antics of these lunatic Englishmen. It was only later that they conceived the idea of ski school, setting down rules of instruction based on those early days. Read the rest of this entry »

The plough parallel combines a plough and a parallel, would you believe, the parallel bit involving a rotational movement of the inner thigh and bringing the skis parallel for the majority of the turn. The plough is used to start the turn, and before reaching the fall line the unweighted ski is slid in parallel to the other to provide the parallel finish. At the start of the turn a pole plant is usually incorporated in order to germinate the seeds of anticipation, angulation, and a minimal unweighting movement.

From a traverse the outside thigh is rotated to move the ski into the plough position. At the same time the skier bends slightly at the knees and hips and plants the opposite pole just back from the tip of his inside ski. As the weighted ploughed ski approaches the fall line the skier rises up. The inside ski is brought in parallel as the skier rises up. At his stage the turn becomes a parallel turn as the initially ploughed ski has now become partially unweighted by the up movement. It continues to turn across the fall line, and from his somewhat upright stance the skier drops down again for the next pole plant.

This is the theory, but in practice it is quite difficult to combine a pole plant with one side of the body and a stem with the other. If the pupil finds it too difficult, the pole plant can be passed over until practising the Parallel and Parallel stop.

There is, however, a major problem with the plough parallel as a skier can become a victim of its very success. It is a reasonably uncomplicated turn to master in its basic form without a pole plant, ie just a quick stem to get the ski started in the turn, and a sliding in of the inside ski soon after. Once mastered in this form it becomes the mainstay of most skiers’ repertoire. As the mileage increases, Read the rest of this entry »