...and a second thought here....
I recently went to my first PSIA National Academy, a one-week instructional event held at Snowbird, Utah. I skied with PSIA's best that week. At one point (in chopped up cruddy snow) my group leader had me lead the new turn with my new outside arm, as seen in the video James just posted.
So there you go; using the upper body to motor a turn is certainly not dead.
Jealous!....me jealous. Heck, I didnt even make Spring Rally this year!
I have always held with the theory that to throw movement patterns out for the sake of trend is for lemmings!......You can go back past Harb, LeMaster, Joubert, Ericson, Killy, Kruckenhauser, Allais, Schneider, Zdarsky and Norheim....hell, back past the Birkenbeiners for gods sake, and trace all the greatest moves we do today...all that is held on high as a perfection of the evolution of skiing, back to the earliest roots.
Im reading Jouberts book now....and we have come a long way from even there. Back in the 80s, braking moves were all the rage to control speed at least through intermediate levels. ....But if you dig deeper, and read between the lines: what the equipment had to offer, each country's stylistic lineage, and the mindsets...you can see good skiing and the efficient basic movement patterns there and solidly repeating themselves throughout (modern.....lets say 1937 and on....) history. Great skiing morphs with the equipment as does accepted style, but the fundamentals hardly go away, in fact they really must stay intact. (bipeds that we are and all that)
@Kneale Brownson posted: "The French had an upper body rotation into the turn accompanied by an extension.......in the 1940s!!! The guy who taught it to me as my first parallel turns described it: Down, Up and Around. I remember him shouting that chant repeatedly to our group of kiddos. The outside arm was to swing around as the shoulders dove into the turn direction from being square with the skis in a flexed traverse position."
Kneale, I assume you had this type of turn initiation deeply embedded in your muscle memory at an early age. When shaped skis came along, how much trouble was it for you to convert over to initiating with your feet and legs rather than using all that upper body rotational momentum? Do you remember the process? Did it happen slowly and unconsciously, or was it a deliberate conversion? Was it easy?
How about when you get a student who turns this way... how much difficulty do you encounter teaching them to start their turns with their feet and legs?
I'm asking because I started skiing on shaped skis and never went through this change-over.
(I did however go through all kinds of other change-overs due to picking up many dysfunctional habits from the start.)
Sorry, I don't mean to hijack the question, Liquid....Im sure Kneale has his own take...but this really resonated with me....
It took me years of skiing to embrace the new "skiing moderne" we are all aspiring to these days. Each and every "style" I have learned from the early 70s when I started because it was all so much fun, is difficult to let go of and takes a mindset for change to accept and then adopt evolving movement patterns. For me, its the braking moves from shortswing and wedlin, and check-hops......(and Ill throw a few in here and there, just for history's sake)
Growth Mindset has been a buzzword in the K-12 teaching community lately and embraces flexibility of the mind.....its a good read, actually.......
The equipment is surely new. Im seeing that this fact alone is largely the impetus for new movement patterns. We have looked to the racing world for decades to try to define what GREAT skiing is.....and then have tried to break it down and dissect it all so we can emulate it.
DIRT is another hugely morphing factor historically......The fundamental skills (BREP) are still intact.....but with regards to how, how much, when and where in a turn we apply the skills have shifted over the years. Its like thinking about rotary application or flexion and extension in moguls as opposed to GS turns. We skied both in the 70's.....but the application of the skills was approached with a different mindset on different equipment.
LIke Kneale, I learned "UP....DOWN....AROUND"..... dont say that now, however!.....but good skiing is still in there...we just have to be aware of how we apply and teach it.
I am embracing "teaching to strengths", where we work with the strengths a skier has so that we are taking away as little as possible. If we must take something away, like a really bad habit, then we must replace it with a good one...... We know that if a beginning skier is using a wide platform it's for security. I like to work with the platform, knowing that over time, I can introduce other movement patterns that will reduce the platform by adding other skills......as opposed to simply saying...."keep your feet closer together"
MarkoJP touched on this I think:
When thinking about how to work with excessive upper body rotation, I like to introduce the concept of "re-focusing the energy" ....all that arm movement, or upper body swing, or hip steering, can be re-focused with awareness exercises. given the right terrain and guidance, comfort can be found by adding energy skills to the lower body.....once the efficiency is realized, the other patterns fade. Its good to keep some stabilizing energy in the core, which can also generate that "wind up" used to then release the legs and skis to seek the fall line. the legs can begin to activate and take the energy from the release and continue to guide the feet and skis....
Bcubed, I would love to see a clip of some "two step" and "Mambo", ect....
JP
