Femur Point |
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The D-Team coaches for this years Mini-Academy were Sean Warman, Kevin Mitchell and Nancy Oakes. As usual the groups consisted of Level II and III certified instructors, most with many years of experience. Our group skied with Sean. This was his first visit to Afton Alps and his first year on the Demo Team. Sean’s approach towards the two days was more from an observing and coaching perspective. We would lap past him as he stood on the slope. He pulled us aside individually, giving us guidance to our performance. There were a few times when we would all go through similar exercise sequences, but mostly it was task skiing, guided discovery and skiing laps around him. Sean’s approach allowed each of us maximum skiing time when lapping and very personal direction when he pulled us aside. He would lap with us from time-to-time, but he really kept us skiing. We skied mostly on intermediate to advanced terrain. To gather information for this article, I would join Sean in his private huddles or interview one of the participants on the chair as to what Sean’s comments were. This article is a conglomeration of those observations and interviews. Sean felt that many skiers had become reliant on their
new side cut with the shaped skis and had forgotten some of the components
to effective skiing. How to move into the turn was one of these elements.
Sean noted that at the transition, you want to stand against your feet.
He asked: “Are your hips over your feet at the transition between turns?”
Sean then followed this question with the observation that if a skier
just relaxes to flatten their skis when they release their edges, the
ski will often get forward, in front of the hips—leaving the mass of
he skier behind their feet. In this case, the legs are often flexed,
thus they loose the ability to absorb for terrain changes at the transition
between turns. Anyone remember the “jet turn”? During this same time, Sean observed some very strong skiers in the group could really carve with great angulation. However, at the transition they did not release all of their angles. They stayed rather flexed and crunched. He encouraged them to get long at the transition so they could redevelop the angles as needed with each turn. The above “femur point” comment was added to help them as well. As many in the group angulated, they settled back. With
this group, the outside femur points towards the tips of the skis and
their hips were behind their feet. Sean requested that as they angulate,
their outside femur should point towards the top skin of their skis
and be perpendicular to the top skin or pointing near the binding toe
piece both during the angulation phase of the turn and the transition
between turns. This got their hips up and over their feet within the
arc of the turn and between turn transitions. A lot of turns were made
practicing this femur pointing. Next, we did the same two-footed traverse to a balanced one-footed traverse on the uphill ski. Then, if we were in balance, we were to turn downhill, going very slow only on the one, now the outside ski. During this sequence the uphill leg needs to change its shape and where the femur points. In the two-footed traverse, the balancing leg is the downhill one, while the uphill leg is shorter due to the slope pitch with its femur pointed towards the tip of the ski. As soon as you move to the uphill ski traverse, the uphill leg’s femur now has to point towards the toe piece of the binding and maintain this pointing during the slow turn downhill. If this is not done, you get into the back seat. We did these very slow, turning back up the hill to control speed before we entered into our next traverse. Staying in light shin contact with the front of both boots was mentioned to a few. We then initiated our turns from a two-footed traverse
with the following requests. We eventually eliminated the two-footed traverse and linked some very slow parallel turns with the same above requests. Adding the femur point towards the top piece of the binding kept our hips from dropping behind our feet. We were to reduce the skidding and arc the bottom halves of our turns by increasing the edging, while still keeping the speed down by turning uphill. Wide and constant stance, flatten and change edges equally and together, keeping both skis on the snow; these turns became rail-like. We started to pick up our speed and fun level. When
we were doing this correctly with our outside femur pointing perpendicular
towards our ski in our most angulated and carving portion of the turn,
we could feel our inside knee rise as we increased our angulation. But
the outside femur has to remain perpendicular to its ski. The integration of these skills into short radius turns
started with several runs of linked pivot slips in a narrow corridor.
Eventually we added subtle additional edging to make these carved. After
skiing many short radius runs with Sean giving us additional personal
coaching, he requested that we use as little edge as we could to accomplish
our desired carved turn, but to continually increase the edging as the
turn develops. It amazed quite a few on how much extra edging they had
applied at different phases of the turn, more out of habit rather than
necessity. This locked them laterally and back. You could see it in
where the femur of the outside ski was pointing, mostly towards the
ski tips and not towards the toe piece. A little less edging, but continual
increase helped the body move through the turn over the feet, rather
than getting the upper body locked behind and laterally. This static exercise helped cement the activity required in the legs to keep our upper body ahead and over our feet as we moved through the transition between turns. We practiced this static task a lot until we got it right. The best practice was doing it with our eyes closed. This helped isolate the activity in the legs. Many had lost the forward flexing of the ankles to maintain shin contact against both boots in the tug of war. It was hard to stay forward at the turn transition when you were already back at the last turns finish. The overall goal in skiing is balancing on sliding objects, while changing the primary support from one outside ski to another. We need to move in the direction the ski is sliding and use our legs to redirect our movement. As a group many skiers tend to move vertically or laterally, but rarely forward enough. Our turn transition moves are often too quick and miss-directed. He reminded us of his earlier requests: We all left skiing better than we did when we started.
The Mini-Academy is a great way to spend two quality days with a D-Team
member, skiing at a very high level and not having to purchase an airline
ticket. We did not have any of the distractions that the mountains have.
Tram rides, powder and steep chutes can really get in the way of a good
progression. ;) If you want a spot in our next Mini-Academy, sign up
before Christmas to assure your spot. |
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