Go to Start of Better Skiing

1- BASIC CONSIDERATIONS - Part B

People often say to me ‘Can you teach me to have more style?’, and I have to reply ‘Don’t come to me pal, I’m as stylish as the hunchback of Notre Dame’. I’ve never gone much for style really. Style can go jump in the lake as far as I’m concerned. You can have a style of your own. In fact everyone develops their own individual style from pig ugly to amazingly beautiful (the second type being restricted to the fairer sex) without much thought, but there are people who spend a lot of time trying to develop it, and a lot of people who believe that to attain it will improve their performance. Off the slopes in the night club this is indeed the case, but not on the slopes. Sometimes you see the odd person coming down towards the restaurant. ‘Isn’t Hugo a beautiful skier?’ says someone on the next table. Here he comes with his legs locked together in a pink shantung Versace suit. His arms are held out ever so slightly from his body, as he does perfect linked turns, his skis flat on the smooth piste. Put him in the bumps after a three course lunch, a bottle of wine and three pear schnapps, and I’d like to see how stylish he is then.

Did Franz Klammer have style? Not the sort of style that can be taught he didn’t. No, forget about style.

There are several ways to improve your balance but no short cuts to perfecting it. Balance depends on a combination of mileage, at what age you started to ski, and whether you have done any similar sports that involved balancing such as cycling or riding horses. If you started as a very young child, your balance will have come naturally, and there will be no concept of skiing being 'easy' or 'difficult'. If you started later in life, your balance will not become second nature until you have skied a very long way. You will have to rely on muscle power and fitness to hold you up and hold you steady at the start. This reliance will decline as your balance improves. What also helps considerably with your balance is thinking about where your weight is at any given moment and the type of snow you are skiing on. This is discussed in detail later.

To improve your balance try keeping your skis about four inches apart, rather than trying to keep them together. I don’t care how close the instructor has his skis. He is only trying to look stylish. It may be a little tricky keeping the skis parallel to start with as they sometimes tend to cross, but they will soon grow out of this. Get a little lower down too. I have always been a strong advocate of the English Lavatory Position (ELP) as it lowers your centre of gravity, and gives you a wider stance, rather like a low slung, wide wheeled sports car. I am not saying that the English Lavatory Position differs from any other country’s lavatory position. It may just as well be the Australian Lavatory Position or even the American Lavatory Position. Actually, ALP is less isolationist in this computer age so we’ll make the change as of now.

The wider stance also gives you more latitude with your centre of weight which can swing to a certain extent between the two skis. I discuss this in more detail under the heading ‘The Uphill Ski’ (ch10).

Concentrate on keeping your weight right in the middle of your feet unless told otherwise. As you have probably never thought about where your weight is on your feet even off skis - after all it’s not something anyone spends a lot of time thinking about - try experimenting now. Just stand up with your knees a little bent and rock slowly backwards and forwards. OK, I realise you’re in the bathtub, so just climb out and give it a go before you forget. It’s quite a strange thing to do - ball of the foot, instep, heel, and back to ball of the foot - not far, but it can make a lot of difference to your balance while skiing.

Keeping your weight right on the middle of your feet therefore gives you a wider margin for error before your fore and aft balance goes, your longitudinal balance, and the ALP position lowers your centre of gravity to give you a more stable lateral balance.

You will have gathered that if you are tooling around in the ALP mode, style will no longer be uppermost in your mind. but the more miles you put under your skis, the sooner your skis will start coming together, and the more upright you will become. In short, your own personal style will improve but it should be an unconscious progression.

You can improve your balance by doing a fairly simple exercise at any time during the year. Every time you do your regular pre-skiing exercise routine why not spend ten minutes trying to walk along something narrow? I used a post and rail fence in the garden. The top rail was about an inch and a half wide and thirty feet long. It was only three feet above the ground, so I didn’t do too much damage when I fell off, which was quite often. I certainly improved my balance on the post and rails, but I can’t be certain whether my ski balance improved! This is something that needs a bit more evidential proof before writing it in stone, but I felt it was doing some good - especially to the leg muscles.

I recently met someone for the first time who was doing t’ai chi. After an hour of tuition I suddenly realised that this ancient form of Chinese ritualistic exercise was just the thing to improve balance. It is especially useful as we get older and the ligaments and muscles which help us to stand up weaken naturally; t’ai chi encourages them to keep on working. It also gives us an understanding of where our body is in the space around us, and I found it strangely invigorating - both physically and mentally. A course with a tutor is obligatory, preferably one to one until the moves have been learnt, and then you can go it alone or in a class of fellow t’ai chi’ers.

'How do you mean - learn to ski? One just skis or one falls over - it's as simple as that!' Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, 1928

Obviously the high mileage you are clocking up skiing is going to mean that initially you will be falling a lot more. This may be bad for your ego and street cred, but at this stage in the new learning progress you will have to abandon them.

Falling is a critical part of the learning process. It helps to reduce fear, and strangely enough often reduces injury if done properly! You must learn to relax; if you tense up as you fall you will hurt yourself far more. You normally fall when you go over your limit, and if you are developing a more positive attitude to skiing, this will happen often.

Accept that you are going to fall a lot and you will learn to relax while you are doing it.

Never despair because you are falling too much! There will be off days when you are always falling and can’t ski at all. You must accept it. Even the best skiers do it. They usually take the rest of the day off and go home and read a good book like this one.

If you have time to think of it, try to fall backwards with your backside dropping uphill from your skis and relax while you are doing it. This may be obvious to most people but it is surprising how many people fight it and end up in the most awful tangle. A fast, controlled lie down with both skis in the air can be the most satisfying fall, as it’s possible to get straight back up and everybody watching thinks you have just performed your favourite trick.

After you have notched up a few hundred falls (some of which you will class bad crashes), I have no doubt that you will be controlling most of the falls and some of the crashes. You must accept that the rest of the crashes may cause injury - that is the nature of the sport - and I discuss this in more detail later.

As a general rule a better skier’s upper body, including his head, should face down the hill. The reason for this is not as obvious as you may have been led to believe. No doubt your teachers have made you face down the hill before, and you might have thought that this was solely to prevent you from facing up the hill and stop you from doing all those interesting things like backwards snow ploughs and skis crossing at the back etc. You would be right to assume this, but it is only the half of the reason.

Here is an example to show why your body should face down the slope. For now treat it as a purely theoretical experiment. By all means try it if you don’t believe me, but for now just imagine you are doing it.

Find a good friend and go hang him from a tree branch by his arms, so that his skis are perhaps six inches off the ground. Now get the tips of both skis and move them round so that they are at right angles to your friends line of sight, or until he screams. His head and most of his upper body should still be facing forwards. If you let go of the skis (make sure you get out of the way quickly), the skis will swing back of their own accord to their original position. In this weightless state they swing back quite simply because of the tension in the muscles and ligaments of your friend. The thigh and stomach muscles, and the ligaments holding him together are wound up like a rubber band, and so long as the skier’s body is facing down the hill, a turned ski will tend to swing back in the same direction when unweighted. Simple isn’t it?

I said earlier that as a general rule the upper body should always face downhill, but there are a few occasions when it doesn’t matter, and one or two occasions when it is even beneficial to face uphill.

For example, it is quite in order for your upper body to be facing your ski tips when tooling along on a fast traverse, or on a path, or going straight down the fall line without turning. Perhaps you are searching for goats high up above you as you tool along, but you must be aware that, depending on your speed, the slightest twist of your upper body, and even your hands and your head, can affect the direction of your skis.

As I have said, at the start of some long fast turns it is even beneficial to turn the upper body ever so slightly into the slope. This movement involves little more than bringing the downhill arm up across the chest, but it has the remarkable effect of sliding the tail of the skis round. It is like a miniature christie stop in preparation for the next turn. This action, known as contre virage, is explained  later (ch7) but again demonstrates the torsional springlike power the muscles and other bits of your body can have on the skis' direction. You may have seen old film footage of skiers coming down hills before the war, where they did an exaggerated contre virage into the slope before the turn, and then twisted their upper bodies round in the opposite direction with a hurling movement of their outside arm. The long heavy wooden skis of the time readily came after their owners, like obedient dogs.

Try hurling your upper body around sometimes to start a turn without any unweighting or steering, and see what happens. The skis should follow. You will get a few funny looks, but after all the other silly things you will be doing to become a better skier, who cares?

Let's now take a look at the four dangly bits - the arms and the legs. A key word here is angulation, and that means almost what it says, ie a bending of the hips and the knees. Its main purpose is to put the skis on their edges. This is done by bending the knees (the lower one more than the upper one), in towards the slope, and lowering the upper body by bending at the hips. It is generally done so that the weight stays over the middle of the feet and over the bottom ski, but not always. Varying degrees of angulation will be used to put the skis on their edges mostly in the turns, and by the time you have been doing this for a day or two, you will be glad that you read about fitness! Your muscles and ligaments are going to be well exercised.

When you angulate, your upper body may be facing the ski tips, or facing down the hill, or maybe somewhere in between, depending on the type of turn you are doing. What governs your upper body position, and to a certain extent how much you angulate, is what you do with your poles. Where you put your poles to get your upper body in the right position is called anticipation. I also take anticipation to mean full use of your eyes, and the sensitivity of your feet, and I'll elaborate on that shortly.

Whenever I mention a pole plant the rule is that it should be made vertically unless stated otherwise. This means that it can go into the snow anywhere on the downhill side in a quadrant radius of about 2 feet from your lower boot. The further away from you it goes into the snow, the more you will need to angulate.

In my reckoning the pole plant is very nearly the most important thing for the better skier to concentrate on when learning new technique. Everything follows from it, but more later. So running through the process once again:

You must anticipate a turn by going down to put the pole into the snow vertically. Most of your weight will be over the middle of your lower foot. Angulation will get the skis on to their edge, and by so doing, will give you more precise control in the turn. You will then be in a position to set up for the next one if necessary. The speed at which you do all this depends on the type of turn you are making.

How you use your eyes and the soles of your feet is also a part of anticipation. You need to know what you are skiing on, and what you are about to ski on, so that you can react accordingly. You therefore need to be looking far enough ahead for the speed you are going, so that you can make the right decision. The feel for the snow you are skiing on comes through the soles of your feet, and tends to come with mileage and experience. It is quite an interesting exercise though to close your eyes for some seconds every now and again (preferably on a wide open, slow and empty piste) just to feel through your feet. This is discussed in more detail in the section on snowcraft.

In the section about reverse camber I mentioned that the ski is designed as a spring. Depending on its construction, a ski can be bent to produce a substantial arc of reverse camber. For example, if a racer is making tight turns on ice through slalom gates, he will want the skis to be bent to their maximum to carve an arc round the gate with the minimum of sliding. On the easy gates near the finish, where the turns are little more than wiggles, he will just set the skis on their edges, with minimum reverse camber. Edging is just setting the ski on its edge, whilst carving is applying the sort of pressure to make the ski bend more than the minimum reverse camber. To achieve maximum reverse camber a skier does not just apply his weight to the middle of the ski, but sometimes to the front of it, by moving slightly forward at the start of a turn. This tends to bend the front of the ski first, and the bending process is amplified and transmitted back along the ski.

This is a good time to expand on something else I mentioned in the section on reverse camber. If a ski is put on its edge then it will have more spring in it than if the ski remains flat on its sole. It will also have the potential for even more reverse camber and therefore more spring. A ski flat on the snow has no potential for any reverse camber at all and that means no spring to help you into the next turn.

An edged ski will also make a much more controlled turn than a flat ski could ever do. Just imagine that you are on ice. Will your control in the turn be better on a flat ski or on one where the edge cuts in? The answer is obvious. Some years ago (well actually thirty years ago) we would always prepare skis for running slalom gates by scraping the soles with a sharp metal decorators scraper bending it slightly as we took off some of the plastic sole. This meant that the sole of the ski ended up slightly concave. The theory was that the change from edge to edge would be quicker with less time on the flat of the ski, and therefore give more control. Even while running flat the ski would have more directional stability. Whether it worked in practice I couldn’t say. All I remember doing is scraping quite a few ski soles down to the wood!

In the UK this is a  euphemism that raises the spectre of the dreaded IRS - Inland Revenue and Taxation, but here it means exactly what it says, and if you’ll allow me I’m going to digress for a minute.

Self assessment can be used to advantage to test your grading in every sort of activity. You ask yourself the question ‘How good am I at skiing?’ These are the categories you can choose. They are definable enough to avoid cheating and giving yourself a better grading, or as is often the case, giving yourself a lower grading out of modesty!

The ‘conscious’ refers to your brain and the ‘competence’ has to do with your body. The ‘zone’ is to do with nirvana and total enlightenment.

Think about them. The first stage of Unconscious Incompetence is that of a complete beginner. Do you remember what it was like? You hadn’t a clue what you were doing and what you did do was more than likely a disaster. You were being told to do things by an instructor or a friend, but your brain was in melt down. If someone had asked you what the time was while you were trying to execute a manoeuvre, more than likely you wouldn’t even hear them. Basically, you hadn’t a clue what you were doing, and what you were doing you were doing badly. Anyway you didn’t really care did you because it was such FUN.....wasn’t it?

The next stage of Conscious Incompetence is where I reckon most people are. On really good days they may occasionally move into the next stage for brief moments, but are unable to harness this sudden improvement. Most of the time they are painfully aware of their shortcomings but cannot find a way to develop their technique. They know what’s wrong but can’t correct it. It is often an extremely frustrating stage, and it is mainly to those people that this book is addressed.

Stage three is like lifting off for the first time in an aeroplane. I don’t know how it works but my does it feel good from where I’m standing. Unconscious Competence is a wonderful first time experience if you are a skier, and like a lot of other things you will probably remember the first time forever. Feeling the skis throwing you from one turn to another on short swings is exciting. The fact that you don’t really know or don’t really care how you do it puts you into this transitional category.

Conscious Competence is an enjoyable hard working roller coaster that takes you forward two steps and backwards one. You can start to look at skiing from the outside and begin to feel what it’s all about. It is hard work; you start to put a lot more effort into preparing for a ski trip, understanding how the ski works, wondering why it is easier to ski on different snow surfaces, and computing and filing into your sub conscious the methods you are using to ski on them. This book should help you get well into conscious competence!

What it can’t do is tell you how to get into the Zone. This is something that can’t be taught but is the result of everything you’ve learnt and it doesn’t come often. It’s your moment when everything goes so perfectly - the bright sun shining out of an azure sky on to the dazzling snow, a smell of pine and wood smoke on the crystalline air - and you ski the most perfect run, every turn part of a dream to remember!

Right, that’s enough, let’s go for some reversion technique..

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CHAPTER 2