Better Skiing - Chapter 4 - Edging the Skis, Long Turns, Short Swing Turns.

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4 PRACTICAL WORK

EDGING EXERCISES
A LONG CONTROLLED TURN
SHORT (SWING) TURNS - THE STANDARD MODEL

LEARNING POSITIONS

What you are now going to learn about now is how to maximise the skis potential by getting them on to their edges. The turns and the exercises in this section, therefore, will provide the basis for every type of controlled turn.

To learn new techniques I often suggest quite strange positions - the ELP (English/Global lavatory position), combined with a wide stance - being obvious examples. There are others like the exaggerated pole plants and angulation over the skis. These should not be adopted permanently, and with time and mileage will hopefully disappear to be replaced by a naturally acquired elegance that you can only fantasise about just now.

Their importance to start with, however, is paramount and will make learning so much easier.

EDGING EXERCISES

Just a few points before we start. If you have downloaded ‘The Secrets of Better Skiing’ from the internet it will be tricky to take these instructions up on to the mountain. With this in mind I have made them as simple as possible. Reading them through a few times should give you a basic idea of what to do. You could always print the pages off one by one and take them with you in an inside pocket, or perhaps you could take your lap top up top.

Throughout this book I spend a lot of time repeating certain things. This is intentional as some instructions are so important that with only one or two mentions you may forget them.

If you have read and understood the section on edging and carving in Basic Considerations, you will recall that a ski has to be put on its edge to turn effectively in a controlled manner. The ski also needs pressure applying to its middle to make it bend into a useful reverse camber position, although this is something that will come naturally with plenty of mileage and is not a major concern here.

Let’s get on to the practical stuff. These exercises are an introduction to edging, and getting a feel for the control that edging will give you before we start doing proper turns.

Tool up to a nice wide open blue run with nice white snow on it where you can go fast enough without worrying.

Are you there, or has the lift broken down again? Stand sideways against the fall line. Look down at your skis. Are the soles flat on the slope? If they are, you should find a slightly steeper slope so that the edges are cutting into the surface while you are standing virtually upright.

While standing there, lower yourself over the bottom ski as if to do up a boot buckle.

As you go down you should be aiming to touch the middle outside of the lower boot. Are you touching it yet? Go on, lower! Notice what has happened to the lower ski. It is even further onto its edge now. To get to this position you have had to bend your lower knee into the slope, and to a certain extent your uphill one too. You have also had to flex at the hips. This is angulation, and is an exaggeration of what you will be doing at the end of each turn shortly.

(Some teachers call this position in motion as ‘driving the skis around'.)

Having practised this exercise at a standstill on the other traverse as well, you can now have a go at the next exercise, which you may have done before, but without having a clue why you were doing it.

Start moving slowly across the slope on your favourite traverse.

As you traverse across the slope slowly go down to touch your lower boot as you did in the standing position. This will edge the skis and put most of the weight on the lower one. This exercise whilst moving is somehow more difficult than it sounds here; doing it standing still is easy. The brain finds it a bit more difficult to accept a moving ski on its edge for the first time, but persevere and it will come.

Now stand up, keeping the weight on the lower ski, and you should find that the skis are sliding forwards and sideways on their soles, ie: flat on the snow.

Go down again to touch your lower boot. Your knees should be angulating into the slope so that your weight can remain central over your lower boot. Stop, turn, and do the same thing on the other traverse. While you are touching your boot there should be no sliding at all, and if the snow is right, you can look back and see the smooth, slightly curved trench that the edges have made.

A LONG CONTROLLED TURN

That gets rid of the exercises. Now for a proper turn. Tootle off on a left traverse as though you are going to do a right turn first. Start off with your right hand half way down to touching your boot. Without moving your body from this position, lift your right arm up roughly horizontally and plant the pole in the snow. This is actually little more than a momentary stab in the snow approximately as far in front of your boot as your outstretched arm will allow and only a few inches away from your downhill ski. As you put the pole in start to rise up. Rise up fast enough to unweight the back of the skis with a parallel turn so that you can start to bring them round. There is no need for the backs of the skis to come right off the ground; in fact it is important to apply as little unweighting as possible in your upward movement to maintain control. The faster you go the easier it will be to unweight the backs of the skis.

You will speed up as you go into the fall line. Come round as smoothly as possible, and drop down slowly as if to touch the left boot with the left hand this time. At the same time apply pressure on to the lower ski. By 'applying pressure' I mean that you should have a sense of pushing hard down on to the ski with your leg and thigh muscles into the middle of your foot. It should feel as though you are driving the skis round, and the whole movement must be done smoothly and firmly.

Why should you apply pressure in this way? Well eventually with more speed and less unweighting this downward pressure will start pushing the skis into added reverse camber, which as you probably remember will make them carve through the turn and because they are bending under tension they will give you a spring to bounce you into the next turn as you start unweighting once more.

(You will notice I have put the phrase ‘applying pressure’ into inverted commas. This explanation would not stand up in physics, but you will understand what I mean when you start doing it. There must in fact be a weighting of the lower ski as you come round after the slow upward unweighting movement, and coupled with the turning action of the ski on its edge, a satisfactory reverse camber can be achieved.)

The skis must not be rushed around as you come into the fall line, and from above their tracks should resemble a nicely rounded capital S once you have done a turn on the other traverse. As you come round after this first turn and start to angulate, the inside edge of the lower ski will start to bite. Carry straight on and come up after putting the left pole in, speed up into the fall line, and once again go down smoothly and firmly. Do a few more before stopping, and if you haven't got the hang of it, stop, think about it, and start again.

Compare the difference between the two sequences. The first turn will make a large capital S on the snow and the skis, because they are on their edges for most of the turn, will give excellent snow holding and control. In the second sequence I have rushed round coming to the fall line in a near standing position and the skis for the most part remain flat with little edging.

You will find to begin with that you may be sliding more on the soles of the skis than carving on the edges, but as you learn to angulate more, and apply more pressure to the lower ski, it will start to bite. There is obviously a section of the turn as the skis come into the fall line and pass it when they are flat on the snow transferring from one edge to the other. This is the part of the turn when it is most difficult to maintain a nicely rounded S. You should make a positive effort to let the skis come round smoothly even while they are sliding flat on the snow. Incidentally, it is virtually impossible to carve a turn 100% with no sliding, but should you feel like a challenge perhaps you could be the first person to do it.

There are two important things to remember when trying out this turn. The first is to avoid a common fault. When most people turn into the fall line and start to speed up, they tend to rush the turn round in order to brake as quickly as possible and slow themselves down again (see the photo sequence). This tends to make things worse rather than better, and it's therefore important to accept and allow this increase in speed.

If you want to build more confidence in this respect find a steep bit of piste leading to a flat or uphill gradient. Practise running straight down the steep bit after a final turn, knowing that you will be able to stop easily. Don't you just love that feeling of acceleration with the wind in your hair, and your eyes watering so much that you can't see where you are going?

The second point is to make sure that your upper body, from the hips up, is facing down the hill as much as possible. Rather than make a positive effort to face down the hill at this stage (after all you have a lot of other things to concentrate on), just make a point of looking for the area in front of you where you could be making the next turn. The faster you go the further ahead you should be looking. If your head is facing downhill then it is reasonable to assume that your upper body may just be as well. It’s permissible for it to be square over the skis but at this stage it must never face towards the hill.

SHORT (SWING) TURNS - THE STANDARD MODEL

Certain turns are for certain conditions. The long carved turns using up the whole of a wide smooth piste are for fast skiing, where braking is not a necessity. These turns are the basis for giant slalom and downhill technique.

On steep or busy slopes, however, or in the bumps, or while learning to ski in the powder, you will need to brake your speed more, so here is the basic short turn that will keep you going nicely on these surfaces in perfect control.

Go to a gentle blue piste to start with in order to concentrate on these exercises. Before you start to do anything imagine your upper body position as you drive a car. Your head is facing the front. Your arms are holding the steering wheel. They are held out, slightly bent at the elbow, in front of you. The rest of your upper body is held facing the front by the shape of the seat. This all pre-supposes that you are not trying to tune the radio or wind down the passenger window.

Stand on a flat bit of your chosen slope and assume the driving position. Face straight down the hill. Hold your arms out at chest height as though gripping the steering wheel of your sit-up-and-beg roadster. By now quite a few passers-by will have stopped to look at you.

The poles are held quite firmly, hanging down with the points just off the snow. This is the position in which your upper body must remain the whole time that you are moving and turning down the piste (not for ever but just for this exercise!). Your skis will be going from side to side underneath you like windscreen wipers.

Get going straight down a minimal slope jumping the skis from side to side across the fall line underneath you. This is where all that fitness training is going to come in useful.

You are travelling quite slowly, no more than five miles an hour, your body is facing the front, and your arms are held out as though gripping the steering wheel. You will find that the only way to get the skis round each time is to go down slowly, and then jump them up and across the fall line, ie a down slow and up quick unweighting. As you go down put the pole in firmly, jump up and around it, and immediately go down to put the other pole in for the next turn.

The object of this exercise is to get a rhythm going with one turn after another, and to give you a feeling of the skis going underneath you whilst your upper body stays rigidly facing the front. You will probably be wishing by now that you had never bought this book.

Have a rest after a few turns, and then try again. It will seem pretty rough to start with, especially trying to keep the skis parallel and bringing them round tidily, but worry not. While you are having a rest, try this sequence a few times standing still: down, right pole in, up ... .......down, left pole in, up ... and so on.

The next time you go increase the speed a bit, remembering that the faster you go the less effort is needed to unweight the skis. Continue to do one turn after the other with no lapse in between. Hum a catchy little tune to yourself and keep in time with its beat; you should be doing about one turn a second.

Now there comes a time, and it is quite often a natural progression, where the method of unweighting the ski goes through a subtle change from down-slow-and-up-quick to down-hard-and-up-quick. If you drop down hard towards the end of a turn to put the pole in, the skis will unweight for an instant, allowing them to slide slightly further round against the fall line. As the weight on them increases (see p.14), and because you are angulating, the edge of the lower ski will dig into the snow. This is known as setting an edge. It is in effect a braking movement as the ski will quite often stop dead. You can then jump around into the next turn. As I say the lower ski is quite often motionless for a split second, and if the snow is soft you should be able to see the imprint made by the bottom of the ski. The tracks of these short turns will differ considerably from the large S shapes of the long turns.

There will be little carving at this stage, although later on as you clock up the mileage you should start to carve a little before setting an edge. At this early stage, however, the tracks you are making will look more like a z than an s.

To really get into the swing of doing these short turns you must introduce a bit of aggro into your performance. As you push hard down on the snow, say something aggressive to yourself like 'Hard down! Hard down!', or 'Attack! Attack!'. I remember teaching two fit girls a few years ago who wanted to be extricated from the famous bog standard stem christie. I told them to say something aggressive and skied down a few metres to watch them. The first girl came down in a rather half hearted fashion, going a bit too fast, and not driving down hard enough to brake her speed and get some turns in. I asked her what she had said to herself, and she replied 'Hard down! Hard down! Hard down!'. When the second girl got going, she was really giving it some welly, and did about twenty turns in fifteen metres, collapsing in a heap at our feet. When she had got her breath back, I asked her what magic phrase had produced such a brilliant performance, and she replied, 'Screw you, Simon! Screw you, Simon! Screw you, Simon!'.

At some stage you will mistakenly put too much weight on the uphill ski and fall over, so once you have got the hard down movements stored in the memory banks, you can say instead, 'Left ski, right ski', etc, to help keep the weight on the downhill ski as you come hard down on it.

Eventually there will come a time when you do a turn and suddenly feel the skis throwing you into the next one. You have arrived! You have applied enough pressure to bend the skis into an added reverse camber and they will have become real springs! You will also be polishing off the turn by carving a little! The skis will track round more accurately and smoothly before bouncing you into the next turn.

The pain of having splashed out all that valuable cash on a pair of performance skis will now turn to joy as you realise that it has all been worth it!

As a final exercise, and to give you something that will be completely knackering and set you up nicely for lunch, see how many turns you can do in a given distance, let's say in thirty metres. This will help your rhythm, and get you used to the braking action of the turn. It will also make you fitter, and help elasticise those natural springs, the old thigh and stomach muscles.

Remember that it is imperative to keep the upper body facing down the hill the whole time you are doing short turns.

Once you get the hang of doing these turns on easy open pistes, you are set up for more adventurous terrain, and for learning variations of the standard short swing turn.

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CHAPTER 5