Balance + Efficiency = Enjoyment

By Ed Kane  

Spring 2001

Some time ago I had a conversation with Larry Murdoch on how one can continue to log many vertical miles as one’s age advances. Granted a certain amount of conditioning is required which takes more effort and diligence as one’s skiing career matures. But, another equally important aspect of continuing to enjoy the mountain sports during the winter is to let gravity be your friend and enjoy the ride. Enjoyment is directly related to how hard we have to work to achieve the trip to the next chair ride. The effort involved is closely related to how efficiently we can make the movements necessary to control the path we choose down the mountain. The efficiency of those movements is dependent on the way we employ the basic skills we use to make the skis go where we want them to go. Fundamental to how well we are able to use pressuring, edging and turning movements is our state of dynamic balance as we ride down to the next lift ride up.

 In recent years, I have become much more aware of the relationship between balance, efficiency and enjoyment. Over the last few years much of the focus of our divisional clinics has be related to obtaining and maintaining a better state of dynamic balance. It all starts with making sure that you and your equipment are suited to each other. The first link is between you and your boots. They must fit well throughout from the foot bed to the cuff, place you in a roughly centered stance so that your hips naturally find themselves over the center of your foot and allow you the ankle flexibility to vary that stance to keep your hips over your feet regardless of the steepness of the hill or phase of the turn. The next critical connection is between the boot sole and the ski. The ski should be flat on the snow when we stand on them so that any lateral movement in either direction will cause both skis to change the degree of edging equally. This process is called stance balancing and has been discussed in numerous articles in both this newsletter and in the TPS.

 Assuming that all of the above is in place, the next task in gaining a higher level of efficiency and enjoyment is to maintain that balanced stance regardless of the path we choose down the mountain. This leads us to the consideration of what has been called dynamic balance. In other words staying over the center of our feet during turns through all sorts of terrain and snow conditions. This is somewhat of a challenge and recently we have spent quite a bit of time and effort developing numerous exercises to help tune up this skill. Some of these include: shuffling the feet throughout medium radius turns; medium radius turns in a very wide (1½ hip width) stance; medium radius turns with a hop as you reach the fall line; finish each medium radius turn on the inside ski, weighting it at the fall line; linked turns on one ski; and the infamous hop turns in the fall line.

 The point of all these and other such exercises is to acquaint one with the center of his/her foot. I find that the kinesthetic feedback that helps me is when I can feel pressure concentrated under the inside arch of my foot throughout each turn. When it is there, the turns are round, controlled and carved (no slipping or chatter). When it is not there the line is not what was intended, the skis chatter at the end of the turn and my thighs start to talk to me. Each of us will use whatever feed back mechanism that works best but the outcome will be the same. Better control in each turn, on each run and more variety on more runs. In other words ---- more enjoyment!!!!