cheesehead wrote:I really don't want to continue this but, for me at least, this is what I take away from this, that if you feel out of balance there is probably something wrong but that doesn't tell you what it is that is wrong.
I find the statements that some never feel like they are out of balance to be difficult to comprehend. Maybe the "down the mountain" part of the phrase is too loaded (I wasn't aware of such a history to the phrase): if it was changed to, "I never feel like I am falling," is that really true? Those are your words--are you really always perfectly in balance??
I have no idea what you mean by feeling in or out of balance. I have some idea of what it feels like to me. I do know what it means to *be* in or out of balance and I can tell you that the only time I'm out of balance in my skiing is if I've made a mistake or gotten surprised by terrain or snow conditions. This does not happen very often. By definition good skiing is being in balance at all times.
Does that mean that if you feel out of balance, something is wrong? Not necessarily. Without knowing how your feelings around balance correlate to your actual state of balance, I can't comment. You may well be in balance even though you feel that you aren't. Probably this isn't the case, but it certainly could be. But we don't have to rely on your feelings. Watching you ski, we can watch things like whether your feet get behind your hips at the right part of the turn, whether you are leaning onto your inside ski, whether you are making unnatural movements, etc. These are objective criteria with which your skiing can be evaluated and we can definitively say whether you are in balance.
I have no idea what you mean by feeling like you are falling. I know what falling feels like to me and I never have that sensation in my skiing. That you have this feeling does not necessarily mean you are doing something wrong. If I could somehow get in your head and experience what you associate with the "feeling of falling", I might be able to tell you definitively, but I can't. What I can do is watch your skiing and tell you if you are managing fore-aft properly. If you are managing fore-aft correctly, then there is nothing wrong with thinking that it feels like falling and using that sensation to help you produce good skiing.
Just don't assume that what you think you feel will make any sense to anyone else. That is the lesson from this thread. The idea that we can use feelings to establish any common ground for communicating is completely false. Nobody can understand what things feel like to you, we only know what they feel like to us. And as you've discovered, there is considerable room for disagreement. This is why threads on other ski forums often end up getting so ridiculous. People either spend all of their time trying to define things so they can communicate or they just argue past each other. This problem is easily avoided with PMTS by describing skiing in terms that are objective and verifiable.
High level skiing is difficult to describe and there are things that you must figure out for yourself. PMTS lays out the groundwork for this self discovery, but there are no shortcuts. I can tell you from experience that knowing what something you are trying to get feels like to somebody else isn't helpful. I've even asked the "what does this feel like" question to Diana, and while she answered, she was absolutely correct in adding that it wouldn't likely help me.
As you have seen, when you try to tell people that they should feel like they are falling, it results in confusion. None of us know whether the feeling you are trying to describe is the same feeling that we associate with falling. That is why we try to avoid talking about what skiing feels like.