MonsterMan wrote:My amateur 2c worth for my own MA practice as much as anything. As always, expect my betters to correct if this is out.
You mention that you think the major issue was flexing to release and timing of this. Only you as the skier can know what you had in your head that run, but in my opinion, you would do well to show us observers that you own an "O shape". The amount of flexing you were doing would have been adequate for those turns if you found your uphill LTE and stayed there a while. The timing doesn't seem all that out to my eye either.
I know you mentioned somewhere that you've been working on your lower body recently and what I see may be already corrected, but on the evidence presented in the video:
I would council working on your inside foot pullback. When the inside foot is lightened, tipped AND pulled back aggressively, the new inside knee further up the kinetic chain will move away from the new stance leg knee and show a lovely O shape.
How do you enjoy pmts javelins? Just a thought.
After skiing with Max_501 and JBotti for a day (and receiving a lot of feedback) I believe I can answer some of the questions posed in this post.
When performing the O-frame drill in the flats I absolutely can perform the drill correctly. That doesn't necessarily mean that I always initiate my turns with LTE tipping of the new free foot though (as other video has shown). When moving at normal speeds and not drilling, it is rare to see an actual O-frame develop - the movements are occurring too fast. You do not see an O-frame in Max_501's free-skiing, nor does he spend more than a tiny fraction of a second ever traversing along balanced on the LTE.
You are quite correct that I need to manage my inside foot pullback much more consistently. However, once again I will disagree on whether you will see an obvious O-frame in normal free-skiing. The stance leg should "come along for the ride" and match the angle established by the free leg tipping. Yes, an O-frame is usually a clear indicator of tipping the new free foot first, but the lack of an obvious O-frame is NOT necessarily an indicator that free foot tipping is not leading the turn initiation.
After doing some PMTS javelin turn drills with Max_501 I now understand that I was missing some critical elements of that drill to ensure that it is performed correctly. The two critical elements I was missing was establishing balance on the uphill LTE BEFORE tipping the new free foot (this ensure that the uphill ski actually performs a complete edge change as it rolls from LTE to BTE through free foot tipping) and I was not pulling back the free foot far enough to match the position of the stance boot. With these two key focus points I was able to greatly improve my performance of the javelin drill.