Well, As Long As I'm Here...

Well, As Long As I'm Here...

Postby TheRealBlakeSaunders » Fri Apr 27, 2012 5:06 pm

Hello,

I came here a couple weeks ago because someone was impersonating me here. I'm still not sure why.

Anyway... while I'm here, does anyone want to see a video?

Critique if you want... don't if you don't want, it doesn't matter. I'm happy to read critiques if anyone posts them though.

Following the link will play it at a better quality (and bigger). Usually embeds play a little rougher, but here is both a link and an embed:

http://youtu.be/XCcQk5g9dvY



My wife got some wedges drilled on the bottoms of her boots late this season at the Harb ski shop. They made a nice positive difference in her skiing. She's not wearing them in the video because we got them later. I just thought I'd say that they're nice and we like them.

Blake
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Re: Well, As Long As I'm Here...

Postby Skiasaurus Rex » Tue May 01, 2012 9:15 am

Well,

You know, usually when I see someone doing zipper line, comp style bumps skiing in real moguls, they usually look like they are taking a beating, however, your feet are incredibly quick and you are smooth--your absorption in the moguls is very impressive- your head never changes it's level, and there is no translation of the impact at your feet into your upper body. It's very cool....and the tele marker looks like he is literally walking through the moguls, I haven't seen much zipper line tele skiing before, it's impressive.

There is a neat slo mo video of an asian bump skier on the regular PMTS page, it'd be interesting to compare the techniques...typically I would say skiing like that in the slo mo video yield a smoother, yet less direct, ride through the moguls than WC style....but in your case I'm not so sure, you really float through the troughs.

How much of your mogul technique carries over into your free skiing in the rest of the video? Do you completely change technique (and gear)?

Oh, your wife, for a 4th year skier looks good in the off-piste and in her mogul sequences.

I'm surprised you haven't gotten more of a response here, there is a lot of skiing to look at in that video.
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Re: Well, As Long As I'm Here...

Postby Max_501 » Tue May 01, 2012 10:50 am

For MA purposes it would be much easier if the video was separated so each skier was in their own clip. I'd suggest putting similar footage together so the flow was something like this:

Section 1- Skier 1 Carving
Section 2- Skier 1 Bumps
Section 3- Skier 1 Steeps
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Re: Well, As Long As I'm Here...

Postby Max_501 » Tue May 01, 2012 11:03 am

Skiasaurus Rex wrote:You know, usually when I see someone doing zipper line, comp style bumps skiing in real moguls, they usually look like they are taking a beating, however, your feet are incredibly quick and you are smooth--



A high level bumper will almost always appear to be flowing right down the fall line with a quiet upper body. The skill, leg/core strength, fast twitch speed, and coordination needed to pull this off takes years of dedicated training.
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Re: Well, As Long As I'm Here...

Postby TheRealBlakeSaunders » Tue May 01, 2012 3:12 pm

From Skiasaurus Rex:
How much of your mogul technique carries over into your free skiing in the rest of the video? Do you completely change technique (and gear)?

I would say that it is a total change of technique, and also a total change of gear, almost without exception. I wouldn't look the same in the moguls if I tried to ski them on my other skis and visa versa. I guess the only exception would be in wider, smaller, spaced-apart moguls, it'd be ok to use my all-mountain skis there.

From Skiasaurus Rex:
You know, usually when I see someone doing zipper line, comp style bumps skiing in real moguls, they usually look like they are taking a beating, however, your feet are incredibly quick and you are smooth--your absorption in the moguls is very impressive-

Thanks : ) I have always thought that good skiing should not hurt. If it hurts, there must be something wrong (with technique). Some of the moguls in my video from this year were especially hard to be smooth in. Because of the extreme slush conditions in Colorado this year, a lot of the moguls on our mountain formed, literally small cliffs in them --drop-offs on the back sides of many of the moguls. If you look at the shot at 5:00 there is a big drop-off on the second to last mogul. It wasn't possible for me to be smooth on that particular bump because it was a complete vertical wall on the back side. There are a few other moguls like that in the video, but the others were more manageable. Normally those drop-offs are not an issue, it had to be just because of the heat this winter.

Anyway... You're right about most zipper-line skiers. Many of them are not very smooth, but it depends on the skier. There's wide range of smoothness between different skiers. I like to keep my feet on the snow. Hannah Kearney is incredibly smooth. I think she has better technique than a lot of the competitive men. It seems to me that men are likely to rely on brute force and less technique with maybe an over-emphasis on speed. I would really like to see Hannah Keaney on natural moguls rather than machine-made ones to see if she would be as smooth. I don't know if she would be or not. She certainly might be, she's great.

Many successful male mogul skiers are far from smooth (in terms of not keeping their feet on the snow). I see it on the mountain a lot... here is an example on video. This was the olympics so these guys were all good skiers, but it's pretty hard to call this smooth with how much their feet are coming off the snow. Their skis only hit one part of the bump. I honestly don't know how a lot of today's world cup moguls skiers would compare to these guys. Today in competitions the moguls are machine-made and small and perfectly symmetrical. That makes an enormous difference. In this video they were huge and irregular.

http://youtu.be/wmuBwitDEmY


From like 1998 to 2002 I think that competition mogul skiers got pretty smooth and they were still on natural moguls most of the time. If you check out Jonny Moseley's gold medal run, that was a pretty smooth one.

Just as a side note, while we're on the subject of 'zipper-line' skiers, I want to say that any good zipper-line skier has to be able to ski well outside of lines as well or else they would have never been able to get truly good at lines. Some people, like the guys from Sun Valley, want people to think that 'zipper-line' skiers can only ski zipper-lines. That is simply not true and if you think about it, you'll see that that's kind of crazy that they say that : ) What kind of bad parent would take their kid skiing and not let them do any bunny-hill or anything first and just stick them straight into a mogul line in their first few seconds on skis and keep them there until they learn just a mogul line and nothing else LOL It doesn't work that way. It's easier to ski outside of a line well than to ski a line at a truly high level and the skiing outside of lines comes first in the learning order without exception if you ever want to be truly good in a line. On a related note, skiers who are not very good in lines are also often not very good outside of lines. The two activities are related, so I don't usually seperate mogul skiers into categories of 'zipper-line skiers' or 'non-zipper-line skiers'. There are 'good' mogul skiers and 'less good' ones in my mind. Maybe the guys in sun valley don't like that kind of categorizing because they'd be known as the 'less good' ones... maybe that's why they try to convince people of the things that they say.

PS Thank you for the compliments to my Wife and Brother : )
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Re: Well, As Long As I'm Here...

Postby TheRealBlakeSaunders » Tue May 01, 2012 3:37 pm

From Max_501
For MA purposes it would be much easier if the video was separated so each skier was in their own clip. I'd suggest putting similar footage together so the flow was something like this:

Section 1- Skier 1 Carving
Section 2- Skier 1 Bumps
Section 3- Skier 1 Steeps


I don't know if I want to make a seperate video just for the purpose of critiques, but if you see a specific shot you want to critique maybe you could just say the time of it in the video.
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Re: Well, As Long As I'm Here...

Postby Max_501 » Tue May 01, 2012 6:14 pm

TheRealBlakeSaunders wrote:I don't know if I want to make a seperate video just for the purpose of critiques, but if you see a specific shot you want to critique maybe you could just say the time of it in the video.


The question isn't if I want to critique your skiing but rather if you want your skiing to be MA'd (for free) by one of the PMTS coaches/experts on the forum (note - if you are not interested in PMTS than this might be a waste of your time). If you want a PMTS MA, maybe separate out the segment you'd like to have MA'd. Right now its 9 minutes of footage mixed between 3 skiers in a variety of terrain, which is a huge amount of footage to wade though for MA purposes.
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Re: Well, As Long As I'm Here...

Postby TheRealBlakeSaunders » Tue May 01, 2012 7:49 pm

Yeah, I understand that it's a lot of footage to go through.

From Max_501
...note - if you are not interested in PMTS than this might be a waste of your time...

I don't know what PMTS is.

As I mentioned in my first post I came here because someone was using my name and posting as me on this forum. I figured that out because my vimeo video said that plays were coming from this website. I got on here to look and saw someone posting as Blake Saunders.

My point is that I don't actually even know what PMTS is so it's hard for me to know if I'm interested in it or not. All I know is that it's some sort of alternative to the PSIA.
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Re: Well, As Long As I'm Here...

Postby TheRealBlakeSaunders » Tue May 01, 2012 8:05 pm

An 'alternative to the psia', as I put it, doesn't sound like a bad thing to me, by the way : )
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Re: Well, As Long As I'm Here...

Postby jclayton » Wed May 02, 2012 7:25 am

PMTS is a teaching system . The idea being to help the recreational skier approach World Cup technique ,i.e.to use efficient movements .

Best to get an idea looking at the YouTube posts under PMTS or Harald Harb ( HH ) .
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Re: Well, As Long As I'm Here...

Postby Max_501 » Wed May 02, 2012 8:12 am

TheRealBlakeSaunders wrote:My point is that I don't actually even know what PMTS is so it's hard for me to know if I'm interested in it or not.


There are a bunch of great PMTS videos here - http://www.youtube.com/user/skiwhh

If you would like to ski like the following clips then PMTS is the easist path that I know of to get you there:





And Katya might like skiing pow like Diana?

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Re: Well, As Long As I'm Here...

Postby jclayton » Wed May 02, 2012 11:15 am

Lovely skiing .
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Re: Well, As Long As I'm Here...

Postby TheRealBlakeSaunders » Thu May 03, 2012 5:33 am

Really nice skiing in those videos there!

I really like the angulation. I'm comparing those shots of groomed skiing to the only real groomed shot in my video (it's at 5:43). The difference in body positions is significant. Next season I think I will try some experimenting and see if I like trying to angulate more like you guys are doing there. I suspect that I will be able to imitate what I see in the videos there. I've learned most of my skiing from watching others, both in person and on video, and imitating.

Do you guys have anything to avoid 'boot-out'? Looks like your shins are really low in some of those shots. I remember years ago they were putting plates under bindings to help with that. I never raced, so I missed out on any other ideas that might have come along. Are you guys on race skis?
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Re: Well, As Long As I'm Here...

Postby Max_501 » Thu May 03, 2012 7:25 am

TheRealBlakeSaunders wrote:I suspect that I will be able to imitate what I see in the videos there. I've learned most of my skiing from watching others, both in person and on video, and imitating.


Take a look at this article and the pics to get a good idea of how we use the pelvis as part of counter balancing (what you are describing as angulation)

The Role of the Pelvis in CB

TheRealBlakeSaunders wrote:Do you guys have anything to avoid 'boot-out'? Looks like your shins are really low in some of those shots. I remember years ago they were putting plates under bindings to help with that.?


Most of my bindings are mounted on a plate or rail. This does help avoid boot out. But on today's wider skis boot out is less of an issue then it was back in the days of 60-65mm wide skis.

TheRealBlakeSaunders wrote:Are you guys on race skis?


Sometimes, like in the Vimeo video of Heluvaskier above. But, we ski all types of skis, ranging from narrow race skis to big wide boards like the Icelantic Shaman.

The following picture is on the 183cm Elan 1010, 140-111-130, 23M radius. It shows the CB (counter balance) and CA (counter acting) that PMTS teaches.

Image
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Re: Well, As Long As I'm Here...

Postby TheRealBlakeSaunders » Thu May 03, 2012 8:08 am

Cool. Thanks!
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