by h.harb » Tue Mar 24, 2015 2:36 pm
This is well beyond your pay grade and you are way off in the understanding; both of you, Big E and Theorist . You have to get educated and study first to even begin to understand the interrelationship between heel angle, fore foot , footbeds, boot design, cuff adjustments and alignment. Self medicating will only make it worst. You are only compounding one layer of mistakes with another layer of compensation for those mistakes.
There is a good formula for alignment procedures that we have developed and evolved. The manual for this is our "HSS Alignment Manual", we created it over the last 15 years. I'm very proud of that document, because it's the only one of it's kind. It has the value of Master's course in biomechanics. There is nothing in the ski industry that can rival it.
And that said, with knowledge and experience you can address each alignment session from many angles. And each alignment session is different, and individual. And each change or adjustment has consequences that you can't possibly understand. Mikaela Shiffrin's boot tech and her coaches could not figure out what was wrong with her skiing. Even at that level they don't understand. I had to call her mother to tell her what to do, they did it and the results are obvious.
As many of you know a footbed has to support the basic principals of movement and balance for the kinetic chain be functional. What we see 99% of the time in our shop is locked up feet due to bad footbeds or totally worthless soft footbeds that do nothing but take up space. In most cases, boot fitters don't even know how to place their own footbeds properly in the boot, we see this all the time.
So don't tell me your footbed expert made you a footbed and now you (he or she) are trying to fix your alignment based on it. The reason, because in 99% of the all cases, the footbed is flawed and you are just compounding what your boot tech didn't understand and what was wrong in the first place. You are adapting to an incorrect base of support. None of these boot fitters mentioned here or that we know across North America and Europe, the "so called alignment specialists", ski with their clients and can coach them. So they are basically shooting in the dark. Now, trying to fix it yourself, do it on your own, play around, makes no sense what so ever. So let's put a stop to this useless speculation. No one can possibly explain to you on a forum, all of the pre-mutations for disastrous alignment you are creating and causing.
Skiers think alignment is just throwing around a few shims and changing a cuff, if that was so easy the world cup techs would have all their set ups, right on. If you watch world cup skiing, how many times does Doug Lewis comment on their set up being off, even for the same skier from one race to the next. If it's a black art on the world cup, how do you expect your boot fitters and your tinkering is going to get it right????? We do this stuff for a living and we have decades of experience doing it right, based on the skiing outcome of our guests.
"The Harb Way", is not one way to do it. It's the only way, if you want it done right. I'm not bragging. It's not ego. It's fact, I have not seen anyone get alignment right and I've been doing this for the last 35 plus years.