Carving Madness

[dewdman42]

Jay I guess you are the famous Jay that teaches PMTS at Hood? If so I might be coming down for a lesson early this winter.

[richk]

a drifted turn is produced by tipping the stance foot less than the free foot. ...what movements in the stance leg could flatten the stance ski in relation to the free foot ski? Often this can be achieved by simply relaxing the stance ankle a little

I find this statement to be profound!

It says, if I may re-formulate it, once you are doing all the free foot actions, including tipping/flexing/pulling back, and countering movements, then the stance foot should actively tip to the big toe edge.

In PMTS discussions, moving away from stance foot activity is so important (and difficult to do with finesse) that it seems that the stance foot is only passively involved through the kinetic chain and passive stance leg extension. This quote says the it is actively tipped as well.

Am I getting this right?

RichK

[Harald]

Dewd that was an excellent evaluation of most situations.

[Harald]

Here's a look from a different persective:

Essentials of Expert Skiing
If we look at only the Essentials of Expert Skiing possibly we can simplify this whole idea. Tipping is the act of getting the skis on edge or on an angle to the snow. When this is done, the legs also move to follow the angles of the tipping skis. So the whole body angles when we tip in transition. There are two types of tipping, tipping onto and tipping off of the edges.

So tipping involves both moving the feet onto their sides and off their sides. We call these movements releasing to get off the edges and engaging to get the ski on their edges. Notice that there is a constant theme here, no turning!


These are not Essentials, but it Happens
Most skiers end up on edge not by tipping the skis, but by pushing the skis out from under the body, as opposed to producing edging by tipping in transition. What happens with the skis pushed is a combination of pushing and steering or twisting the skis.

When a skier pushes the skis to the side the skis skid away from the body, into a skidding turn. They eventually create an angle to the slope when pushed far enough. This approach has huge deficiencies in control, because the turn is over before you feel grip and nothing involving elegance, efficiency or quality is achieved. Therefore this is not a brushed carve.

The other non-essential that happens in no carve turns is twisting or act of steering. These movements physically change the direction of the skis, but not your body. Skiers make this happen at the point between the tipping off the edges and tipping on to the new edges, the most vulnerable part of the turn, when the ski have to go through flat.

If you release and get through transition and engage to the new edges you created a 100% efficient edge change. With this method the skis take your body to the next arc, you ride the skis.


Traditional Way
If you transitioned and while the skis approach flat you give them a twist they start to change direction, but you are still moving downhill, no longer creating an arc. You have given up on making the skis take you to a new arc, now you are actually letting gravity pull you toward the falline collecting speed. Now you have to start pushing to engage the skis. When you engage the skis in this manner, they do start gripping the snow, but the twisting caused a major problem, it took the back of the skis and moved them uphill and through a radius, during the time they were in that radius they were not on edge or engaged. When this happens the brushed carve is dead. You have a skid, not a carve or a brushed carve. This is my question, should you attempt to learn how to control your twisting or skidding or do you learn to transition without twisting?

Well this is a predicament? Do you have to know how to carve first to get to brushed carving or do you have to know how to stop or at least reduce twisting to change edges for a new turn, before you can brush a carve?

Part of the problem is that most skiers don?t know they are twisting. I can tell you most PSIA instructors don?t know or think they are twisting, but they are. Twisting is a PSIA phenomenon, not one that comes from PMTS. So if instructors don?t know they twist, how can regular skiers possibly know? They can?t. (Until they take a PMTS lesson)

We are addressing an issue of brushing a carve, but we don?t know our mechanics, that?s why we are getting an uncontrolled brushed turn, which is simply a skid.

Check your tracks
Most skiers don?t know or feel that they change ski direction (call it what you want, it?s a twist) when they go through transition or when the skis are flat through transition. Can you learn to ?reduce twist? or should you learn to transition without twisting. To me the mechanics of reducing twist are totally different from a PMTS direct transition to carving. In other words, reducing twist is just a refined PSIA move, and not an Essential of Expert Skiing.

Twisting, steering , foot turning, rotary moving, call it what you like, these are not Essentials of Expert Skiing, but they sure can reduce the quality and block you progress to Expert Skiing.

Blending the wrong movements doesn?t get you any closer to an Expert Skier
Just reducing the amount of twisting and increasing the edging component won?t get you to a brushed carve or expert skiing. There is no way to metric how much to reduce or how much to increase these movements when they are intertwined.

You have to learn the PMTS Essentials. They are in this case tipping onto and off the edges without twisting. This requires a different set of mechanics, PMTS mechanics.
Eliminate the twist transition, the transition with ski direction change and you will own a brushed carve and possibly a locked or railed carve.

The results of these movements are measurable and you can determine and quantify the results. You see this is what PSIA hates so much about PMTS, we can show you results. We can measure our performance they can?t.

A PMTS brushed carve is just a locked carve without the commitment to lay the ski over far enough to lock the side of the ski (edge) into the snow. The mechanics are the same.
Another way to say this is, use a PMTS transition and back off the commitment and intensity of the inside leg flexing, body dropping and edge tipping.

For most skiers this isn?t the issue, you will probably hear back off the committment, the opposite will more likely be presented, tip more, flex more. Those are Essentials. I can guarantee that 99% of the skiers who haven?t figured out brushed carving isn?t because they are carving correctly. If you can Carve with the PMTS method you can brush a carve. If you think you are carving and can?t brush carve, you better reevaluate they way you are carving.

[Harald]

I think that reducing edge angle to create brushing in an arc that has begun with a strong commitment to carving is not effective. As a release of edge angle, given the forces that are already in play, to get brushing produces a skid. If brushing is to be effective it has to be progressive from the beginning of the arc. If too much brushing begins, increasing angle to reduce brushing is OK. The difference here is that Brushing, isn?t the same as skidding, because it is not created by rotary movements; therefore it is much easier to control. With PMTS, tipping is introduced and steering is excluded.

Edge adjustments or change with load on the ski, to go from carve to skid and back are very difficult. I know of only a few skiers that can manage this activity.

In real situations, in the high C part of an arc, if you slow down angle creation and begin to extend the outside leg before the ski is locked, you will begin a brushing action. By extending the outside leg I mean only slightly stronger then maintaining contact. Extending should occur after high C. If you extend immediately after engaging you will immediately need to twist. Brushing can be controlled through the rest of the arc easily as long as you don?t twist (or even rotate slowly) the body toward the ski?s direction. Make sure you are solid in your counteracting and counter balanced movements.

[dewdman42]

wow. Great post Harald. Thanks for that. That actually clears up a lot what is meant by a Brushed Carve.

I am not going to deny that I have some work to do to remove some transition pivoting. When I was experimenting with PMTS last Spring I found that as I started to get the hang of tipping and standing more on the stance leg, I felt more confident that the skis would arc tightly enough on their own without my having to initiate the turn through a leg pivot. Its a bit of a chicken or the egg issue. Until you know the skis are gonna turn, its hard to give up the twisting motion to get them going.. But as I did get better at tipping, it became a lot easier to just relax and tip at the transition..it was actually easier and more relaxing.. A leap of faith to get there though.

Specifically for me, I found that I needed to get upside down in order to get the kind of turn shape that I wanted. If I was not upside down early, then it seemed very difficult to avoid a bit of pivot at the top of the turn in order to complete a smaller radius. However when I started taking a leap of faith to get more upside down at the top...it all kind of clicked in place and I felt no need to pivot at the top (I'm sure I probably am still a little bit, but hey, gotta have SOMETHING to work on). Actually I'll probably be working on breaking that habit for quite some time I'm sure.

You guys also have me really pondering that as I do this I really want to master control over my tipping to control how much edge angle I have for the sake of controlling how much brushing is happening or pure arcing. I don't personally feel a need to ride pure arcs every turn..and in steeper conditions most definitely I want to be mastering control over how much brushing is happening. I feel like in those conditions I have been doing something that is closer to to a brush than a skid, for quite some time..but I haven't really broken it down to figure it out and I'm certain that I'm not doing it with the same degree of precision with which you guys espouse...and I want to get there.

Thanks again for that great explanation. Looking forward to the new book.

[SkierSynergy]

a drifted turn is produced by tipping the stance foot less than the free foot. ...what movements in the stance leg could flatten the stance ski in relation to the free foot ski? Often this can be achieved by simply relaxing the stance ankle a little

I find this statement to be profound!

It says, if I may re-formulate it, once you are doing all the free foot actions, including tipping/flexing/pulling back, and countering movements, then the stance foot should actively tip to the big toe edge.

In PMTS discussions, moving away from stance foot activity is so important (and difficult to do with finesse) that it seems that the stance foot is only passively involved through the kinetic chain and passive stance leg extension. This quote says the it is actively tipped as well.

Am I getting this right?

RichK

Hey Rich.. Thanks for the comment. You are right to push my wording.

Maybe I should have said that a drift can be achieved when the angle of the stance ski is less than the angle of the free foot ski.

This state can be achieved without actively tipping the stance ski to the BTE. I can hold back the stance ski or I can actively flatten it. Neither involves an active tipping toward the BTE.

General comment: I have heard Harald sometimes say that the topic of drifted turns is often not the most useful topic for most people because for most people, the biggest problem is not tipping enough and not engaging enough. And for those people with even a little steering and/or rotation still left in their skiing, an emphasis on flattening and drifting can just cause bigger problems ? especially if you add bumps or difficult terrain into the mix.

However, I think there is a way to conceptualize this so that working on a drift will help working on being able to tip and carve more.

If brushing is to be effective it has to be progressive from the beginning of the arc.

Holding the new stance ski back by hanging onto the LTE is the key to gradually controlling the commitment to the carve during the transition and into the engagement phase of the turn.

Of course this assumes that one is adequately tipping the new Free foot to LTE. If the stance ski stays flat through lack of tippin g that is not what I am talking about.

Tip the free foot aggressively to LTE, but control the stance foot independently by holding it on it's old LTE.

In the transition/top of the turn phase, hold the stance ski on its LTE as the new free foot tips LTE and hold it back longer . . . releasing through flat and to the BTE more gradually. This will keep the stance ski ?flatter? in the first part of the turn, than if it is allowed to just hook up.

Personally, I really worked on this during last season. During camps I would often see Diana ski very steep terrain in a more ?conservative? mode, by aggressively hanging on to the LTE of the new stance ski though the transition and into the engagement phase of the new turn. It looked so effortless, bombproof, and controlled that I decided to really work on it myself.

If the stance ski is tipping toward its LTE in the engagement phase the stance ski simply stays flatter, than if you didn?t hold it back. If you watch Diana doing ?non-cranked? short turns, she has a radical O- frame quite a ways into the new turn She is tipping the free foot just as much as a hooked up, cranked turn. [Harald only cranks so forget him as a model here.] The difference is what is happening with her new stance foot during transition. By very deliberately hanging on to the LTE, she is able to have a very controlled drift at the beginning of the turn as she gradually allows the skis to hook up. The movements that do this are, of course, maintaining inversion of the old free foot as it becomes the new stance foot and maintaining flexion of the new stance leg longer into the new turn. These are what allow her to have such a definite ?O.? Of course, by the middle of most of these turns she decides to crank it a bit ? stops hanging on to the LTE of the old free foot and allows her stance leg to lengthen and take the force of the turn -- but the edging develops through the turn rather than being a hard on/off. This makes a very short turn that is bombproof -- just not a locked ?hard edge to hard edge.? In these turns Diana shows great analog control and great independent tipping control of each foot ? just to be clear, she does this through knowing how to hold the stance foot back from BTE, rather than active tipping towards its BTE.

What about actively flattening the stance foot during the turn? Harald?s take was:

I think that reducing edge angle to create brushing in an arc that has begun with a strong commitment to carving is not effective.

I agree here in relation to actual skiing, though there is an exercise Harald worked with me on that I really liked and do almost every time I ski. We worked on doing turns with feathered releases of the stance foot mixed into the turn I have found it is really good for developing better analog and independent control of these movements.

Now, I will usually warm up with long deep carved turns during which I do a release move in the middle of each turn and then reengage. It?s like a single garland release and then a turn into another garland release on the other side. Then I add two releases in the middle and then three . . . until there is a constant feathering of release/engagement throughout the turn.

[John Mason]

back to my doorway test - a post from a couple of years ago.

I noted that if you stand in a doorway and use your arms for balance, then put your feet on the floor and tip one foot then one of 3 things will happen.

1. You can allow the free foot tipping to do the most natural thing and let the other foot match the tipping. This will happen by itself for most people.

2. You can actively prevent the stance foot from matching the tipping as it is wanting to do. In the doorway test this will create a very very strong twisting force on that foot. This is simply because you have forced an O-frame and are not allowing the other leg to go parallel with the other leg. In the doorway test when your feet are on a surface that does not allow free movement of the feet, this will hurt the torque is so strong. On a less frictiony surface, like in the doorway with a paper towel under that foot, just try it and see what happens.

or

3. Remove any hip tension and 1 and 2 will not occur at all and you certainly won't feel any sheer force from number 2 above.

When we were working with Max last November he had us doing turns with the heavy O-frame - leaving the stance ski flat while tipping the free foot - in the length of the ski. Bascially near 180 degree turns in 3 feet of length. I've done hockey stops this way since my first PMTS lesson after I was shown this by a PMTS instructor as well (when I challenged him that you'd sill have to use steering to do a hockey stop then he showed me how the phantom move will do it and it was much more balanced and controllable than how most people do hockey stops).

So my question is this - like my doorway test playing around with the phantom move. It looks to me for this type of turn where you are still very balanced on the stance ski, that the phantom move where you do not allow edging to match but hold back and keep flattened to some variable degree, yet you tip your free foot which rotates the inside femur out (towards the inside of the turn) - in the presense of normal hip tension, this will create a strong imbalance that has 2 ways to resolve themselves. Either you can allow the stance foot to tip to equalize the system back or you can leave that foot flat and it will have to rotate to equalize the system back (or you'll tear your foot).

I get the feeling this is a no-no subject because of the confusion rotary has, but it has always seemed to me that the phantom move in an O-frame creates a balanced and controllable rotary torque on the stance ski that allows any type of drifted carve you desire in a completly controllable fashion even in terms of a 180 degree turn in a ski length like Max was having us doing. Of course if you simply let the edging match there is no rotary force created on the stance foot as you tip the free foot, but leave that stance foot flater is a whole different feeling and effect on what the skis will do.

In other words, the phantom move and the kinetic chain gives complete control over any needs to have the skis turn in a radius shorter than what those skis can carve.

And you can prove this to yourself in a doorway. The caveat as noted by Hobbit in my post a couple of years ago, is that if you don't have hip rotator tension, the o-frame position will not create any imbalance the body will need to correct. But if you have hip tension, this is a directly linked system and tipping that free foot has instant consequences on the stance foot that must be resolved.

Jay - your observation that this happens whenever you choose to let the o-frame happen - by not allowing edge matching of the stance foot - has been exactly how I dial this in. This is a completely progressive and controllable choice. We work so much on pure carves around here, the brushed carve and the balanced versitality it gives, non-pmtser's often think we don't have versitality with PMTS. But it's a better way to manage these shorter turns than any type of movement generated higher up the body. (and it looks entirely different on the hill too)

[milesb]

Cool. Jay explains what it means when I tell people I just delay the engagement of the stance ski. Although I might screw it up now that I know what's really going on! Speaking of O frame, what happened to piggyslayer?

[dewdman42]

John,

Can you please explain this "hip tension" you mentioned, and perhaps an exercise I can try to sense when it is activated or not?

[John Mason]

sit - put leg up - have someone twist foot around axis of leg - resist the twisting

That will co-contract your hip rotators. You don't need much to hook things up, but you can definatly turn if off and disconnect things.

or

Stand on one foot in a doorway - push yourself to rotate while in the doorway with your arms but don't let any rotation occur. That creates a lot of leveage on the hip-rotators of one leg so you can build awareness of what muscle group that is and what it feels like to co-contract them.

I'm still thinking of a one which locks both at once.

While I'm musing about all this it should be pointed out (punny) that there is a difference between inside foot tipping and inside foot pointing. While pointing the inside foot without tipping will also create the induced torque to the stance foot if the hip-rotators are co-contracted, you don't want to do that in skiing. Tipping the foot will create the same inside foot femur rotation as inside foot pointing, but tipping will allow any ski attached to remain parallel to the other foot. One is a PMTS move, the other is not. The o-frame occurs but the feet remain pointed the same direction.

[Ken]

The movement question to ask is what movements in the stance leg could flatten the stance ski in relation to the free foot ski? Often this can be achieved by simply relaxing the stance ankle a little (i.e., not try to vigorously evert) while simultaneously continuing to tip the free foot. This flattens the stance ski a bit and it drifts. One can also flex the stance leg a bit and while continuing to tip the free foot ski. This will also flatten the stance ski a bit. By the way this is why you don't want to be flexing both legs during the engagement phase: it actually decreases bite in the stance ski.

1) Is the flattening caused by the knee bending a bit sideways when flexed?
2) Is this 2-ski-flattening happening in the old style of up-unweighting to start a turn and coming down on bent knees?


Ken

[John Mason]

Serious's question leds me to another question

What are different people meaning with the term brushed carve.

With a given set of skis, if you brush the carve, will it:

1. take a longer radius
2. take a shorter radius
3. or both depending on how the brush carve is used/implemented

In my own use of the term the answer is 3 because. If you just do a normal carve but don't fully engage you can lengthen the turn. If you go more o-frame at the same time as not fully engaging you will shorten the turn.

Serious's question gets to another - maybe seperate subject. What other ways can you turn shorter than the radius of the skis while staying balanced and not rotating at the hips. I know of a few ways. The way he mentions to let the tails break loose. I don't that that offers as much control as the other ways, but it works. I like to stay more centered.

The other way is just to sideslip and if you go fore, the tips will dip. If you go aft in your balance the tails will dip. You can do circles by playing with that. John Clendenon teaches this a lot, but it's not taught that I'm aware of as part of PMTS.

So, my question out to the group and HH of course is a brushed carved any time the skis are not engaged to where you are putting a line on the snow, and thus your turn is dictated by pressure and the side-cut of the skis. And when in this non-pure carved state - is the brushed carve both longer and shorter than the pure carve state depending on how you are holding your tipping differential between the feet. Any clarifications would be helpful. I know what I do but I'm curious as to the official position.

To restate my own playing with this, tipping is not enough to fully engage the skis to the skis being flat on the snow. In that range, the amount of o-frame - difference in tipping between the feet - controls the radius of the brushed carve to 180's in the length of a ski to longer than the normal turn radius. The context is always stance foot - standing on the outside leg - and tipping the inside free foot laterally (not pointing it to the inside of the turn) and creating the o-frame (as opposed to the a-frame non-pmts skiers get using steering).