Hi Carl,
I can’t claim to have perfected the art of skiing myself and I’m not an experienced MA appraiser, so you might need to take all this with a grain of salt, but I’m sure that others will provide correction if I’m heading you in the wrong direction.
I hope this comes across as a serious effort to spot and crucial areas and not as a go at criticizing someone else’s skiing that actually has a lot of good things going for it. So her is my go at it. I tried to imagine I’m making those turns and wonder what I would try to do, to make the most dramatic change.
First – what looks to me like the SMI area to work on. Initial appearance is there is lots of edge carving going on and lots of counter. Lots of things look pretty good. But something is not quite right as outside ski is unpredictable especially in left hand turns, the ski position is fixed in a very permanent open position, often forcing you to the inside ski and body position through early part of turn is actually out of kilter
The things (I reckon) I’m seeing.
1) Your biggest problem is that you are not creating any Counter BALANCE at the critical phase when you or coming through transition and just beginning the next turn (the body/slope relationship that is ( I think) referred to by Harald as being “upside down on the slope”). In fact I can’t see much counter balance used at all, except for from the - middle of the turn - where it naturally seems to look like there is more than there realy is because there is lots of counter acting, but there is some here I think probably initiated by body angulation in a counter balanced way, really as a result of skiing into it.
To be more exact, at the time you are transitioning you must pass through a “neutral everything” phase – since the body position you had in the last turn is now going to be completely reversed through the next turn to the opposite side. So at transition as you release, and knees flex up (even with dynamic release) skiis come through flat, shoulders and hips come square, boots come through side by side alignment. At any sort of speed this is the briefest of moments so it is really critical that body position here is “dynamically” moving straight into the ideal positions for the instance the new turn is beginning from the flexed position. As you begin the next turn the body must already be moving into CB. Without deliberate CB here you can’t tip early, and you can’t tip fast, or enough, to make tipping the real initiating cause of the turn. CA also has to be starting to happen so it develops properly (I mention your RH hip later) . CB & CB doesn’t have to be dramatic but it absolutely has to be there. If it isn’t done in this instance it is too late to get the top part of the turn right, and the body positions and angles through the whole turn are compromised (as Harald has shown a number of times in montages) . To me this is the key for you. In the brief moment where you come through transition you must be acutely aware that you are already starting to lead your body into counter balance and counteracting, but particularly counter balance for you, thinking of squeezing the waist laterally WHILST the boots are still aligned together in transition , and you keep tipping and counter balancing as much as you can, going absolutely straight ahead in the same line, boots still aligned UNTIL the action of your tipping starts the turn changing direction. If you held this till then, the body position through the turn would be much better as would the ski carve and dynamics. In fact you would be forced to change your whole dynamics by not allowing yourself to compromise on this critical part.
To me it seems that if CB isn’t established very decisively as one of the first actions in moving from transition into the new turn I never get the chance to develop it properly through the turn and it makes a huge difference to edge hold, stability and body angles.
Also (and I actually have this problem and have been working on it) I think one of your hips is possibly permanently a bit out of alignment. It looks like your right hip is a bit forward naturally which means that if all else is the same, you naturally have better CA when making a RH turn (ie RH hip forward) , but when making a LH turn your CA is naturally compromised since the RH hip is still actually leading at the beginning of the turn and this I think contributes to the stance ski slipping away on the LH turns.
OK well! Now we find out hopefully if anybody can affirm or otherwise correct these observations and suggestions.
Regards Robert