by geoffda » Wed Jan 03, 2018 6:42 pm
Should we do a "golf clap" here? Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while. The author of this video is (from what I've seen) a park and ride skier who seems to have a limited understanding of what it means to make a ski perform. You can find some examples of his skiing on PugSki. He seems to be a typical masters racer/instructor type who doesn't know what he doesn't know. He came on the forum years ago, but he didn't stick around.
"If you can't do it, you can't understand it, and you have no business trying to teach it."
The obvious question would be, "Why are elite skiers flexing in transition?" I doubt the author can answer that because he doesn't appear to ski with foot tipping. Moreover, the notion that the skier is in the "back seat" is completely wrong. As is the notion that flexing during transition involves some sort of leg work out. As is the notion that there is active leg extension going on.
When people who can't do it try to explain it, they often fall back to descriptive, rather than prescriptive instruction. Since they don't know *what* to do to achieve what they think they are seeing, they fall back to trying to describe that which they don't understand. In their own skiing, they try to imitate, but without real understanding, the results are almost never what they intend.
Look, there is no need to seek out random ski instruction on the internet. Everything necessary to develop into a world-class skier can be found in Harald's books and videos, his blog, and here on the PMTS forum. There simply isn't anyone else who understands skiing at his level. Even people who seem to get it generally don't. Most people have no clue what is possible on skis. They get to some level and they think they have it all figured out. The reality is that true, world class ski performance is only available to a highly select group of athletes. The rest of us will never get there. That said, if we can develop perfect movements, with perfect timing, and our bodies aren't so far removed from world class athletes that our deficiencies can't be overcome with proper equipment setup, well, we can get really close. But it takes somebody like Harald, who not only was an actual, elite world-class skier, but who has spent his life figuring out how world-class skiers actually ski, to explain what is required to ski at that level. Why on earth would anyone seek out instruction elsewhere when they could take advantage of a resource like Harald?
If the thought is that "hey, this video shows instructors are cactching on," well, that is just wrong. Like I said, even people who think they get it usually don't. And if you can't ski it, you definitely don't get it. When ski schools start requiring their directors to be PMTS certfied and they start teaching a pure PMTS curriculum, then you can say things are changing. Sprinkling a few movements (or the Phantom move) into the mix isn't a sign of understanding--it is actually a sign of lack of understanding. Anyone who isn't teaching straight up Essentials, nothing more, nothing less, doesn't get it and isn't worth listening to.
If you want a good video of racers flexing in transition, just go grab Stefano Gross, Marcel Hirscher, or Mikaela Shiffrin running slalom on YouTube and play it back in VLC Media Player so you an slow it down. There is no need to watch this video since the analysis isn't correct.