I got to spend 3 days at mammoth working on my releases, etc.
Well, short story long, the friend I was skiing with (he is 45 and skied since he was 5) gave me a show accidently and cut his thumb pretty bad.
While in our short 1 hour in the emergency room, we saw check in:
2 broken legs
2 broken arms
2 broken wrists
1 knee that didn't look knee like anymore
and
1 ankle that - sorry - little hard do describe (see me cringe here)
and finally
one local non-sking resident with some sort of illness.
This is a dinky little hospital. Of course all these people have insurance and I doubt there is too much indigent care up there that needs to be done. Probably the most profitable hospital per square foot in the nation!
Anyway - my friend gave me some body position tips that helped my PMTS practice quite a bit. Basically, now I always pole plant, even if doing cruising large arc turns. Keeps me out of the back seat. Back last summer I learned a non-pmts drill to drag the tips which is a good drill for keeping the upper body stable and pointing down the hill. For me it stopped my early skiing habit of throwing my shoulder then letting my lower body catch up. But, this drill, with arms out to the side, got me into a persistant habit of being a little on my heels. Pole planting and reaching down the hill to do it, fixes that bad habit that I sometimes found myself in. (and, yes, all my PMTS coaches have told me the same thing, but 3 days spent with a person reminding me constantly does help break a habit)
(he also took me up to my first bowl too, it was pretty fun!)
Oh, also, he builds artificial limbs and he opened the "black box" on how the phantom move on the inside leg makes the external femer rotate. He knew right away because he has to deal with the gait analysis issues all the time in his work. Basically, refering to the phantom move in a doorway test I described in an earlier post, when doing the phantom move the hip tilts towards that foot and rotates in the direction of that foot. The body and tendons etc, that stablize the gait is then out of kilter for the other leg and that leg will, on it's own, seek to find it's way back to equilibriam. Anyway, he knew all the technical medical terms for what this rotation is called as they have to account for it in the way an artificial limb is constructed.
A phantom move, once you study yourself in the doorway, will also naturally move your body into the new turn. In a stem turn, where some or all of the turn has some outside leg active steering component to it, will move your body towards the outside of the turn as compared to the body position the phantom move places you in. (especially true at slow speeds)
All in all a fun 3 days!