I am glad to see that my efforts to educate skiers are having influence on instructors and that my demonstrations of how skiing really works are taking hold even by PSIA and PSIA followers.
In the most recent Ski Racing Magazine, Ron LeMaster does a section on balance, with photos. He talks about vertical separation of the feet rather than horizontal separation. This understanding and interpretation is from PMTS material, it is PMTS understanding and theory of narrow stance skiing that we have been promoting for ever. In fact, it does more than support what I have written and presented it is what I wrote in my Book 2.
He demonstrated Hermann and others skiing with a narrow stance with vertical separation rather tahn hrizontal separation in the turn, for better balance. . He does not advocate, as he did previously a wide stance. Now according to Ron at least, the top skiers on the world cup are holding their boots close to there legs when they are in the turn. I did not get a chance to read the article in depth, but I will and will report back as to the accuracy of the article.
We have demonstrated through PMTS teaching that you can not achieve high edge angles by focusing on horizontal separation, a la Al Hobart Gorilla turns.
I first introduced this very concept of how world cup skiers ski, in a presentation at the last International Congress of Skiing and Science in 2000, in St Christoph, Tirol. Then I followed up on this idea in my ?Anyone can be an Expert Skier 2? book. In the book and Congress presentations we wanted to educate skiers about what a functional stance width means, because so many ski instructors and coaches were promoting the wide stance incorrectly at that time and still are.
I hope Ron?s article has additional influence and starts to bring the issue of wide stance under control.
I knew it would take some time for most PSIA instructors and many coaches to realize that the wide stance approach wasn't functional and that the wide stance would disappear after they had enough time to figure out it didn?t get results. Now Ron presents my concepts and ideas in ski racing magazine, hopefully instructors can now can get back to teaching functional stance.
Fortunately for PMTS skiers they never had to go through these awful aberrations in skiing understanding. Don't relax too much, there are still plenty of bad skiing concepts being taught. We will eventually turn them around as well and when that happens ski teaching will be PMTS.