by leopold bloom » Mon Dec 31, 2007 1:33 am
Hello Rispalding,
I have a theory, totally untested, that you could teach a professional hockey player who has never snapped into a binding in his life to ski at a very high level in a day or two.
" stopping frequently is about the most tiring movement there is, thats why you see people skate in a circle to turn around instead of stopping"
The answer to your problem is contained in this statement from your post. You have identified that the difference between a hockey stop and the circles you describe above is analogous to the difference between your green groomer turns and your speed control problem turns.
If you divide your skating circles into the PMTS high-C/low-C segments you know from your skating experience that you are building edge angles progressively in the high-C segment. On skates, on a flat surface, there is no psychological impediment to doing this. On a sloped surface, especially a steeper sloped surface, the last thing any sane individual wants to do is aggressively arc down the hill into the fall line.
Complete and utter trust in technique is often confused with insanity by the third party observer. It is also the key to speed control.
Whenever I get in a speed control jam my tendency is to focus on the bottom half of the turn. This is an utterly dysfunctional, albeit natural, reaction. The only way to control speed is to focus on the top half of the turn because this is where we go awry on steeper, icier slopes (i.e. those speed control situations).
I am teaching my young son to ski. This has proven to be a delightful experience because we both respond to simple, monosyllabic directives. I would like to share a couple of them with you. I repeat these statements in my head, sometimes out loud, when things aren't going so well. They seem to work for me and my seven year old. I hope they will work for you.
1. To find a new edge, throw away the old one.
One steeper, slicker slopes, my natural tendency is to hang onto my edges. This behaviour gets me to the fall line without developing the edge angles I need to get out of it gracefully. Speed is the inevitable result. Throwing away your old edge is really committing to your release.
2. Trust your tipping.
Releasing and tipping need to meld into one motion. If you trust your tipping, you will tip early, i.e. right at the point of release and continue to tip progressively. Steeper slopes tend to test your trust, making it harder to tip "upside down" as they say in PMTS-speak. If you haven't developed good edge angles before you get to the fall line, you never will, no matter how hard you try.
Of course, to control speed you need to press on your ski in the bottom half of the turn, but if you can get the top half right, this will be easy and natural.
I have a little exercise that I do to help me work on these things. I call it the pyramid. I begin, on a moderate slope, to link some shallow carved turns that allow my speed to build up a little bit. Then I try to make each turn just slightly deeper than the last one. A slalom course set to this line would be narrow at the top and broadening steadily to the bottom like a pyramid. The point of this exercise is to identify what is working in the easy, shallow carved turns and make it bigger and more effective a little bit a time. Each turn will be a little more dynamic than the last one.
If none of this helps take up downhill.
- Leo