, 5 min, 896 words
Tags: national-ability-center teaching
This week I had the enormous pleasure of attending a skiing skills and drills clinic with experienced instructor Philippe Astié. The focus of the clinic was edging and its opposite, flat ski work.
One of my favorite aspects of ski instructing is the chance to really think about the mechanics of skiing. As an experienced skier, I don't really think about the basics anymore. There's no "oh, I need to engage my left shoulder more" or "uh oh I knew I should have practiced little-toe pressure yesterday." It all just kind of works. But the beauty of this clinic was that my colleagues and I got to figure out what our bodies do when we engage a ski edge. It's more complicated than it sounds!
But before we got to edging, we had to play with flat skis! This sounds counter-intuitive, but in reality, flat skis are what allow edging to create such effortless turns. If you're a skier, envision what you do to initiate a hockey stop. In order to kick your skis all the way across the fall line, you first have to get off edge and allow your skis to rotate freely on the snow. The same is true at the transition between turns. Finding a flat ski is crucial to understanding how to use your edges as a skier.
To find whether our skis were flat, we did what Philippe called a "flat ski run." In other words, we pointed our skis straight downhill and just went straight for a while. Then we stopped, popped off our skis, and hiked uphill to see our tracks. The sign of truly flat skis is that a track in the snow will show all four edges (inside and outside for both skis). For me, my right ski showed two edges, but my left was slightly tilted toward my inside edge. Knowing this, I was able to flatten out my left ski to improve my flat ski sliding.
From there we moved on to actual edging. There are two main ways to use your body to engage the edges of a ski: inclination and angulation.
In inclination, the skier's entire body angles uphill from their skis. This means several things. First, it brings weight to the inside ski in the skier's turn. This is nonideal for both balance and anatomical reasons. It also means the skier can only turn as fast and they can move their entire body to the side, which means slow, gradual turns. And finally, it often brings the skier's weight back over their skis, further reducing their control over their turns. On the whole, inclination isn't exactly an ideal way to ski, even if it is easier to explain than angulation.
In angulation, on the other hand, the skier's legs angle up the hill, but their torso and head angle down the hill. This results in a noticeable angle between legs and torso when looking at the skier straight on. It means that the skier can turn as fast as they can move their legs or hips (rather than their entire body), and it encourages their weight to rest forward in their skis. And to top it all off, it naturally puts weight on the outside ski in a turn, which improves balance and adaptability in adverse conditions.
There are two flavors of angulation, both named after the part of the body that produces them. In lower-leg angulation, the skier's ankles and knees move side to side to engage the edges of their skis. This type of angulation is quick and ideal for short turns.
In contrast, hip angulation involves the entire body. In essence, the skier keeps their center of gravity slightly inside of their turn but continues to angle their upper body down the hill by angling their entire lower body up the hill, with torso angled downhill. With this kind of leverage the skier can really dig into a turn, and look awesome in the process!
The difference here is hard to describe, but easy to see. Check out the excellent photos and diagrams in the yourskicoach write-up on the topic.
Practicing each of these types of edge engagement gave me a renewed appreciation for the complexity of skiing. In great skiers, different types of angulation will appear totally naturally, without the skier having to think about it at all. But "just do it" doesn't work so well as a ski instructor, so really understanding what the body is doing as we engage our edges is crucial to passing that skill on to our students.
Thank you to Philippe for bringing us this clinic, to the NAC for making it available to employees, and to Vail's Epic Promise 40 program for actually paying Philippe to teach us things. It was an incredible afternoon.
To learn more about the NAC, check out our site, or find @nationalabilitycenter or #adaptivenation on social media. Vail has also asked that I mention #epicpromise and @VailResorts as well.