Steering Your Skis - Part 2: Ski Performance Breakthrough, #3

By Hugh Monney

Suitable for intermediate and advanced skiers, experts and racers, these highly illustrated ebooks show you how to finesse excellent performance with more skill and less effort.
Steering your skis - part 2

If you read the previous section, Steering your skis, part 1, you have an appreciation of some steering blends and some useful drills to help you develop skill with them.

Now it's time to take a closer look at each steering element.

This section deals with many refinements to the process of steering your skis, which gives you many opportunities to improve your effectiveness and control.

To start this process, let's look at each of the steering elements, pressure, edging and rotation, in detail.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hugh Monney
• Release date: Jan 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9780992800871

Hugh Monney

Performance coach and author of Ski Performance Breakthrough - the series of e-books. Hugh is also the Director and founder of the BASS Network of elite snowsports schools, operating in: Chamonix - Chatel - Courchevel - Les Gets - Les Contamines - Les Deux Alpes - Megeve - Meribel - Morzine - St Gervais - Tignes - Val d'Isere He runs advanced skiing clinics and off pistes courses in the Alps, as well as off piste adventures across the globe, having previously trained thousands of skiers and hundreds of ski instructors. Formerly a research chemist, for the Cancer Research Campaign, Hugh has a degree in Chemistry and a Master's research degree. He is also a qualified science teacher. He spent 10 years in the science departments of British universities before switching to a career in skiing. He began skiing in 1975 and became a full time ski teacher in 1984, to get out of the lab and into the mountains. He has skied extensively throughout Europe and his off piste skiing and Heliski clinics have taken him to Argentina, Canada, Chile and Greenland. He was a Trainer and examiner of instructors for the British Association of Snowsports Instructors, for 22 years, from 1989 to 2011, and contributed to the development of BASI's system of instructor training. He represented Britain as a member of the GB Demonstration Team, at the 1991 Interski Congress, in St Anton. For many years, Hugh was invited to train the British Mountain Guides in Off Piste skiing performance. Hugh wrote and presented the 1991 Channel 4 TV and video series "The Complete Skier" and in the same year he founded BASS, The British Alpine Ski and Snowboard School. The BASS Network of elite snowsports schools now extends to 12 resorts across the Alps. His main interests, in addition to his family, are: Alpine & Telemark skiing, developing the quality of service to clients of the BASS Network, Photography, Science, Tai Chi Chuan, Motorcycling, Cycling, Balance trainiing, including slack line and playing guitar. Qualifications include; BASI ISTD Level 4, International Ski Teacher Diploma BASI Telemark Teacher Full certification in France M.Phil, B.Sc. (Hons), PGCE Some comments from Hugh's clients and colleagues: "Hugh is a technical expert and an innovator, continually pushing the boundaries with his exciting and dynamic ideas, many of which have put BASI at the fore...

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Pressure - the lowdown

Let’s start with a definition.

Pressure is the force that the ski exerts on snow, divided by the contact area of the ski with the snow.

(pressure = force / area)

This is just physics, that’s what pressure is.

We can influence the pressure between our skis and the snow, in many ways. They fall into the two categories of either increasing or decreasing the pressure.

1.Increasing the pressure between the ski and the snow

a.Press the sole of your foot down into the snow.

Imagine that you have made a snowball and set it on the ground, just to one side of your ski boot.

Now, imagine picking up your ski, placing it over the top of the snowball, so that the middle of the arch of your foot is directly above it.

Now, imagine that you press down, to squash the snowball into the snow. Yes, it is that simple.

Of course, you can make that pressing down movement, even without the snowball being there. That’s the process we’re talking about.

Skiing at speed, on steep slopes, requires excellent pressure control.

Skier: Steve Ricketts, BASI International Ski Teacher,

Director of BASS Val d’Isere. Photo: BASS Chamonix

You can do this very gently, or very strongly, or with any intensity between those limits, so it is a very versatile process.

This is a very important way of generating pressure, usually near the beginning of a curve, in the initiation phase.

b.Pivot your skis across your line of travel and tilt them onto their edges.

This creates pressure automatically.

The amount of pressure created depends on:

how quickly you are traveling,

how far across your direction of travel you pivot your skis

and how much grip you create with the skis edges in the snow.

Expert skiers can adjust the amount of pressure generated, by controlling these three variables.

This principle is easy to understand, in the context of a skidded curve, created by the pivot steering method, discussed in the previous section.

However, this process also works when your ski arcs across your direction of travel, more progressively. So this process also works during carved turns.