Your skiing and riding is predicated that the movements you’re making with your body will result in an anticipated response from the skis and snowboard. How is it that one person can naturally just take to a sport like skiing while another never seems to look comfortable with what they’re doing? The answer isn’t so much that these two people are making different movements, but that these movements are translated into different degrees of balance and control from their gear. It’s very common that there are inherent variables in your body alignment; for your best performance, all serious skiers and riders should pay a visit to their local boot fitter.
Archive for the ‘Telemark’ Category
Sunscreen protection is a must for those spring skiing days when the sun is high and bright. After a full winter of limited exposure, the strong spring sun can really do a number on your pale skin if you don’t take some precautions. Sunscreen is the #1 preventative and a personal favorite for sunscreen protection are products from the Bullfrog brand. Read the rest of this entry »
Spring skiing is surely the Prime Time of the winter season. The weather’s warmer, the sun’s higher, the snow is softer, and you’ve been making turns all season so you’re probably feeling pretty comfortable on the slopes. By March, you should be set up for some amazing days of skiing and riding, provided you take care of an unintended consequence of those factors on your gear. Due to the warmer temperatures, your boots won’t have the same fit as they did earlier in the season. Materials such as plastic, foam, and suede all behave differently under various temperatures and you need to adjust your boot settings to compensate.
O.K., today’s blog is surely a pet peeve of mine in skiing; too many people have no idea how to carry a pair of skis comfortably! Let’s face it, the gear can be heavy and you’re probably wearing heavy layers of clothing and might be in your ski boots and it’s likely that you’re walking uphill or on uneven terrain and yeah, sure, it can be a challenge! With all that adversity, folks tend to make things worse by contorting their bodies and limbs in all sorts of combinations that usually aren’t very efficient and lead to almost immediate fatigue. These folks are almost human porcupines, in that their gear is sticking out in all directions and likely to hit anyone and anything close by. To learn how to carry skis comfortably, watch the professional skiers from your local ski school and ski patrol: they’ll show you how it’s done!
When moving down a slope, control requires turns and turns need to be efficient and efficiency comes from strong turns and strong turns come from good balance and good balance comes from steady edges and steady edges make a turn round and round turns give you control. As in all things in life, everything goes full circle! So, how do you accomplish any one of those factors? Forget that goal; you can have it all if you use the mental image of a train while making turns.
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Skiing and riding in the trees relies on both physical and mental aspects to successfully make it through a run. While the physcial aspects are most important, you can help set yourself up for success by developing mental concepts that support those moves. Since avoiding the trees is the goal, you can be more successful at that goal if you let yourself think different about what composes a turn in the trees. Instead of thinking of turning around them, you can create more room for yourself in the trees by thinking about skiing at an angle past them.
It’s just human nature to want things to come easy and the frustration level can rise with an activity that requires a substantial amount of learning before you master it. Skiing requires thorough learning which builds methodically to bring you to a higher level of ability. If you rush that process, you may create a situation of diminishing returns as you abandon what’s come before in a hurry to get to what’s next. In skiing, telemarking, and snowboarding, use patience turns to give your gear a chance to do the turning for you.
Good balance in telemark turns can come as much from what you keep out of your stance as from what you put into it. It’s tough to maintain balance from a split stance regardless; adding in an unnecessary rotation of the body will only make it more challenging. It’s key to keep the upper body quiet in telly turns and the location and motion of your hands can have an important role toward that effort.