NSW Nordic Ski Club
FOOT LOOSE AND FANCY FREE - THE BASICS OF SKIING II
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In "Feet First - the Basics of Skiing", I touched on the tools, skis, and the medium, snow. This time we will look at the part of your body that connects you to the tool. To extend our earlier analogy of the sculptor and chisel, just as a hand controls a chisel so your feet control skis. Feet are the fundamental point of connection with the tool. Feet are also the furthest part of the body from the brain and the heart.
Your feet are cable of twisting, rocking, rolling, pressuring, lifting, flattening - in fact they are incredibly versatile and very sensitive. They act as an instant sensor of what is happening underneath and can pick up incredibly fine changes in pressure and surface even when transmitted through heavy skis and thick boots. So getting in touch with your feet is an excellent way to connect with the ski and the snow under and much better than your head as a contact point.
This is easier for people with highly developed bodily/ kinaesthetic intelligence such as dancers. Learning the snow plough or wedge turn is a very good indicator of whether this intelligence is developed. A person with underdeveloped kinaesthetic intelligence will often observe a demonstration of a snow plough turn then proceed to roll their feet out or not at all rather than roll them in. If this is your own experience, don't despair. Very few people are aware of their feet at all and it takes some time to make the connection.
There are also keys to activate the right sort of movement and these keys may involve moving another part of the body altogether. I call this "referred movement" - move one part of the body to automatically move another. Try the simple exercise of standing with your feet wide apart and then try to make your knees touch together. What happens to your feet?
What this demonstrates is something that many ski teachers have known for ages - your body as a whole and different parts of it control and influence your feet and hence what forces are transferred to the ski. So in the basic terms of mechanics, consider the feet as the final transfer point of force to the ski. This force may be sent through the whole of the foot, the toes, balls of the feet, sides and heel to varying degrees.
Last time we looked at what happens when you stand on one ski and use its edge to carve turns. To put a ski on its inside edge you need to be able to roll your foot in. The alignment of your feet with your legs is very important here. If your feet pronate, then they are already rolled in. This makes it much harder to bring the ski from the flat to its edge. A solution which made a big difference to me is orthotics in my boots. These correct the alignment of knees, ankles and feet and ensure the biomechanics work properly.
Your feet and especially your toes are fundamental to balance. Does your foot wobble around when you stand on one ski? Being able to balance on one ski is critical to effective parallel skiing on most snow other than powder. One foot is having to control the balance of your whole body weight.
Try standing on one foot and move your body around. You will experience the subtle adjustments of tension and relaxation required in your foot to maintain balance. This tension and relaxation in the feet is made obvious in side slipping where very fine adjustments allow you to slip sideways on the flat of the ski or stop by edging.
The same principle applies to carving or skidding turns. Try starting the side slip with more weight on your heel then slowly put more weight on the ball of the foot. By subtly moving your weight from the heel to the ball you can control the movement of the ski forwards and back.
The subtlety of foot control is most clearly experienced in the telemark turn and especially in the back foot where the heel is lifted off the ski. This reduces the contact area of the foot to the toes, the ball and part of the side of the foot. Paul Parker (author of Free Heel Skiing) uses the idea of pressuring the edge of the little toe on the rear foot. Think about what this might achieve in terms of the transfer of force through the ski. What will it do to the ski? What will it do the rest of your body, especially your knees? Try it out and report the results to your brain.
I have to admit that in the heat of the moment, thinking about my small toe is a long way from my mind. This technique assumes a reasonably strong connection between brain and small toe, which is not well developed in my case. The strength of the concept is that it pinpoints the actual force transfer point to the ski and snow and uses a micro force (small toe pressure) to influence a macro reaction (whole body position and ski movement). Whether this particular focus suits you or not, the principle is a very useful one - use one focused idea to influence what your feet are doing.
Now with all this talk about feet it may be tempting to watch them while you are skiing. This has some very unfortunate effects on your total body - as your head looks down your whole posture and balance changes, usually with disastrous results. Try thinking about your skis as an extension of your feet and just as when you are walking normally, look ahead not down. This is another example of "referred movement".
At an advanced level, Lito Tejades-Flores uses a referred movement concept in what he calls "phantom edging". In essence, this suggests "edging" the unweighted inside ski in a parallel turn to influence the weighted outside ski. More on referred movement in the next instalment where we will look at what the rest of body is doing to influence the feet, starting with the ankles.
In summary, your feet can act as super sensors, telling you what is happening in the snow and as the primary means of controlling your skis. They give you reaction to the snow and terrain and are the means of response. Good skiers use this information to finely adjust pressure and weight distribution between skis, angle of edging, balance and direction. Flexible and responsive feet are the means to "dancing with the mountain".
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