Carving in the Steeps

[John Mason]

Counter is when you draw a line horizontally through your hips and a line at right angles to your hips points outside the direction of the turn. This is also called counter rotation.

In the camps they will set you up with a hip-o-meter. You make a hip-o-meter by taking two ski poles and reversing one to the other, and one goes on your front waist and the other goes on your lower back and the ends are hooked into the wrist straps. This gives you your horizontal line as a reference point.

In early counter at the top of the turn, you point your hips to the outside of the turn. This is completely opposite of facing your hips down the hill into the next turn which will set your hips up opposite of any counter rotation.

One of Jay's posts on this is in the classic thread's section. But this is not the one with the link to the movie. I'll look for that later and pop a link up - but time to get off the forum and earn some money.
Strong tipping of the inside foot will help to set yp this counter rotation and hip drop. This increases your edge set and leaves you very skeletally strong.

If your turn speed is very low, this counter rotation is mixed with counter balance. Counter balance is when your body is in a c-shape. In the early part of the turn if your uphill shoulder is tipped to match the slope then you will not have any counter balance. If your shoulder is kept down at that part of the turn you'll have more counter balance.

Search Jay's posts. He has an excellent post of both of these with about a 15 minute video of HH explaining and showing these. Search Skiersynergy (jay)'s posts or look for the word counter and bring up Jay's posts.

[Max_501]

See the SkierSynergy post in this thread for detailed counter discussion:

http://www.realskiers.com/pmtsforum/viewtopic.php?t=662

Harald's video'd upper/lower body lesson is here:

http://www.web.pdx.edu/~petersj/Skills/Videos/ULBC.wmv

[cometjo]

On a much less technical level than this discussion, it seems to me that both the Nobis and Wendy Fisher segments of Warren Miller's "Impact" have some nice examples of steep carving (when their skis are actually touching the snow! )

[François]

Dewdman's point on gravity is worth repeating. When you carve a tighter arc, you load the ski more to decamber it; your foot pushes down in the middle of the ski and the snow pushes back all along the edge. The edge grips the snow thanks to gravity pulling you down. On a flat slope all of gravity is straight into the snow, and it's easy to turn a tight turn. On a 90 degree cliff face NONE of gravity is pushing into the hill and you cant carve anything. The force providing the grip on your edges is your weight times the cosine of the angle the slope makes with the horizontal.
On a 60 degree slope for an extreme example, your edges have half (cosine of 60 degrees) as much grip. Also on a 60 degree slope, a force equal to 86 percent (sine of 60 degrees) of your weight is pulling you downslope in addition to your momentum.

On a steeper slope you have less grip from your edges and need to resist more force.

[François]

You could compensate by having skis that are easier to decamber (in addition to having a smaller sidecut radius). You would then be able to make smaller turns, but you would also have to, cause you wouldn't want to see any high speeds with noodles. What's the point of skiing steeps if your not going to go fast though? Just get some SG skis and carve LR turns

[Icanski]

At Fernie, on a steep run, I was having trouble with the release. I was staying vertical and not letting my CM come across during the release. I was afraid I would be leaning downhill and my skis wouldn't catch up in time and I'd sort of be diving down the hill.
Diana suggested doing the two foot release exercise. lighten and tip the old stance foot, and the new one following as my CM started across the skis. As they flattened, they sought the fall line very quickly, and by continuing the tipping, they came around quickly, too. The trick for me was the countering of the upper body, so I didn't end up facing up hill and falling over backwards.
I'm not being too clear perhaps, but as I started to link these short turns, and get some momentum, it was easier to make more carved turns and keep some grip on the edges. The flexing at the ends of the turns (rather than the CSIA extension) made a bigger difference, because now, I had some room to extend the stance leg as the skis came around, and at the end, as I flexed, I could then start to counter in the high-C part.

It's very different than the jumping pedal turns I'd seen in other steep training.
The two footed release, and one footed release exercise helped me do it at a pace I could handle for starters and gain confidence in the steep stuff.
Hope that helps...
Icanski

[Harald]

Here is an example of PMTS counter, high C

Check the amount of flexing and tipping from the 3rd frame to the last frame.

[dewdman42]

Check the amount of flexing and tipping from the 3rd frame to the last frame.

Harald I have a question about this. When you say tipping and flexing I assume you are referring to the free leg that is flexing? Or is your impression that this skier is doing some kind of extra flexing with the stance leg for some purpose?

Also, I have a question about the free leg "flexing". When you say flex...do you mean forcibly flex the leg by using muscles to forcibly pull your knee up higher towards the chest? Or do you mean to allow the leg to flex by not resisting it?

[Harald]

Cool, yes I'm referring to the free foot side when I say amount of flexing or bending and tipping. When I use the word flexing I am referring to bending/flexing. Not flexing as in contracting a muscle. In biomechanics terminology, flexing means hinging a joint, not contracting a muscle, so I'm used to using that word.

Second question, if you want to get that much tipping and flexing of the free foot side, you have to retract, actively pull the extended leg. The retraction is almost a collapse of that leg, with immediate tipping to the little toe edge. Unless you have loaded the ski to the point where it is bent, you won?t get the body crossing at nearly the rate demonstrated by Rocca.

The rate of crossing depends largely on the energy and forces resisted in the previous arc.

[NoCleverName]

On a flat slope all of gravity is straight into the snow, and it's easy to turn a tight turn. On a 90 degree cliff face NONE of gravity is pushing into the hill and you cant carve anything

Au contraire, mon ami. Yes, gravity plays a part, but you can't count out the component vectors of the centripedal force that is causing the turn (i.e. the continuous inward-pointing force that causes you to follow a curved course). The centripidal vector is right up from the ski top thru your leg straight thru the Cg. The two components of the vector are (1) in shear to the surface and (2) normal to the surface. Shear force tries to break away while normal force presses you deeper into the surface. So all those g's you feel in the turn go towards (a) trying to breakaway and (b) digging deeper into the snow. Add in the gravity vector (itself having shear and normal components) and you get the final vector diagram.

At slope angles less than 45 deg the components of the gravity vector predominate "normal" to the surface (helping edge grip), but beyond 45 deg the shear vector get bigger than the normal vector and gravity is working against edge grip. In any event, it's the total shear strength of the surface that's going to determine whether or not you stay upright. But again, you've got to combine all the forces, not just gravity

Said in a simpler way: if "flatter" surfaces allowed "tighter" turns, auto race tracks wouldn't have banked corners.

(As a review, a vector is an arrow whose direction points along a force and whose length is proportional to the strength of that force. The components of a vector may be considered to be the two vectors that form the sides of the rectangle that has the original vector as its diagonal. If the rectangle is drawn so as one of its sides "lies on" a surface, then the "component vectors" measure the individual forces parallel and normal to that surface (this is called a "vector diagram"). Don't bother to bring up vector diagrams on the E..c forum, they'd rather believe in magic, instead).

.

[dewdman42]

Obviously, there is no such thing as a situation where there are ONLY downward forces into the snow, except when you are standing still.

The point is, on steeper terrain, gravity and momentum combine in something closer to the same direction, which is a direction that is NOT directly down into the snow. So you have more total forces wanting to slide you across the snow instead of digging your edges into the snow. its not all or nothing.

[dewdman42]

Cool, yes I'm referring to the free foot side when I say amount of flexing or bending and tipping. When I use the word flexing I am referring to bending/flexing. Not flexing as in contracting a muscle. In biomechanics terminology, flexing means hinging a joint, not contracting a muscle, so I'm used to using that word.

Second question, if you want to get that much tipping and flexing of the free foot side, you have to retract, actively pull the extended leg. The retraction is almost a collapse of that leg, with immediate tipping to the little toe edge. Unless you have loaded the ski to the point where it is bent, you won?t get the body crossing at nearly the rate demonstrated by Rocca.

Ok. I am a BIT confused by those two paragraphs because if we aren't contracting a muscle as in paragraph1, how can we actively "pull" to retract it as in paragraph2? It seems on the surface like a contradictory statement, but please explain more. The word "flex" is easy to misconstrue.

I was more or less under the impression that if we are truly standing on the stance ski and balanced on it...our free ski is barely touching the snow and we're tipping it...no additional directed input would be required to get that knee to bend and provide the vertical seperation needed for the big edge angles. Seems to me more like a matter of "reducing resistance", as opposed to actively "pulling" it up. But.. please clarify... It could be that I've been subconciously pulling it up more than I think I have.

[NoCleverName]

The only reason why I got over-the-top pedantic about it is I guess, an over-reaction to what goes on in "Other Forums" where there is complete disregard for physical reality.

Sorry.

[Harald]

The question comes up about using leg flexing during the arc when the stance leg is extended. If you want to shorten turn radius in a highly angled arc, after the stance leg is fully extended, you must flex that leg slightly so that you can add more tipping angle to the ski. The slight flexing reduces pressure to the ski, enough so that you can increase foot tipping against/toward the boot to tip the ski .

This is a high level expert skier movement. You have to have complete control of your balance and carving early from the High C on through the arc to even consider this approach. The only other way to decrease or tighten the radius of the turn is though ski tip pressure. This is dangerous, as adding tip pressure with short skis like slalom or carving shaped skis; it is very easy to unload the back of the ski. When that happens the tail skids out. If you do add forward pressure to the ski boot for the tip to engage; make sure you are pressuring the bottom of the foot behind the arch or the ski will pivot at the toe piece.

This doesn?t apply nearly as much with long wide all mountain skis as they can stand and may need forward leverage. They behave much more like old straight skis.

[Harald]

Sorry, my last post didn?t address you subsequent question from my earlier post, you?re too fast for me. I posted before I checked if there were new posts, so I?ll get back to your questions about flexing and pulling, and light inside leg. Give me a minute to re-read your questions so that I can completely understand.