by John Mason » Sat Apr 03, 2004 9:51 am
The instructor manual is quite good. Often duplicating material in the other 2 books (three books if you include the excersize book). The instructor manual goes more into the reasons for the excersizes and what they are trying to accomplish. For a head first guy like me rather than monkey see monkey do learner, I found it quite helpful.
I look at float as the natural result in a turn of letting gravity and prior turn energy work for you. You don't push off to get to the next turn in PMTS or in Lito's soft release, but your letting everything in your skiing efficiently create the next turn through passive (collapse/flex) stance leg action plus this tipping of the former stance leg. This will move you, depending on how much tipping and how much flexing, pretty dramatically into the next turn. In the process of doing this action you will experience, at the momemt the body moves over your skis but before the turn has actually developed and changed direction a "float". Depending on the arc and energy of the turn this can be very brief or simply a weightless sensation or it can be a little longer.
This is my experience with it anyway. I'll be interested to read HH's comments on this too.
If, however, you are using a wider stance, then you can't use passive forces to enter the next turn, but must push off to get the next turn going. If this is the way you transition between turns, there would be no float. I think this stance issue is why some things people read in threads here, do not translate to self teaching on the slopes. PMTS doesn't work with a the type of wide stance that seems to be in vogue these days.
Nice discussion (and HH's back, how'd the racing go?)