tipping muscles

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tipping muscles

Postby acali » Fri Feb 04, 2011 12:01 pm

What muscles and joints are involved in tipping?

Clearly tipping starts by hinging the foot towards the LTE, but what joints and muscles are involved in the entire movement?
I understand that many of the secondary movements we do make more extreme tipping possible but what are the primary joints and muscles we use in tipping?

If I were asked to do a push up the primary movements would be to contract the pectoral muscles and to extent the arm by contracting the triceps.
Secondary actions would be to contract the abdominals, muscles that stabilize the shoulder, etc.

Can tipping be explained in such a way?
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Re: tipping muscles

Postby SkierSynergy » Fri Feb 04, 2011 12:40 pm

Sure this is easy -- though I don't think it will help anybody actually tip better.

Contract the tibialis anterior and posterior along with the flexor hallucis longus and the flexor digitorum longus. These muscles are reponsible for inverting the foot or tipping it to the LTE.

Does that make things easier. Just pick something easy like "hinge the big toe side of the ski off the snow," etc.
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Re: tipping muscles

Postby acali » Fri Feb 04, 2011 12:49 pm

I guess my question is really then, what happens after the foot is inverted?
Maybe those are all secondary movements, but what are they?
Is it really just hinge the foot and then CA/CB/flexing/fore-aft to maintain balance and allow more tipping?
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Re: tipping muscles

Postby SkierSynergy » Fri Feb 04, 2011 12:57 pm

acali wrote:I guess my question is really then, what happens after the foot is inverted?
Maybe those are all secondary movements, but what are they?
Is it really just hinge the foot and then CA/CB/flexing/fore-aft to maintain balance and allow more tipping?



I'm really not sure what you are after.
Yes, it is just those four other things at the same time that you continue to tip more and balance. The whole forum's content is a discussion of these 5 movements. Maybe someone else will chime in whether they have found that working on these 5 things is enough.
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Re: tipping muscles

Postby Max_501 » Fri Feb 04, 2011 1:18 pm

acali wrote:Is it really just hinge the foot and then CA/CB/flexing/fore-aft to maintain balance and allow more tipping?


Yes, but I wouldn't say 'allow' more tipping. That is too passive sounding. If you want big angles you need to actively tip and keep on tipping.

If tipping from the foot isn't working for you perhaps try tipping from the inside knee to see if that makes a difference.
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Re: tipping muscles

Postby acali » Fri Feb 04, 2011 1:53 pm

In the past before having a 1 on 1 lessson with a PMTS instructor I've definitely misunderstood the mechanics of tipping, not starting with the inversion of foot, although I may have thought that I was.

Thanks Max,
I will try that cue and see if it helps.
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Re: tipping muscles

Postby jbotti » Fri Feb 04, 2011 2:30 pm

Just so you know, you will not be the first person that has worked on tipping and some time much later on realizes that the way they were doing it and thinking about it was limiting the result. Harald often says that tipping is the most important essential but it also may be the most difficult one to master. I have been tipping and attempting to tip fr 8 years now and every few weeks I discover that I can go further and do it more efficiently. If it was easy everyone would ski like Harald.
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Re: tipping muscles

Postby h.harb » Fri Feb 04, 2011 2:42 pm

Jay has the muscles absolutely correct, these are the tipping muscles and they are very small and don't have much tipping force to overcome resistance. Just a word of caution, so skiers don't get a misinterpretation. (which always happens). Tipping isn't a big muscular effort. Done correctly it comes from momentum and relaxation.

Max is right, you have to keep tipping, (inside ski) but you don't encounter much resistance if you are flexing the inside leg, (flexing that leg takes the pressure off the ski) while tipping.

If you are turning your skis instead of developing a high C, (or target tipping) you aren't going to get much free tipping help. "Free tipping", comes from added momentum from tipping off the edges during the release. In this situation, the skis are tipped on to their downhill edges, while the edges are still on the downhill side. If you turn or twist the skis at release, the legs are extending or turning, this inhibits, if not eliminates tipping.

Many Epic skiers, I'm sure will relate to this, and are sure to run into this predicament when hearing that they should try PMTS tipping. If you are a skier who has come from old school or TTS, you are probably using leg rotation and extension to exit the previous turn; therefore the legs are steering, which makes putting the skis on edge very difficult. If you have any extension in your transition, you won't to able to tip. I'm sure this is great justification to those Epic skiers who want to prove PMTS tipping doesn't work. They walk away saying this tipping thing doesn't work. And they are right, it doesn't work if you are using old school technique to produce turns. The old school movements that block tipping and are not needed in modern skiing are, leg rotation and extension.

Once tipping is timed properly, used at the right time, the skis and lower body go over to the new edges easily.

When I hear someone saying they are having difficulty tipping and want to know how much muscle they should use; there is almost always an underlying technical factor that is restricting the tipping movements.

That is why you have always heard me write or say, in response to, "PSIA is talking about tipping now!" They can't teach tipping because they would have to stop teaching everything else around it to make it work. You can't mix PSIA or TTS with PMTS, the movements conflict. TTS movements reduce or eliminate the ability to tip the skis. If you have any residual TTS movements and almost 99% of skiers do, (that leaves the 1% that is actually here) you have to stop and take into account what movements you are actually making, before you blame your muscles.
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Re: tipping muscles

Postby h.harb » Fri Feb 04, 2011 3:16 pm

Image

Here I have released the stance ski and am already on my way over to the new edges. The new edges are below me on the hill. The momentum of releasing from the old angles, is taking my skis and legs to the new side and the tipping muscles are creating and directing the skis and boots to a new angle. My legs are totally relaxed, that is why the skis can tip. If I started to extend here, tipping would be over. That is what so many skiers are taught.

They are taught to extend, that stops tipping. The legs can't follow the skis and the tipping muscles are too weak to overcome the extension action of the legs to generate any lower body movements to the side. That is why skiers so frequently ask, I need more tipping muscle? It's not more muscle or bigger muscles or stronger muscles, it's using momentum and relaxation, so the muscles you do have, can create your tipping. This is sheer biomechanics. They body can't go in two directions at once. Standing up here is like redirecting momentum, (from side to side, to up, that's just wrong) you are intervening, interfering with the natural direction of the body, skis and legs, if you extend.
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Re: tipping muscles

Postby h.harb » Fri Feb 04, 2011 3:32 pm

Image

Here is another example, from here tipping is easy to the new edges, because the knees are relaxed and the momentum from the release off the edges carries the legs and skis through to the other side. Of course, with this the tipping muscles that Jay provided, are able to do their job. The new inside leg, (right leg) needs to be flexed even more, then where it is now, if the transition is going to continue to be consistent and fluid.
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Re: tipping muscles

Postby geoffda » Fri Feb 04, 2011 3:40 pm

h.harb wrote:Tipping isn't a big muscular effort. Done correctly it comes from momentum and relaxation.


Which is precisely what makes it so freaking hard. You have to RELAX. Which is also why hinging is a much better description of what has to happen then, say, "rolling" onto your new edges. When you do the static tip through release to new edges drill, if you do it right, it becomes really clear what is going on. This teeny, tiny reaction that you get from inverting the old stance foot is just enough to move your hips ever so slightly into the new turn. If you just GIVE IN at that moment, you can flex or collapse down on that light, hinged ski, just like when you do tipping against a wall.

JBotti has it right, tipping is not easy. I don't know about the rest of you, but relaxation on skis is something that just doesn't come easy to me. I have to work to get myself loose enough so that I can get the tipping going. I've been doing a lot of ad-hoc dry-land this year; just tipping when I happen to be standing around to try to instill the feeling of relaxed flexion necessary for quality tipping to occur.

This is a great thread. I think it really illustrates that tipping maybe isn't what most newcomers to PMTS might think it is. It also demonstrates how non-straightforward tipping really is, while providing some concrete direction to help those trying to develop or improve the skills. I'd vote for making this a sticky.

I wonder, is there some way to tag posts so we can index them? It would be really cool to be able to just be able to click on a link on a master index page for tipping where this post (and others) would come up. I know you can always search, but you get so much garbage doing that. It would be nice to just be able to get the best of the instructional posts that apply to the rellevant term...
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Re: tipping muscles

Postby cheesehead » Fri Feb 04, 2011 4:09 pm

Most of the information our brain uses to make or maintain a movement does not come from sensing muscle tension -- it comes from receptors in the joints that sense position of the joint angles. These are called proprioceptors ("position sensors"). Combining the action of muscles to make an overall position change in a joint is done below our conscious control. In the pushup, we tell ourselves to push the body up. In tipping the feet, we tell ourselves to tip our feet.

That is why it is so valuable to know what angles we want to achieve, and when and where we want them to happen, much more so than working individual muscles. Where it can come into play is when there is tension and you do a mental checklist of the muscles that should and shouldn't be tensed -- if something is tensed that doesn't need to be you can tell it to relax.

I started out trying to make it simple, didn't I and all I did was pile on more complications.
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Re: tipping muscles

Postby h.harb » Fri Feb 04, 2011 5:01 pm

It gets more involved then that, because you are asking your trust mechanism to let go. That can only happen if your inner ear balance mech is telling you, you are OK! That means you have to know that when you relax or let go, there will be a safe, proper result. That is why we break down all the movements into tiny chunks. This can't be done with any other teaching system.
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Re: tipping muscles

Postby Hamy » Sat Feb 05, 2011 10:36 am

Rick K. sent me this thread this morning and it was very apropros. I have some students who can't tip because they extend at initiation. Once they extend there they have no where to further extend so they pivot, lean in and rotate. They are like Pavlov's dog, as soon as they plant their pole ( which invariably is rotational) they pop up. Should I take their poles away? What is more frustrating, at least for me, is that traditional teaching encourages this, I know because I personally have been there. Yesterday in the Pika's coffee shop, I overheard a Level IV instructor telling his group to initiate the turn by rotating their fibula in their hip joint, and not to initiate the turn with their feet. I didn't want to hear any more so I move away. Later I saw him and his group on the slopes. He popped at the end of the turn and his hips were locked. The whole class followed his example. How could a student follow that instruction, ie. don't initiate the turn with your feet but with the fibula rotating in the hip joint. I don't even want to try. Rich K. was here for 2 weeks and we saw instructor after instructor popping up, leaning in and rotating.
I don't think that I will ever stop trying to be better at tipping. Threads like this help a lot. Harald wrote about confidence and Jeff about relaxing. On steeper, icy, bumped up runs, I don't have the confidence and therefore I don't relax. It is something I have to work on by skiing more often in more challenging conditions and using video.
It is somewhat difficult being in the PMTS wilderness. I only know 4 instructors who use PMTS as the basis of their teaching and it isn't often that we get to sit down and shoot the bull or ski together. I do talk to my supervisor, who is a PMTS junky, about 5 times a week and ski with him at least once, so that is good. It was great having Rich here for 2 weeks.
The students we have love PMTS. I have a group of advance skiers who can't get enough PMTS and in fact in this week's session one suggested we have a tipping party at his place and we watch the 3 essentials DVD's. I sent them all an email encouraging them to keep it up and told them they were skiing better than people 40 years younger than them and they were improving faster. That was actually a censured version of my original draft which was "you are skiing better than people 40 years younger who are in traditional ski school classes and you are improving at a faster rate than they are." I have to be careful about what I say and who I say it to.
One thing that is assumed in this thread, but not mentioned, is that PMTS only works if the skier's boots are properly aligned. I have one student, I will call him S., who cannot tip. He pops up, stems, and skids for 90% of the turn. I found out this week that his boots are a size larger than his street shoes. He is holding the rest of the group up who are tipping and loving PMTS and wanting to go to more challenging slopes. I mentioned this to my supervisor who commented "video him, tell him he has to get new boots properly aligned to keep up or he gets religated to the remedial group because it isn't fair to the others in the group." When I got my boots from Harald, he and Diana spent 4 days getting my alignment correct, and my skiing improved several notches.
It would be great if we could have an annual PMTS convention, where we get together, shoot the bull, ski together, shoot some video of each other, nothing too formal just having fun.
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Re: tipping muscles

Postby h.harb » Sat Feb 05, 2011 11:25 am

Nice post Hamy, always great to hear that there are pockets of PMTS showing success. Unfortunately it's like working the way the French underground had to do it in WW2. You have to be careful what you say, and who you say it to. It is astounding what ski schools are doing to skiers. When you really look deeper and more closely at the biomechanics of skiing, you can see why people can't advance, they are fighting their own bodies when using TTS. I think it's worst in Canada, as the directors and level 4 examiners, are much stricter about what you should teach.
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