by geoffda » Fri Feb 18, 2011 7:49 am
Yes, there are two issues here. One is lack of CA, the other is hip dumping. Don't worry, I think your understanding is intact. I think you are just confused at the moment. Let's go skiing and I can show you what I'm talking about & we can get some video.
Hip dumping just means that your hip moved laterally into the turn ahead of everything else. If you stand parallel to a wall, about a six inches away, there are two ways you can put your body on the wall. The first is by tipping your feet. If you do this correctly, your knees will hit the wall, and you will come to rest on your thighs. Your hip never touches (or if it does it is a very light touch and only after your thighs hit). That is what I mean by the hips have to follow (we're talking lateral movements here; in the kinetic chain the feet tip, the ankles move next, the knees move next, then the hips). Now, go back and do the drill again and notice that you can do it without ever pushing off the outside foot to get started. Simply flexing and tipping the inside foot is enough to remove your base of support and start you moving towards the wall. Repeat as necessary until you feel that you are NOT pushing off. This is how your transitions need to work. Pay attention to the amount of tension in your hip that is required to keep it from touching the wall. That is what you need to be feeling in your turns.
The alternative is to dump your hip. To do that, keep your inside leg relatively straight and try to put your hip on the wall without letting anything below it touch. Notice the difference? In that case you had to push off your outside foot to move your hip over. Now try adding some counteracting with a straight inside leg. Notice how you just made the problem worse? So what this shows you is that hip dumping is incompatible with tipping. To tip you have to be flexed and active with your feet.
So back to hip dumping. The above example was the extreme version. In the still, what is happening to you is simply that the hips have gotten out of sequence in the kinetic chain. They are "touching the wall". So either, you still have a little bit of a push in your transition or you just got lazy with the inside foot, stopped tipping and let the hips get out ahead. You are most of the way towards doing the right thing with your feet, you just have a little more work to do.
As far as CA goes, you understand what it is, you just aren't doing it and part of the problem is that you are bunched up at the hips. Until you figure out how to get more upright, CA is really, really, hard because you are fighting a completely locked up midsection.