In this lesson I'm going to teach you how
to use your feet and give you much more control in your skiing.
Hi my name is James Hecht and I'm a professional ski instructor and examiner in the Danish system
In this lesson I'm going to teach you how to ski through your feet and make starting
the turn easier and get much better grip at the end of the turn. This will give you much
better control in your skiing, in general you'll be amazed how much foot pressure
impacts your balance, especially start and end-of-turn balance scores.
The way Carv measures balance scores is by looking at how the foot pressure moves from the front of the foot to
the back of the foot on the insole. The way you get good start of turn and end
of turn balance scores with Carv is to, start of the turn, you need to feel some
front foot pressure and through the turn that pressure travels more towards the heel at the
end of the turn so you need to smoothly apply pressure turn to turn over to the new foot.
To get started I want you to have a look at your start of turn and end of turn balance scores.
These are the scores that we're going to work on and improve in this lesson.
This is something you can do wherever you are to get some awareness of pressure under your foot .
Jump into your ski boots or stand on your Carv insoles and have the pressure map in front of
you - so get into a good athletic stance now move slightly forward and you should feel the pressure
on the ball of your feet and you'll notice how the Carv pressure map lights up in the front. Now
I want you to slightly move more back to the heels and you'll notice how the heels light up.
From here try to go into the middle and see if you can get the pressure map having no hot spots at
all but the pressure being distributed equally over the whole field. If you experience some
problems here I recommend that the first thing that you do is to check yourself in the mirror
like this - do I have a good athletic stance? So here the lower legs and the upper body should have like
the same ankle from this position you can access this ability to to adjust if you're too far back
you can't really access pressure on your front foot starting the turn will become more difficult
so the same - if you're too far forward like you're not able to access some front pressure
you might find that you'll get a little less grip at the end
of the turn so you really want to be able to like move the pressure around.
so it'll help you achieve the results in your skiing that you're looking for
Now let's go into the shuffling exercise. For this you need to find a wide open slope with plenty of
room and it should be pretty gentle and very easy to ski on for you. So for this drill it's really
important that you are in an athletic stance from here you'll be able to do the shuffle
movement. If you're too far back like this the shuffle movement becomes really difficult. The
same goes for if you're too far forward, you're kind of in a locked position it says the final
form is like a subtle movement that just adjusts where your balance is under your foot, you need to
be very much aware that you don't end up in the back seat from this movement. Okay let's Shuffle!
So as we go here start moving your feet back and forth like this and then start to do some turning
and this really probably feels a bit weird but this is only to unlock these feet ankles knees
to this movement, so you'll be able to later on do this. The minor adjustments you need to have
better balance in your turns - trying to do some slower ones like this, going straight ahead and
then some quicker ones yeah - just to get more used to this shuffling feeling.
I'll show you a couple of variations of the shuffle exercise that you can try. Alright let's
go for it. So the first one is shuffling only the inside ski looks like this. Try to stand well on
my outside ski and I shuffle my inside ski. So this is really good for independent leg work.
Now I'm shifting to shuffling only the outside ski so it looks like this
and then this one
If you have the good athletic stands here your legs your feet are able to move like this
and not if you're doing like completely up or in any of the other locked extreme positions
Check your tips - if they're passing each other as you go all right have fun with it!
So now that you've unlocked your ankles and feet with the shuffle exercise it's time to
go back to your normal skiing and see if you can integrate a little bit of this movement
back and forth through the turn. So start with a little bit of front foot pressure beginning
of the turn we will turn that pressure travels more back towards the heel. Okay let's give it a
go so these this shuffle exercise should really help you to make the minor adjustments of your
outside foot that you need to stay in better control and have a good balance while you're skiing.
Some shorter turns you travel from front to here - it goes really fast it's still something that
happens and allows you to get good grip leave it on kind of a hard surface like this. What the
pressure in front does the start of the turn is that it helps us engage the front of the ski more
and when that is that's engaged, it's easier to start the turn so let's try do that while we are skiing.
Right so here the front of the skiing engages - back ski -as my front skin gate is here - here is
really easy to start the turn and I feel really balanced, and here at the end of the turn I really
want to have like a solid platform that can help me start the next turn. Feel nice and balanced here
yeah good - so this is where the tail engages as well - I don't want it to get too far back
I wanted to engage the whole ski by feeling the pressure going down through the middle
of the foot and the heels. So now I want you to go find a nice open slope where
you can do a re-test and see how much you have improved. I hope to do well, have fun with it!
I hope you enjoyed this lesson if there's one thing that I want you
to take away from this is that you should be constantly doing these
minor adjustments that you learned about in this lesson to search for that ideal
feeling of being in good balance and good control. Remember good balance in skiing is
doesn't come from a static position it's about the minor adjustments you make through the turn.