Just bending the knees and there are quite a few different interpretations of this. My name
is Tom Waddington, I'm a ski coach and here we are today in beautiful sunny Sölden, Austria.
So a phrase you may have heard is 'Bend the knees', you might have heard this
one in in different accents as well. Often with this people get fixated
a little bit on just just bending the knees and the quite a few different interpretations of this.
So this may be one interpretation of bending with the knees, where I'm just hanging in
the front of my boots. That's kind of related to lean forward, but the difference here is,
I got no adjustment in my hip and and back so the center of mass is forward towards the the tips.
Another interpretation might be that bend the knees is I actually move my hip backwards,
but what happens here is my hip goes really far back I'm folding at the waist, so my upper body
adjusts, my brain thinks I'm forward, but actually, most of my center of mass is in the back
on the tails and if I end up skiing like this all the time,
it's going to be hard for me to access the ankle flexion being in the front of the boot
and therefore access the shovel of the ski and allow that ski to bend and work better.
So a better position is to have access to all three of our big lower joints, so our ankle
knee hip and try to make sure sort of our shin angle aligns a little bit with the
back angle so we keep their head and the center of gravity center of mass
more over the feet and with these joints we're ready to move dynamically with the ski.
Okay so here I am just skiing hanging in the front of the boots with no real adjustment
for my hip or my back and I'm ending up
losing control of the skis, the skis wash out and I don't have much balance.
Okay now I'm going into where I'm actually gonna
bend over and fold at the waist, so here I'm folding at the waist and I'm actually just kind of
just on the tails a lot of the time, getting back using a lot of my quad muscles.
It's not efficient and I can't access the front of the ski as well now I'm going to go into
a much better position using all three of the joints, I got good ankle flexion
so I'm in the front of the boot I'm using the knees as I pedal from side to side,
I'm keeping the hip moving over the ski and I'm starting to already feel I can increase the
performance as i'm going down get better at moving with the ski and make better performance turns.
WOO YEEHAA
All right, so we're going to use the Carv app to look at our foot pressures and how the
different interpretations of bending at the knees and leaning forward, affect our foot pressures.
So I'm going to give it a go I'm just standing still here so the first one is kind of folding too
much at the waist and it's really cool you can see that the pressure has gone into my into my heels
and this might be actually emphasized more when we're dealing with more forces at the moment it's
just my body weight when we're dealing with more forces that build up through the turn this might
be emphasized more and that means that if I get stuck too much in this position i'm getting a lot
of force through the the heel and the tails all the time and if I look to move and if I'm just
kind of hanging in the front of the boot spending the knees I'm not adjusting much for my position
you see that actually, i've gone into the more into the forefoot and under the balls of the feet.
I can just do the the lean forward one as well just sort of leaning leaning forward and again
more into the balls of the feet. So when I'm just standing using all of my joints I'm in a nice
neutral position I've got an even foot pressure I don't have any pressure spikes and and this
is a good thing to help me as much as possible to keep my center of mass over the middle of the skis
it means i'm ready to move along the length of my foot and ready for performance skiing.
I hope that this video has given you some context to the true meaning, and how that's going to help
you get better ski performance. As always if you like this video you want to see more from us
hit like comment and subscribe and I'll see you next time