Skiing Insight/Analysis Videos

A snowHead

On a semi-related topic, my daughter and I were skiing with a guide on old tracked powder with the occasional pockets of untracked snow. I noticed that my daughter was skiing a bit one footed - getting away with it but making life a bit harder for herself. We had earlier been getting some film for her GCSE PE and she'd been focused on carving on quite firm pistes so she was in that mode. The guide mentioned it to her too. My advice would have been limited to - "try to weight the skis more evenly, less weight on the outside ski" but he said "offpiste, try to start your turn by pushing on both feet, not just the outside one" and got her to follow him. Effectively he had her standing up taller on the inner ski and using that to tip her through transition with less effort, upper body movement, etc. It really worked quickly. In a different context, I think it was very similar insight and to the one @skimottaret, and @rob@rar, extracted in that video.

A snowHead

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

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is that what used to be called a jet turn ?

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When I was at Tignes maybe three years ago, it was a post-dump week, with lots of soft snow piling up over the course of the day, and very low-viz clag - so the instructor spent a lot of time with us on skiing with feet together and equal weighting (probably helped she was an ex-mogul racer ..) . One really good exercise she did with us was to find a spot on the piste where there was a crest - the piste falling cross-fall line one way, and the side/off-piste the other. We then did turns going down the hill over the crest, so one turn was legs together equal-weight in the powder, and then the other side on-piste with a nice controlled carving turn.

I found this a fantastic exercise - the need to constantly change from one mode to the other really helped contrast the two, and emphasize what you were doing right or wrong in each scenario. Whenever I spot a bit of terrain like that, I always give it a go.

Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...

"He's already looking like a diamond - we just have to polish him a little bit" Laughing

http://youtube.com/v/WTX21DO7Qsc&ab_channel=Carv

After all it is free

@red 27, That was very interesting.

- I had never seen that sliding forward and backwards drill before - to help stop body rotation in short turns.

- There's a touch of the Harald Harbs going on there, with the initial rolling of the U/Hill knee and ankle and allowing the D/Hill knee to follow (8:40)....all to achieve extra grip.

@Old Fartbag, Seems to be Falling Leaf crossed with Braquage. Jacob does it rather nicely in the end

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Something similar was recommended to me/insisted on by some American-led instruction a couple of years back as a great/compulsory thing to do first thing, so that’s one of the things I always do now, whatever, as I found it to be true in my case. Even at Hemel. I recommend trying it.

They called it ‘parking the car in the wrong driveway’.

The idea is, maybe you’re a bit stewed (or hung over?), you’re driving home, but don’t have much clue, so you park in some driveway on the street, say ‘wrong house’ (optional but fun), then reverse out and try the next one one the opposite side of the street, and so on right down the street, never finding the right driveway (you’re in the wrong street?). With pole plant at the stops was said to be the better version (should make it easier to get out of/back into the car?). I’ve seen other people doing it too (on skis). You do the slide turns rather than Braquage, and don’t continue side-slipping like blue-jacket; instead, like Benni, you slide and then stop with minimal edge, turning up the hill. Their idea is, to get the feeling of controlling the skis and the trajectory with absolutely no throwing the weight of the upper body around (you lost points for that) or sharp hip angulations. Steepish slope helps at first.

snow reports

Use that drill all the time..skidding in balance is a great warm up to get centred, the best skier I have ever skied with does a falling leaf as his first couple of turns to start the day...

No doubt most of us are already subscribers but this one is particularly lovely...

FWD to 3:50 for a deliciously hypnotic section...

In my current ski-love-sick state I could just airplane down between Tom's cones for a whole week...

http://youtube.com/v/vPhpIVyXzAc&ab_channel=Triggerboy62

You know it makes sense.

We did another Zoom chat on Skier Analysis last night and featured two skiers this time.

https://vimeo.com/522720185

Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:

@skimottaret, Another most interesting session - so thanks for that.

On the first skier - I found myself seeing a lot right - then doubting myself, as I didn't agree with some of the initial comments.
I spotted the ski divergence and the fact there was a little too much weight on ihe inside ski, as the turn progressed. I also spotted the uphill ski being pushed too far forward - which was something I was taught years ago and had to correct.

I didn't spot the leaning into the turn too much - though I probably should have done, as there was too much weight on the inside ski. I didn't spot the way the hips were blocked - and what was needed to get the correct sensation.

For me, the second skier doing the short turns was easier. To me, it looked a bit Old School, with a pop up (been there, and done that), with too much of a twist and last minute "bite" of the skis - It was like a very loose Short Swing (which is much more tight and punchy). The solution was as shown - and a dramatic improvement followed.

A snowHead

@Old Fartbag, glad you’re enjoying the sessions. We’re still working out how best to use the technology, and how best to structure the sessions. A lot of our motion analysis is done one-on-one with clients, so involving more people in an interactive session is a little bit different. The plan for the next session is to use examples of less experienced skiers.

A snowHead

@rob@rar, Excellent work.

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

Whilst we couldn't teach this winter we have been working on a fun project creating interactive videos. We will release a skiing analysis one every Saturdays for the next few weeks before moving onto other topics such as mountain safety, racing, tutorials etc. It would be awesome to hear everyones thoughts and what you might like to see in the future. It is possible on a mobile but may be a bit trickier to click on the skier so I recommend having a go when you are on a tablet or computer. It is completely free and takes a few minutes to complete. www.snowsportschannel.com Very Happy

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Here is a link to our 3rd Inside Out Skiing "Develop you eye" session. We featured two intermediate level skiers this week. First 5 minutes is chat on our upcoming Alpine holiday programme for 21/22 so skip ahead to see first review session.

Develop you Eye Zoom25Mar21 from InsideOutSkiing

https://vimeo.com/529258439

Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.

Insights from Debs here as she gets the kids to nail not falling, in a trice.

http://youtube.com/v/I1QRavw0aZ8

The three Ms.
Motivation, motivation and motivation.

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We had our fourth "Develop your Eye" session last night and kicked off with an introduction to Ski Mobility exercises and online courses to help you get into shape for skiing. Then from 18:00 onwards we looked at 6 different skiers doing the same task to analyse not just the technical performance but also the Tactical choices made, their Psychological and Physical states. Last part of the session at 1:04 we then compared two runs on the same course by the same skier to see what we could learn. A fairly advanced session with all the skiers being L3 instructors. If anyone would like to join in on these calls please email me at info at insideoutskiing dot com

Zoom8Apr21InsideOutSkiing from InsideOutSkiing

https://vimeo.com/534782647

Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...

One-ski drill -

Here’s Tom with some thoughts.
Nearly everybody I have seen doing the one-ski stuff, when on the outside ski tries to angulate, but when on the inside ski, leans but does not angulate.
This also when they are with their instructors/coaches.
Including when I was at Hemel for a couple of hours yesterday.
I hardy ever see people trying to do both sides with angulation.

I’ve found trying to do both sides with angulation is way more difficult, and it feels a lot more risky.
Hope to master it as well as this some day - I think it would be more beneficial.

http://youtube.com/v/DO9dcQAkQ9Y

The video Tom mentions in his video with Shiffrin commentating is here:

http://youtube.com/v/ffTTkneQWTE

(I think I may have seen that before elsewhere on snowHeads, but couldn’t find it.)

The other difference is The BMtA skiers do look like they are trying to do it in much closer to what would be normal skiing shapes - as opposed to some shapes only made doing the drill in an attempt to balance, even if successfully. Like excessive inclination of the upper body, more or less or no angulation, sticking your other leg out, in front, behind, in some unusual way, just for the drill’s sake. In other words, the BMtA skiers are actually trying to ski on one ski.

After all it is free

What does the one ski drill aim to teach?

I think that will depend on what difference the person telling the skier to do it intends to make to the skier’s performance, or what the skier doing it intends to get out of it, and also, as can be seen from the videos, how it is done.
There’s plenty of videos out there with one-ski drilling going on.
They aren’t necessarily congruent, hence Tom’s video.

I believe the point Tom was making, was that there can be more to be got out of it than a balance exercise on one leg/ski, which seems to me to be what’s generally implied by those saying ‘do this’. Ms Shiffrin seems to agree. I think what they’re getting at is: don’t just balance on it and get turns in, ski on it like you’d lost only the support of the other ski, without getting out of shape, keeping the potential to put the other ski back down on the snow without having to change shape much from what’d be pretty ‘normal’ at that point in the turn, even if you don’t do so whilst doing the drill.

I like to think that the advantage of this approach to the drill over simply making some sort of inside-ski turn by inclining but not angulating, as people often seem to do, is that if later on you’re skiing and the outside ski happens to lose grip momentarily, and the forces are transferred across to the inside ski rather suddenly, you have improved your chances of staying closer to ‘shape’, and making a successful recovery because you are more used to skiing with 100% of the force on your inside ski alone in a ‘normal’ shape, so you don’t so easily get thrown all over the shop trying to make an unexpected forced transition from load on outside ski to load on inside ski. No doubt opinions will differ on this.

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The last of our "Develop your Eye" sessions last night we featured two ends of the skiing spectrum. Rob started off with an analysis of a very early stage intermediate and at 38:45 I did a review of a very high end skier (ex GB team, BASI demo team, L4 examiner) using an interactive tool developed by our friends at the SnowSportsChannel

Zoom22Apr21DevelopYourEye from InsideOutSkiing

https://vimeo.com/540569476

snowHeads are a friendly bunch.

I hope this entertains the more open-minded - here’s Tom Gellie (again), on some Shiffrin free-skiing, with interestingly no marks at all on the snow for some distance between the apex zones:

http://youtube.com/v/Wqu-Cr27WTg

There’s a similar sort of idea by Warren Jobbitt on how he visualises efficient skiing to be, ‘floating’ between ‘direction-changes’ rather than conceiving it conventionally as ‘turns’ with a ‘start’, an ‘apex’ and a ‘finish’ (my words not his). He doesn’t leave much of a mark on the snow between some pretty dynamic direction changes himself. He summarises it halfway through this, No.1 in a series:

http://youtube.com/v/j3bb1mKUJCA

Stop ‘making turns’ is quite a slogan, eh?

No doubt opinions will differ.

snow reports

^ Thanks for the general pointer, but I’ve just had a quick search, and I couldn’t find those: please would you link the spot, saving people the time searching, which could end up being similarly fruitless?

BTW, the racing fraternity obviously will have some interest and there will be crossover Little Angel

interest for sure, ‘Shiffrin’ being a trigger word, but I was hoping more for some comments about the points the two video makers were about? Those were I believe aimed at how one thinks about free skiing, in a much more general way than the particular and demanding problems posed by competition?

You know it makes sense.

@Fat George, It seems easier to me to just ski arc-to-arc than to do what she is doing.

I was checking the other thread to see whether that was where I had posted the links, will put them here. There was one of racers warming up before Levi that illustrates the same thing as well as Lara Gut's winning run in the WCH SG.

I'm not very impressed with instructors commenting on how racers free ski, there was a recent video of Marcel Hirscher that I felt just showed how much fitness he had lost since retiring.

Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:

@Fat George, Try this:

http://youtube.com/v/A-0FPlC60yg

This clip of Lara Gut-Behrami is small enough to download and freeze frame:

http://youtube.com/v/tbjS5Fb2zV4

A snowHead

^ Utterly tedious, I'm afraid.

No commentary.
No insight/analysis, the title of this thread?
Zero relevance to my post.
Different racers doing different stuff. Whatever.
No Shiffrin? Where she?
First one, 2020 already?

Wasted many minutes watching this to add to the minutes spent searching the FIS thread and for no good reason so far as I can see.
Please do help explain how these two videos relate to what the two videos I posted were about, because I can't see it? (Apart from there are people skiing. Quite well. Big deal.)
Perhaps you could also move these videos over there to 'Snowsports' for the racing types, where I suspect they will be more likely to be appreciated than here in 'Bend Ze Knees', which is for us ordinary folk so far as I know?
Otherwise it's seems to be just aimless thread drift.
Or are you taking the mickey here?

A snowHead

@Fat George, I posted those two videos because they are a lot easier to see what is happening than the Schiffrin one that Tom Gellie was commenting on.

I already gave my opinion, I think he is missing the point about why she is practicing that particular thing.

Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?

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@rob@rar:
Yup! Agreed and he does laugh a bit when he says it!

An exaggeration, maybe, just for his purposes of trying to break a thought habit re conventional emphasis on the 'start' point, and the expectation that there should be some sort of dramatic change at that point instead of flowing through; the rhythm, and so on;

Or so I would hope anyway . .

I dunno. Maybe I'll ask him. Can I quote you anonymously? (If I say 'I'm asking for a friend', he'll probably think it's me, and not find out it's you. Cool

).

Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.

@Fat George, it would be nice to get his thoughts on the matter. I certainly agree with the notion of flowing from turn to turn, rather than a sharp change in what is happening. Although I think it is helpful to think of the turn in three phases as each part of the turn has a different emphasis/purpose, the reality of course is that it is a smooth gradation as you move around the arc, from transition to transition.

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@rob@rar:
OK - done; perhaps Warren will come back with thoughts . . . Hope so.

Then you can post your own questions or snow reports...

@Fat George, I enjoyed the Warren Jobbitt video - and it made a lot of sense to me.

Personally, I believe he is simply trying to get you to think about "Turning" in a different way ie. To improve your flow down the mountain, try looking at it as a "Re-Direction of momentum" - so you are working with the forces of Gravity, rather than fighting against them.

The idea, is to make your skiing more effortless - think of it as flowing down the mountain with a series of "Gliding" and "Re-direction" phases.

Once this general image has been understood as something to aim for, then the specific actions to achieve it can be learned and may make more sense.

After all it is free

I don't think that analysing Shiffrin's (or other racers) technique provides much of a useful insight into the technique of your average recreational skier, they are two very different things.

In the first video which follows her down and she is not making tracks between turns, she is generating a huge amount of evenly distributed edge pressure and a high edge angle in a very short turn. I suspect that her excellent technique, strong core and race boots/skis are generating a massive amount of rebound which she is dealing with seemingly effortlessly. Nice skills!

Warren is clearly a very experienced skier but his turns are positively laboured in comparison, despite being very neat. He is on his edges way longer.

In the same way that MS wouldn't ski all day in race kit, maxing out on every turn; I suspect that Warren wouldn't win many races skiing like he does with his equipment. There is still a massive gulf of difference between instructor and WC racer and the techniques are different. Look at some of the Euro Test footage. The course setter (a decent FIS ranked racer) is usually streets ahead of the instructors, even those with previous racing backgrounds.

It may be more useful to consider which aspects of technique are the most fundamental to a rounded technique, allowing the skier to cope with and master a wide range of conditions (snow types and terrains). I see lot's of 'good' skiers who have clearly learnt carving technique to varying levels who come unstuck when they need to turn faster (eg. in bumps). Edge control (or the lack of it) and pivoting turns rather than carving is something which is noticeable. Equally, angulation is generally pretty difficult to get right and a lot of skiers are very upright, with boots seemingly at 90 degrees, leading to a lot of leg blocking rather than relaxed skiing.

Obv's I'm not looking to suggest how to put any of it right as I am not qualified! I am just very interested in fundamentals. Really good skiers tend to stick out like sore thumbs on the slopes, as there aren't many of them.

@Old Fartbag: That's a nice take on it!

Over the last 30 years I imagine Mr Jobbitt has seen come and go a lot of fads and fashions, Old dressed up as New, Emperor's New Clothes, Unique Selling Points, jargon, gurus, dogmatism, mental straitjacketing, Instruction Manuals, Technique Wars, international one-upmanship, Interski Conferences, latest things, must haves, Bright young Things, crowd manias, etc. etc.

Seems to me in the first of the few videos he's done, he's starting by underlining the keys he believes he's got a good grip on, the things he thinks that remain as solid basics that continue to succeed and work, and tries to 'get that across' in a nice and simple way . . . whilst obeying the unwritten rule that Youtube videos need to suit a short attention span and be dead simple. Or should that be too short an inattention span. And to make any headway these days, must include include Unique Selling Points, jargon, etc. etc. you have to put 'carving' in the title somewhere, preferably be controversial ( e.g. . . . stop 'making turns' . . .). Could be.

Considering his recent severe injury and the way he's come back from it so quickly, to me the skiing is remarkable and inspirational.

I don't think he envisions himself winning any races, and probably that's not what his video is about? Each to his own of course , but it was not the reason I put it up together with the Shiffrin video either - it was because of the similarities of conclusions about fundamentals to be drawn.
Myself I thought these were the floating/gliding from apex zone to apex zone, the not necessarily needing to unwaveringly follow any mantra about 'putting pressure on early in the turn' - I had hoped for others if there are any?
This despite looking at two very different skiers, and neither to try and decide who 'is a better skier' nor to analyse Shiffrin's technique per se nor judge any strengths she obviously has over Jobbitt because of her day job as compared to his.
I was interested in insightful stuff which might help general everyday (some chance) skiing really.

Running through the few vids, I found the one he did on Feb 27, 2021 on 'Transition' a good watch:

http://youtube.com/v/vuYfE5mIb7g

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@Fat George, In that last video you posted - his summary links to the general theme of the one you previously posted above, when he talks about the goal of the efficient carrying of momentum, from one turn to another. IMV. These are overall goals/concepts, which he elaborates on how to achieve...and where he gets back into the more traditional territory of balancing on the Outside ski.

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Skiing Insight/Analysis Videos

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