Monday, February 6, 2012

Haluk Off Piste

This morning began with a gorgeous sunrise in Tignes...


The force of this slab of snow that slipped down the mountain can be seen in the way it has ploughed the earth in front of it... 


There wasn't a lot of easily accessible deep snow around but as Haluk likes technically challenging challenging snow and steep slopes we were able to find some interesting stuff without resorting to hiking or any other time and energy wasting distractions...



Technical
Haluk is very aware of his technical limitations off-piste - both in heavy variable snow like this here and on ice. The main issue is lack of hip angulation. There are many observable symptoms in the performance but they shouldn't be allowed to mask and confuse "cause" and "effect". The underlying cause is a stiffness and resistance at the hip (outside of turn) due to it mechanically moving in the wrong direction (forward instead of backward) during the turn. Major symptoms include lack of angulation, over flexing of the ankles, under flexing of the hip, rotation of the upper body, over reliance on big dynamics and "inside edge" turn initiation. On ice this leads to the ski juddering and ineffective grip in the second half of the turn because the Centre of Mass is too far towards the exterior of the turn. Agility is also greatly affected.  Hopefully we will have the opportunity to start to work on correcting all of this soon. Just one central issue - awareness of the roll of the hip joint - can change all of the above.

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