How to manage weight: perception of the "infinite" movement
Once the ingredients that allow for acquiring skiing skills are known, thanks to the experimentation of targeted techniques and exercises, you enter the most beautiful phase: using and adapting the techniques according to the circumstance in a conscious way. As in climbing, this phase of motor awareness is almost impossible without first going through the important phase of understanding and acquiring the theory of movement and techniques. Certainly, anyone who skis very frequently can become skilled, but being aware and knowing how to teach is another matter. It does not depend so much on how often one practices and trains, but on knowledge and quality.
If you ask a skiing specialist where the weight is when doing a snowplow, the answer is in the center, sometimes forward. If you then ask where the weight is when making parallel turns, the answer is in the center. Likewise, on fresh snow, always in the center. But then there would be no difference between the various techniques and types of snow…
In reality, when skiing, the weight continuously shifts both along the longitudinal axis (center-forward-back) and on the lateral axis, loading now mainly one foot, now the other. This results in a continuous rotary movement that coincides with the symbol of infinity (∞). In practice, the center is only the resultant of the movement obtained through a continuous shifting of the weight. Even on fresh powder snow, the resultant is the center, but it is obtained with a different rotation. This is why a good piste skier who uses the same weight management for fresh snow initially has serious problems. The automatism suitable for the piste does not work for off-piste, at least in cases where the skis sink into the snow. But without knowledge and awareness, our skier can only proceed by random attempts until one day he may be able to ski well on untracked snow, but without knowing how it happened. It is also logical that no one can teach these differences until they consciously experience them. I would say that this is why many courses do not teach how to vary skiing based on the type of snow.
The same applies to the snowplow. It could be said that the transition from snowplow to parallel is a trauma. And this happens because there is no awareness of the why, that is, the precise characteristics of the two techniques, which are antithetical to each other. The snowplow refers to the stride pattern, the parallel to the crossover pattern, with two consequently different ways of managing weight and body stance. Consciously experiencing the movement of infinity ∞ means knowing and understanding the dynamics of body movement on skis, perhaps the most important achievement for a good skier.
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