How Do I Turn?

[tkarhu]

Thanks @Stephen, @JohnSKepler and others for your responses. I will start with Stephen's...

with the stiffer, double camber skis, a carved turn is going to have a looong arc.
To make a tighter turn, the ski has to skid.

Great point! The word skidding repeats also in the original quotes (from stephen and riel). It certainly is essential here. It could be added to the list of assumptions:

I also weight the inner rear edge of my front ski in deepish (10-40 cm) snow, too, with my Gammes. I am just wondering, what is the mechanics why and how that works? I can repeat the trick, but understanding the mechanics could let me use my skis in more creative ways.

I have a few initial assumptions, what could be the reason.

1) Could the trick work because that weighting helps carving? I think pressuring is not that important in deep snow because skis really do not carve there I guess. So if that would be a hard surface trick, it would sound more like a carving thing I guess. Well Gamme nordic rocker for sure might do something there, but is that enough to carve?

2) Could it work through weight placement against an external force? Many sea kayaking techniques use such tricks. For example, you lean your body weight towards the front of a kayak, if you want to turn your kayak towards a wave. Similarly, when you put weight on the back of your ski, the rear part of your ski starts to press towards the external force (ie. downhill snow), and its front end will move away from the force. You could think of this also as two rows of men pushing against each other, like in some sports. At places of the row where your own team pushes hard, it will move towards or through the opposing team’s row. At places where you push less, the opposing team will push through your team’s row. Likewise, the less weighted end of a kayak will move away from a wave, and the less weighted end of a ski will move uphill, away from the friction that you are facing. (This idea feels somewhat counter intuitive to me, but it really works at least for the sea kayaking part of it because I use it in practice.)

3) Could it be related to skidding, ie. sliding on a surface? With stiff double camber skis, a carved turn would have a loooong arc. Pressuring the back of a front ski makes the front ski skid (ie. side slide), which helps to make tighter turns. Yet you do not want the tail of the front ski to cut into the snow, but rather to slide across the snow.

This really helped me to think of this in terms of skiing. If you pressure a pole instead of edges, you would land on your face, so sliding is essential. A sticked ski pole has no float. For learning, thinking in skiing terms is certainly more helpful than thinking in terms of kayaking

Still one more analogy with kayaking. You turn a kayak by edging and leaning, too, but kayak "edging" is probably somewhat different from ski edging. For example, you cannot bend a kayak with your body weight, like you bend a ski. Also, leaning (bracing) and edging are two different kayaking techniques. In the edging, you compensate with your upper body and keep balance point above boat. However in bracing, you lean out and take support from water with your paddle, with balance point outside boat. It looks like ski edging is leaning outside balance point, so it would be more similar to bracing than edging in kayaking techniques.

One thing that might work the same in kayak and ski edging, kayak edging makes the swimming hull (body) of your boat shorter, which helps you to turn. Swimming hull means the part of a kayak that is touching water. I would say pressuring the back of your front ski might create some rocker, at least in the sense that the front of a rear-pressured ski raises towards the surface of snow.

By the way, some river kayakers do kayak on snow, too. FYI on following video, they use bracing, when a paddle points towards a side more than backwards. If a paddle points backwards, the kayaker is most probably using a stern rudder.

I need some time to digest all other information given. Maybe this was just a short comment to Stephen's first point Let's see what more is coming!

[lowangle al]

This is what I found about turning dbl camber skis. If you want to carve you need to really weight the shit out of them to compress skis at the same time. The way to heavily weight them is to heavily unweight them first. That's why all that up/down motion in those old vids. That dbl poling back then helped with unweighting too.

Keeping dbl camber skis carving is pretty physical skiing. You'll melt your gortex. That's why they wore wool back then. :

[GrimSurfer]

This is what I found about turning dbl camber skis. If you want to carve you need to really weight the shit out of them to compress skis at the same time. The way to heavily weight them is to heavily unweight them first. That's why all that up/down motion in those old vids. That dbl poling back then helped with unweighting too.

Yup. For sure. It can get really physical.

[mca80]

But, I should point out that in what I wrote above viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4436&start=90#p54876 is in reference to the part of the video that showed Telemark Ski Racing.
And, specifically about the skier’s ability to CARVE turns.
Good ski racers have years of practice learning to do one thing really well: Carve turns.
Carved turns maintain more speed than skidded turns (that’s why they are less useful for controlling speed).
So, to win races, be good at making carved turns (among other things, of course).

After this post I went back again to watch that section of video. You can see loss of speed in some of those racers when the turn becomes more skid than carve. Which should obviously be the case, but it was illuminating to watch it with particular attention to that.

[lowangle al]

I would be leary of useing that video to look for good examples of a good stance. Most of them were too spread out, I only saw a few good examples. That rear foot should be more under your butt than behind it.

[Montana St Alum]

No speed required. I can just stand here and ski down the hill. I have some special goggles I put on and I’m Peekaboo Street, just zipping down the Super G course.

Your statement made a connection between speed and pressure before turn initiation.

What is that connection, exactly? I want to know… because this trick has somehow eluded me up to now. Knowing more might help me be a better skier.

Lord knows, I can use all the help I can get.

As Stephen mentioned, speed can help to keep you in a carved turn, and it can help to decrease the radius of the turn. As you enter the turn, the "g-loading" you get from the centrifugal force (for God's sake, let's not get into a discussion of centrifugal Vs. centripetal!) increases the pressure against the skis beyond the sole force of your weight, helping to bend them into an arc.

This is an example of speed helping the turn. The line from my skis to my center of mass through my hips is pretty straight here. That's NOT necessarily a good thing (and I do have a very small angle going here - just not much), but I'm going fast enough to get away with it, and I was at the limit of edge angle because my boots were beginning to scrape the snow anyway.

If I were going slower, I'd tip over into the turn and fall. A better technique would be for me to have an angle at the hips, such that my upper body is more upright and that would allow me to turn at a slower speed. Double camber XC skis are a bit of a different animal, so there's a limit to which this can be applied, for sure!

[GrimSurfer]

A lot of things will be as condition dependent as they are skier dependent.

You were brave in starting your learning on wet snow. I’m presuming it had some depth to it.

A compacted base with 6-8” of powder would have been much, much easier. More progressive, not as harsh. You’d feel what was going on under your skis much better.

Waiting for the right conditions might be better than trying to learn in the wrong ones. You’re building muscle memory so any bad habits you pick up now (no matter how effective in poor snow) will be harder to shake later on.

Found this out, strangely enough, in surfing. I’d go out in anything. It’s all experience, right? Wrong. I was surfing to stay up, fighting the sea and swell. This is not what surfing is about (like XC, BC and DH it’s about the flow). Can’t *learn* flow in a washing machine or on crappy snow.

[GrimSurfer]

No speed required. I can just stand here and ski down the hill. I have some special goggles I put on and I’m Peekaboo Street, just zipping down the Super G course.

Your statement made a connection between speed and pressure before turn initiation.

What is that connection, exactly? I want to know… because this trick has somehow eluded me up to now. Knowing more might help me be a better skier.

Lord knows, I can use all the help I can get.

As Stephen mentioned, speed can help to keep you in a carved turn, and it can help to decrease the radius of the turn. As you enter the turn, the "g-loading" you get from the centrifugal force (for God's sake, let's not get into a discussion of centrifugal Vs. centripetal!) increases the pressure against the skis beyond the sole force of your weight, helping to bend them into an arc.

This is an example of speed helping the turn. The line from my skis to my center of mass through my hips is pretty straight here. That's NOT necessarily a good thing (and I do have a very small angle going here - just not much), but I'm going fast enough to get away with it, and I was at the limit of edge angle because my boots were beginning to scrape the snow anyway.

1855675857 C.jpg

If I were going slower, I'd tip over into the turn and fall. A better technique would be for me to have an angle at the hips, such that my upper body is more upright and that would allow me to turn at a slower speed. Double camber XC skis are a bit of a different animal, so there's a limit to which this can be applied, for sure!

I get the whole speed and turn thing… centrifugal and centripetal force, ability to set an edge, dynamic stability etc.

these guys are actually going fast enough to put enough pressure on the skis to really carve turns (although there is also skidding):

It was the “going fast enough to put enough pressure on the skis to [contraction of “in order to”?] really carve turns” that confused me. I’ve never seen speed having anything to do with pressure (or vice versa) setting up for a turn.

In a turn? Of course.

[mca80]

I would be leary of useing that video to look for good examples of a good stance. Most of them were too spread out, I only saw a few good examples. That rear foot should be more under your butt than behind it.

Agree, with what little I know. They look sloppy too, in the racing bit. Was just focused on which ones were carving and which were skidding, etc.

The best video was the one Johnny posted of the old Italian instructors. Those guys looked incredible.

What about the video I just posted to the movies thread? His rear is still pretty far back some of the time, but it looks a lot better than most of the racers.

[Montana St Alum]

[/quote]

It was the “going fast enough to put enough pressure on the skis to [contraction of “in order to”?] really carve turns” that confused me. I’ve never seen speed having anything to do with pressure (or vice versa) setting up for a turn.

In a turn? Of course.
[/quote]

Unless you can go from 2mph to 15mph in the length of a ski, speed PRIOR to the turn definitely helps IN the turn!