Binding placement effects on skiing with Lou Rosenfeld

Hey everyone, I'm really excited to offer a new episode of the Global Skiing Podcast. This is a really cool episode, I interviewed a really interesting guy, Lou, from Lou's Ski Shop in Calgary. Now, he's not just a ski shop owner, he's a mechanical engineer, and he's also done quite a bit of research, probably the most research out there on ski binding placement. So where the binding is along the length of the ski, so basically where you the skier is attached along the length of the ski. And you'll find out in this episode that it's actually a really critical factor, and it really will affect the performance of the ski. So Lou talks about some of the research he's done, some of the anecdotal stuff he's seen with skiers, even high-end racers going for the national team, what they've done and things he's seen. Also his own story of realizing how important binding placement is on the ski. So some really great takeaways. I myself am going to go out and I'm going to play with binding placement this season. I'm going to try some different skis and put the binding in some different places and just note, like Lou suggests at the end, like what I feel, making small adjustments. So one final note, if you haven't checked out my website bigpictureskiing.com, I'd highly recommend you go and take a look. So it's built for ski instructors and really avid technical skiers, and what I've got there is basically all the information that's inside my head that I've learnt from studying the body and really taking a keen interest in skiing, you know, to an obsessive level. And I'm trying to just build a library of resources on every topic out there: equipment, teaching, moguls, carving, whatever it is, looking after your body, all these things. And I'm basically putting it all on my website for you guys to access at a really reasonable rate, and an even better rate if you use the code GLOBALSKIING, all capital letters, at checkout, and you'll get a discount on the subscription there. Okay, without further ado, here's the podcast episode.

So I've got Lou from Lou's Ski Shop in Calgary, Canada.

On the line here.

And Lou got in touch with me through another friend who I know through the ski world, and he said, you guys should chat because you've both got interesting perspectives, you both appreciate the feet, ski boot fitting, biomechanics, all that sort of stuff. And so I checked out Lou's website and realized it's not just a ski shop website. He's got articles on there about research. And, um, ski boot fitting. But, but the thing that really caught my attention was his research and discussions on topics around binding position. And I realized myself that's probably the weakest area of knowledge for me, is binding position. Like, I understand like a good amount about boots and the body, but because there's another piece of equipment, your bindings attaching to your skis, and, and how that's placed, you'll find out today, is actually really critical. So I've got Lou here today to discuss with us this, but yeah, that's, that's what you're going to find out. You're going to find out the importance of binding position today through some actual proper university research that Lou's done. But without further ado, let's, let's just hear from Lou and, and maybe just give us a bit of a background. Like, how did you end up in the ski game and then doing research on this topic?

Huh, well, I, like I assume you, grew up skiing, and then, um, and then I got out of the U.S. Navy, and, and, and my first real job that I cared about was in a ski shop, but that was in Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania ski season is 4 months long. And so I was unemployed 8 months of the year. So I needed to do something else. And what that turned out to be was going to school to becoming a mechanical engineer. And so I guess I just have an engineering mind. You know, I mean, there's different ways to approach problems, and engineers always want to know how and why. That's just how it's, it's always worked for me. And, uh, and I worked as an engineer for years. I raced cars, I crewed for a British national Formula 4 champion. I just, I did a lot of technical stuff and somewhere along the way, um, I decided I wanted to stop all of that and open a ski shop. Um, the problem was that, um, you know, I should mention that when I worked in the first ski shop, uh, I was trained to make— it was in the '70s, 1975. Now, that was when foot orthotics were first being used for running, and they were, they were being talked about as being necessary for almost, for almost every sport. You know, if you didn't have foot orthotics, you couldn't do anything. So I was taught how to make foot orthotics, and I was taught the rudimentaries of foot biomechanics by a local podiatrist. And along the way, as I played with things and skied more and, and then decided I wanted to open a ski shop, um, as I was thinking all those things over, I realized that almost every ski shop I had walked into over the years, I felt like nobody could ever answer my questions. It was, you know, I want to buy a new ski. Someone would recommend a ski, and I'd say, well, you know, what's good? How is this ski different from that ski? And whatever it was, nobody could satisfy the way I approach things, and nobody had— I thought had really good answers. And especially when it came to fitting ski boots and why everyone did what they did. So when I wanted to open a ski shop, I decided to get more education. And specifically, I was interested in boot fitting and how balance and alignment affects skiing. And as I talked to people, it became clear that the path for me was to get a master's in biomechanics. And I ended up in Calgary at the Humer performance lab working in a group known for foot and biomechanic research. And my research was about foot orthotics and human adaptation. And while I was involved in that, I got involved in another study for Atomic on binding position. And after all of that and a year A year after graduating, when I kind of lost my way and went back to being an engineer, um, I, I, I opened the ski shop.

Okay, so this first, this first, um, introduction— well, actually, I'm interested from the, the foot sort of orthosis study stuff, okay, if you had to boil down a couple of key points you learned from that, especially if they are perhaps not controversial, but maybe things have been misinterpreted or misunderstood over the years, what would they be through that research you've done?

Well, there's a ton of research on foot orthotics. And I admit that for the last years— I finished my degree in 2000. 2000. I haven't kept up with all the research, but I talked to friends who still do research in foot orthotics, and it seems that things haven't changed a lot from where I was. And that is that there used to be an assumption that foot orthotics— that if you have a bad back and somebody diagnoses you with a foot problem, Foot orthotics may help your sore back, but that's a jump to saying foot orthotics therefore help your performance in sports unless having your back not hurt anymore helps your sport performance. But that isn't what we used to say. So what there was is this assumption that standing on a foot orthotic changed your foot position and that's how they worked. Only the research to prove that was all over the map, and there was no agreement about whether foot orthotics really changed your foot position. So there were lots of theories about how foot orthotics work. Anecdotally, we know that, yeah, you know, we give someone— we give lots of people with health issues foot orthotics and their knees stop hurting and their backs stop hurting. And meanwhile, they might have gone years doing physio and other things and maybe didn't work. So it's okay to say foot orthotics work for those situations, but there was no proof that it helped sport performance. And if it did help sport performance, we didn't know how. And even if it healed your back, we didn't know how. Did it change your foot position? There is a theory, a theory by Ben Onig, whose group I was in for a while at the university, that foot orthotics change your foot tuning. And by that, we would say that the difference in proprioception by having full contact maybe underneath your foot changed the muscle signals and helped you change muscle activation, which you talk about, but not necessarily in light of foot orthotics, but they change the way you tune your muscles. They change the way you activate muscles and that changes your gait and that changes everything. So there's lots of theories, but nobody knows what's right. And so far from what I understand, nobody still knows what's right. And there's still, you know, people that ski without foot orthotics and there's people that are very flat-footed and don't have back pain. And there's people that are very flat-footed and have incredible back pain and it's just all over the map. Right?

Yeah. Interesting.

My research was on adaptation, and it was some of the first research that was really done. And what I had thought— and we'll talk more about that maybe— what I had thought as I read all the studies is that as you read the studies, the way research is typically done is if we want to find out if a golf club or a ski, if we want to find out if a ski is better for someone or not, we let someone make a run on their old ski and then we give them the new ski and we look at the differences. The problem with that is there has to be an adaptation period in all of that if we're really going to find out the true effects, right? Because people just aren't skilled enough to adapt instantaneously.

Yeah.

Especially at a recreational level of doing things. So as I read more and more, I thought, well, one of the problems with the way we approach this research is that all we ever do is give someone a foot orthotic. We walk them over a force plate. We videotape them on cameras so we can measure their motion. And we walk them without a foot orthotic, and then we have them do the same walk again with a foot orthotic. And we say whatever the differences are is caused by the foot orthotics. And my feeling was that, man, there's no way anyone adapts that quickly. And if they do, those changes may not really be real. Maybe it takes them weeks and weeks to figure out how to really adapt to a foot orthotic. So my research was different in that I studied people for 6 weeks and we gave them foot orthotics and they— the instructions were we gave them test shoes so they wore the same pair of shoes and the same orthotics It was 6 days a week for 8 hours a day for 6 weeks. And every week they came back and we walked them again. And in the end, we found out that the foot orthotics didn't seem to make much difference anyway. But it was the first research that was done with that supposition that we needed to test over a long period.

There we go. Hmm, interesting. So then there's a lot of work.

We move— we—

yeah, a lot of work.

A lot.

And then kind of a little bit, a little bit disappointing because you don't really get any definitive answers, right?

Right.

Yeah. So then you moved into binding placement research, and would you say this yielded some more definitive answers?

For sure. For sure.

I mean, so run us through maybe the first— yeah, okay, test on that and what you found out.

It's okay. The first test, um, without any background then— we'll get to that, I'm sure— the first test was just research for Atomic, um, and it was just to determine, um, if we move someone's bindings, what differences does it make in the way they pressure the ski? So we skied a group of people— well, not just people, racers— two of them being Canadian national team members and other, other, and a recreational group that we didn't measure forces with. With the national team skiers, we measured forces. With the recreational skiers, we didn't measure forces. And then, and then we had a group of Alberta team members, so also racers, and we measured forces again. So we set them up on skis, let them ski runs with a force transducer underneath their foot, and we measured where they applied pressure to the ski. And related it to which binding position they were in. And what we saw with the national team skier was that the pressure changed slightly in terms of where it was applied, how far forward on the ski and how far back on the ski according to where the binding was on the ski. If we move the binding forward, pressure was applied more forward on the ski. But the graphs were still very smooth, and, and the movement from moving forward at the beginning of the turn to coming gently backwards towards the end of the turn— or I should say, as the whole turn progressed— and then moving forward again to the next turn was very smooth and very even for the national team skier, regardless of where the bindings were mounted. But for the Alberta team members who are still high-level expert skiers, when we move their bindings around, they were all over the place. Now it's fair to say, back to where we were a moment ago, that part of the reason would be that they're simply not good enough, they don't ski well enough to respond and adapt, and adapt instantly, right? That national team skier, best skier in the world, absolutely can do that, but other people just can't. So that's fair to say, and that's fair to bring up, but it's also then fair to assume based on, you know, anecdotal evidence and just that, that changing their balance position and changing where they are on the ski would take them a while to adapt to, and maybe they would never make the adaptation well, right? Because it changed the way they pressure the ski, and if it changes the way they pressure the ski, we know it changes the way the ski skis. So maybe they can't make that adaptation, right, ever.

Interesting, interesting. Cool. So, so that was the first introductory one. And so then, uh, had you owned— did you own a ski shop at this point?

No, that— this is when I was in university, so this was just, okay, something I did to help out as part of my master's.

After that, can I ask you, did you do anything with your own— did that really sort of intrigue you and you went, oh, are my bindings in the right place? Like, did that trigger it in you?

No. Here's what happened for me.

Okay.

Something similar though. Um, eventually I said I took a year off, I lost my way. I worked as an engineer for a year once I earned my master's degree, but then I remembered, oh, you're supposed to be opening a ski shop. And it's supposed to be a boot fitting shop. And so I went to Snowbird, Utah, uh, from Calgary and worked for a year with a guy I was really fortunate to meet, a very good skier and a good boot fitter and someone that was really interested in balance and alignment. And, and there, uh, I worked with a tool called the Campbell Balancer in the store and The first research we did for Atomic was just about quantifying what happens when you move bindings. It wasn't about saying, Tom, you walk in the store and I have a way to figure out where your binding should be on the ski. It was just to show that it matters. Right. Then in Snowbird, we worked with a tool called the Campbell Balancer. And the purpose of the balancer was to determine the best binding position for individual skiers. And so then I started putting two to two together, and I said, oh, there's another research project here. And this is the one, this is the one that really applies to you and me and recreational skiers.

Yeah, cool.

And, and this was right at the beginning of— I mean, back then we would have called them shaped skis, but there were no skis with rocker tip or anything like that. All we had was more sidecut. So it was easy to compare one ski to another and measure binding positions and see that some skis, some whole brands, are mounted in front of other brands. And I was skiing at that time I was skiing on a Völkl. And as I learned more and more and more and did more measurement and talked to more people, I found out that Völkls and Atomics and Fishers, and at that time kind of all the Austrian skis, um, that if we would read about on a ski test, the ski test would say great ski, hold really well, super stable at speed. Kind of difficult to ski, right? Not very forgiving. Don't get in the back seat. And then if you'd read about French skis or American skis, they'd be not as stable at speed but quick and lively and easy and playful and fun, right? And so I was skiing Volkl, and one of the problems I always had with my skiing, especially in bumps, was an ability just to stay balanced. And I'd always find myself in the back seat, and it would be like, you know, 3 turns in and then, oh damn, I just missed the turn, you know, and do the traverse across the bumps and get yourself all gathered back up again and then get started. And we balanced me and measured the binding position on the vocals I was using and said, oh, why don't we move your bindings forward 3 centimeters? And we did that, and the very first run was like one of the best runs I made that year. And that's when—

because of the contrast, I guess, like you'd been skiing with— yeah, like hard, hard to ski and do everything, and then suddenly, suddenly I just—

I went from having to think— it used to be before that, it was like, okay, I'm going to turn So now I'm getting ready to turn. I'll move myself forward a little bit and get against the front of the boot, get against the front of the boot. And, you know, it's kind of like this thing you rehearse in your head. And, and that's the way I used to have to ski those skis. And then as soon as we moved me forward 3 centimeters, then it just all happened automatically. I just stood there, put the skis on edge and they turned and I didn't lose my balance. I didn't get as far in the back seat and, And then I started putting it together. So then we did the research for Nordica on the balancer to see if it actually was a tool that could be used to determine binding position and if it was functional.

So we should probably quickly describe to people this Campbell balancer and how you go through balancing yourself on it.

The Campbell balancer is essentially a seesaw or a teeter-totter. I don't know what term is used where, but they're the same thing. And, and you stand on it, not, not with your skis. It isn't about finding a balance point for your skis. It's about finding where you balance. And so there's— it's a seesaw, there's a fulcrum, and, and the fulcrum is somewhere under your foot. And as you move forward and backward and you purposely tip the Campbell balancer forward— seesaw. Yeah, the seesaw or the Campbell balancer. As you tip it forward and backward, you can find a point where it's as easy to tip forward as it is to tip backward. And we would say that's your balance point. And it could be with the— depending on your anatomy and the length of your foot and all of those things, it could be with the tip of your boot 5 centimeters in front of the fulcrum or 9 centimeters in front of the fulcrum or 11, whatever it is. It was accurate. And people picked the same point. We moved people forward and backward on it. We didn't tell them where we were moving them to. We didn't tell them what position they were in. And it was very repeatable. Not only was it repeatable for me, but the other person that was doing the research with me, we wanted to test the repeatability of the balancer. It was repeatable for him. And he and I found the same spot for all the different subjects. So it was very repeatable.

Hang on a second. We're jumping onto the next— Oh, sorry. Okay, research thing. So we've just, we've just talked about the, the Campbell balancer and how it works and that everyone's going to be—

you're right, yeah, it's a teeter-totter for underneath your feet. Yeah. And the balance point. And then we would say that that balance point, the fulcrum, the fulcrum of the teeter-totter, is the same as the center of the running surface of your ski. So you can duplicate the position we find on the seesaw or teeter-totter to the ski so that if, if you balanced on it with the toe of your boot 9 centimeters forward from the fulcrum of the teeter-totter, your binding position or your boot position on the ski should be the tip of your boot 9 centimeters forward from the center of the running surface. Yeah. That way you have the same surface in front of your balance point as you do behind your balance point.

Behind it.

Yeah.

So, so in another way of saying it, You've equally easy access to pressuring the front half of the ski as the back half of the ski. Yeah, okay, cool. But yeah, for your individual anatomy. And I mean, like, people are probably going, oh, but you know, you're not seesawing on your skis as you go down the hill. So, but it's just, it's just an assessment tool, isn't it? And a teeter-totter is a great way of finding out, like, Yeah, whether you've got access to the front or the back, or is it biased one way, one way or another. Well, and that's still occurring even as your ski is fully locked on a huge, you know, 50-degree edge angle carving. Like, you still want to be, I guess, naturally feeling like your weight basically settles to the middle, and it's your choice if you want to pressure the tip, or it's your choice if you want to pressure the tail. And on your vocals, you are basically always— it's easy to pressure the tails, which is where you got the speed stability, and you was working like a dog to get—

that's exactly right, because you have to get to the tip to get the ski to start to turn, right? And, and if, if you have to get to the tip by bringing your body forward, um, that takes some repeatability and some skill, and that you need to keep working on. Where if you're in a position where you already have as much pressure on the tip as you do on the tail. Um, the ski just, just starts to work and it does everything for you, which is really the whole purpose of the new ski designs, right? Yeah, yeah.

So this triggered some, some real— we'll get to the research, the next research topic soon, but this triggered me straight away after you first told me about this to go and try and figure out a way of doing that test myself. And I sort of— I haven't told you this yet, but, but at home I've got some dumbbell weights that, that are like hexagonal edged. Yeah, okay. So they're essentially— right, so, so when you place them on the ground, they don't roll, right? But then they create this bar that you could basically put a— like, I put a ski on to create a teeter-totter. Okay, okay. So I was kind of using my ski as a teeter-totter, and I've got new skis, I haven't put the bindings on, I put the ski on, so it's essentially just a teeter-totter. So I was playing around with, okay, where have I got to put the sole of my boot so I can do the— do the tip the teeter-totter forward, tip the teeter-totter back, and feel, feel easy the same. And then then that's basically my teeter-totter fulcrum point. I would just mark, mark that.

Yeah.

And it's not always— it's not— yeah, I mean, it's basically around the ball of the foot for most people, isn't it?

Pretty close. Yeah, yeah.

Could you make any assumptions on like long torso people or big hips, short legs people? Like, have you seen that? Like, can you kind of—

Well, I haven't— I haven't done research then to try and look at body types and say what's going on. What we can say, I think, and we need a bit of history, if you want it now, is that most people balance around the ball of their foot. On the Campbell balancer. And in the old days, before we had marks on skis— and it wasn't really that long ago, we started marking skis sometimes in the late '70s or early '80s— until then, bindings were mounted ball of foot, center of running surface. So if you came into the store and you bought a pair of skis from me, I would take your boots downstairs and look at them and try and estimate where the ball of your foot was in the boot and I would actually do the measurements to find the center of the running surface. And I would put, as accurately as I could, the ball of your foot over the center of the running surface. And that's the way skis were mounted back then. And, uh, and we were given a window of plus, plus or minus 1 centimeter to say, if we want the ski to be a little quicker and livelier, we'll move it forward a centimeter. And if we want it to be a little more stable at speed and a little more GSE, we'll move it back a centimeter. Okay, and that's the way skis were mounted. The problem with that system is that it's slow, and I had to guess where the ball of your foot was, and I might guess different every day, and certainly the person across the street might guess differently, and the other ski shop might guess differently. So it meant that there was no reliability in you being mounted the same all the time as you change skis. So you could demo a ski and, and say you really liked it and then actually buy it and be mounted in a completely different position and the ski doesn't ski at all the same anymore. Right? So there were lots of problems with the system. So the industry got together and decided to just do away with all the inaccuracy and take some control themselves. And they came up with a system that is The center of the boot goes over a mark on the ski and the ski manufacturer puts the mark on the ski. But obviously the problem with that is that the ball of your foot floats all over the place. Then the ball of your foot doesn't, it's always in the same position. But if you are, for instance, a men's 11 and there's another man that is a men's 7, and you're both on the same ski, the ball of his foot is substantially behind the ball of your foot. And yet we haven't changed anything about ski designs yet. Right? So there's a real problem with that system. Um, so that's where the Campbell Balancer came in and, um, how we started looking around and got me thinking that, you know, there, there, there's something we can do here. And that's how the Campbell Balancer was developed. I mean, the guy just thought he was a ski instructor and his wife was a ski instructor. And he thought, I wonder if there's a better way to do this than the new system. And so what makes the CamelBouncer work and what's interesting about it is that most people balance on the CamelBouncer about the ball of their foot. We used to mount skis ball of foot, center of running surface. So if anything, it, it, to me, just, strengthens the idea that ball of foot, center of running surface is at least a very reasonable way to mount skis.

Yes.

Yeah.

And just, just in case people don't know, uh, surface, uh, running, running surface of a ski, do you want to give us a quick—

yeah, the running surface of the ski is that portion of the base that touches the snow when the ski is just flat on the snow. So flat, kind of groomed run, or we would do it on a table, right? And if you flatten the ski, where the tip starts to curve up would be the beginning of the running surface, right where the ski touched, and at the tail, the same thing. And the same thing, and you'd measure the distance and then divide it in half and mark that center point, and that's the center of the running surface.

Yeah, ball of foot on that. You know what's interesting is, um, so one, one sort of assessment I do with every, you know, client that comes in to see me when they're coming in here for pain or performance in their body is I will find out, I'll try and assess where they prefer to balance on their feet. Okay, and yeah, it changes a lot of people. Like, obviously the ball of the foot is a much more ideal place, but a lot of people don't use that for whatever reason— history, uh, lifestyle, genetics. That's, you know, like active or lazy, that sort of stuff. And so, um, yeah, yeah, so, so it's interesting, even, even thinking back to Thomas Grandy, the national team guy, and even the Alberta ones. Like, he's obviously fine-tuned his body to really have a very consistent balance point and very aware of that. And so he's just— as soon as he gets on something, he adapts and finds that spot on whatever equipment.

Well, well, you can do that when you've been on a podium at World Cup slalom, right? But, but the rest of the world has a harder time.

No.

Yeah.

And the rest of the world is the majority of the skiing population, so helping them out, you know, is really— for sure, is a bit— is a big— yeah, it's a contributing factor. We want to— we want to kind of solve that.

So what's been interesting on this whole journey then for me was that, um, when we did the research for Atomic which was in, I think, 1999 or 2000. And by then we're 20 years or so down the road of marking skis, right, and having a center mark on the boot and a mark on the ski, and the two marks go over each other. So when we're doing the research for Atomic, I was not the principal researcher, I was an assistant. But I had worked in a ski shop for 7 years and nobody else had. So I was the one who knew how to mount bindings. I was the one who knew how it was done. But the lead researcher needed to be a PhD. So I helped set the methods. And I was the one that was in touch with the director of design at Atomic. And I asked, how do you figure out where the mark goes on the ski? For recreational skiers? And the answer was, well, we designed the ski and then we send a bunch of ski testers out to test it, and we move the bindings forward and back, and, you know, I don't know, they have some kind of meeting and they talk about how they want the skis to ski, and they decide where the mark goes. Fine, sounds perfectly logical. And then I said, well, how do you determine, uh, where your national team skiers are mounted? And then he said, oh, well, we mount them ball of foot, center of running surface, and then we send them out. And the difference on Atomic skis and all those skis between ball of foot, center, and running surface and the mark, if you compare the two things, I would typically be moved 3 centimeters forward on the Vokals and the Atomics and Fishers from that generation. Right? So if I put my boot, the center of my boot on the center of the mark on the ski and skied and measured that, and then measured ball of foots— and then I should say measured Campbell balancer to center of running surface, my Campbell balance position, which is very close to the ball of my foot, would be about 3 centimeters forward. And 3 centimeters is huge.

It is.

Yeah. Yeah.

Anyone you like any anecdotal evidence in, in your shop that you find, like, expert skiers tend to want it back or forward? Or is that again, is it still the individual thing?

No, I, I can't answer your question, not because it's an individual thing. I can't answer your question because nobody does this anymore, right? So we're so, you know, when I, when we did the research for Nordica at Snowbird This was after I'd already talked to directors. You know, I'd done more research than almost anyone in the world on this or been involved in some way, and anyone in the world other than the ski manufacturers themselves. And I've talked to the director of design from Atomic who tells me the way they do it, and they use ball of foot, center of running surface, and everything else, and And then I'm riding up the chairlift with a woman I'd known all year, and she was a PSIA demo team member, and she'd probably been teaching for 40 years. I mean, she's a mighty fine skier. And she looked me in the eye on the chairlift and she said, I know about the research you're doing, and it's a bunch of crap. She said, everybody knows that you know, the engineers designed the binding position into the ski and there's only one correct place for it to be. And so, so it just shows how ingrained all of this is, you know, how we just kind of make assumptions, right? Well, here's these marks, the engineers must have done something and, and she's never played around with it and tried to learn anything about it. And so I know she's wrong because the guys who designed the skis have told me she's wrong. But nothing to say about it. So now, um, in my store, I urge people to experiment with binding position, but, but I don't know that they do anymore. Some people certainly do, but most people don't. They just go ski, right? And most instructors— there's no place in, in PSIA or CSIA curriculum that talks about moving bindings around to help people balance differently. So nobody knows anything about it, it's just gone. And we accept that here's where your boot goes and, uh, and you just learn how to ski there.

You know what, I think I was, I was, I was thinking back because, uh, I don't know if you knew, but I came from more telemarking. Like, I was a telemarker before Alpine. Okay, and so you've obviously mounted teleskis like that. There's no— like, it's a very— you mount ball of foot center of running surface. Like, I remember now, I remember going back and I was like, this is such a pain in the ass. Like, I have to— every Alpine pair of skis, I have to like do this long thing. It's not just these presets. That's real. Yet, yet it was good for me because I really like I got a sense of how much that affected my tele skiing. Because, because you're not locked in at the back, you've got to balance more. You could really feel when a ski was hard to turn or the tail just was just breaking away really easily. So yeah, just that came to me the other day because I've been spending more time on Alpine and I'm like, ah right, that's why. Like I felt it a lot more on, on telemark skis.

Well, you would, you would feel it on your current skis, non-tele skis. If, if you go out and, and play around with it, you'll feel it.

Um, that's, that's my mission this, this season, Lou. Yeah, I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be as much as those things move, and I'm gonna drag out my, uh, my, um, vocals with the R-motion, the, the adjustable, right, um, binding to really play with it. And I've been speaking with a couple of friends and and, and they move all their bindings. I'm like, this is something I've just never done except when I tell them, right? But since I got into Alpine, I just assumed—

I have so many, you know, stories about it. I was asked years ago when I came back and opened the store, I was asked to do a presentation to the Alberta Ski Coaches Federation, um, if that's what it's called. But anyway, it was all the, all the ski coaches in Alberta and I was asked to talk to them about binding position. And there were two things. It was from the same guy who I can't name, but his brother was a famous national team skier and he was a pro skier. And the first thing he said to me was, I don't like moving bindings forward because the skis are slower. And I think he's probably right, especially in the US. And he was a technical skier, and, uh, and so the skis would be a little slower, but, but who cares? As a recreational skier, I've got more— I've got more speed than I know how to manage anyway.

Yeah, I care.

Yeah, is that it's easy for me to stay balanced and I'm always in control. Um, I'm going to go as fast as I want to go if I just keep going down the fall line, certainly on any run from a hard blue up, right? Yeah, yeah, I'm going to have— uh, so that was the first thing he said. But the second thing he said was, um, and then I said, well, but for your athletes that aren't as skilled as you are, um, maybe it's harder to ski. And he kind of scratched his head, and that was, you know, as far as it went. But, but my thinking is that It's great that the skis are faster, slower, but, but at the— I'm a, you know, I'm a U16 level or U14 level. What's more important to me is that I need to be able to keep my balance and I need to be able to not make mistakes and I need to be able to learn what you're trying to teach me and everything needs to be working easily and the same all the time. And when I'm as good as you are and I make the national team, then we'll start playing around with ski setup that I can work with and maybe is harder to ski but could also be faster in certain circumstances, provided I don't make a mistake, right? But the other thing he said was, you know, I was at Panorama years ago and it was funny, it was about Atomic, and, and a lot of my athletes were using Atomics And it was just before, I don't know if you know, but, but the first downhill of the year is at Lake Louise, right? And all the national teams are here and they're oftentimes training at Panorama. So, um, he said all of our Atomic skis were against the fence. And, uh, and we just happened to be next to national team skiers. I don't know what team, but, but national team skiers Atomic. And I noticed that all of, all of their skis were mounted forward of my athlete skis. And it was because at the junior level we use boot marks, and at the national team level they use ball of foot center of running surface. So, so the best skiers in the world had their skis forward and easier to ski than kids that were still learning, learning their skills. So I think it's really important, and if people— yeah, depending on what ski they're on, you know, they may or may not find a different position that's better, but it's an experiment they should do. It can really dramatically help their skiing.

Yeah, and that was, that was probably the number one reason I decided we should record this and share it, is because now people have some information and some permission almost to freely experiment, whereas if someone had heard about this as a great find and they maybe went and asked that person you described on the chairlift, that demo team member, and that demo team member comes back to them from a position of sort of authority and guru status, no, it's rubbish, don't do it, that other person might just be like, okay. And then it could, who knows what it could be, but it could be the thing that just suddenly, like you in Snowbird, you had the run of your life, right? You know, so I thought this is really important. So there's, there's a, a skier you told me about, a young female racer that ended up with a bit of a tragedy. Can you, can you just tell us that story?

Yeah, as long as I, I want to be a little careful, right? Because I don't want to blame the tragedy on— but, but, um, she was maybe, I'm not sure, but maybe the youngest girl named to the Canadian national team a few years ago. She made the national B team at either 15 or 16. And she had been— I did her boot fitting and we did her equipment setup and we balanced her on the Campbell Balancer and ended up moving her about 3 centimeters forward. And that year she just had a fabulous year. But obviously she had before as well, but because she was already one of the top juniors in the country. But she had a great year, and that's when she was named to the B team. And then the next year, her coaches moved her back because—

well, whatever reason.

Yeah, who knows? They didn't believe it, or like the coach I had talked to before, they thought she would be faster with the skis further back. I mean, when bindings are further back and the tip isn't as pressured, These don't turn in as quickly, right? And they don't turn in as much. So it's— so it— you don't turn— they don't come out of the fall line as quickly. So it's reasonable. It's reasonable to think that in a racecourse you're going to be faster, provided you have good runs, right? So it's, it's a reasonable assumption for racing.

Yeah.

Yeah. That, um, that that skis might be faster if you're back—

So then they moved it back, and then what happened?

Well, as I say, I don't want to blame it on that, but towards the end of the season, she fell and tore her ACL. And I don't want to blame it on that. I don't have a way to do that.

Yeah, we can't, no.

What we do know, and you'll find out as you move bindings around, is that as you move bindings back, it definitely becomes harder to stay out of the back seat. Having bindings back on the ski gets you into the back seat. You have to constantly bring yourself forward to get the turn started, and then as the turn progresses, you get pushed back again, and then you have to bring yourself forward unless you're very, very And you, you obviously are, but, um, and Thomas Grandy was, but still you'll feel the difference and it'll be interesting to see. Um, yeah.

I mean, even just, just the simple thought of if, if, if everyone had like a mini teeter-totter in their backyard and you just stood on it where you, where you couldn't balance the teeter-totter, like so that the, the front and the back of the teetotter are off the ground. If you were stuck where it just always wanted— the tails wanted to drop, drop, right? Just imagine standing there for hours. Like, it's sort of tiring, and you— yeah, you're just not set up that well. So it makes— I mean, I def— I like thinking in terms of levers and, and fulcrums, you know, all over the body, and, and that's how we get mechanical advantage. Or there's a mechanical disadvantage to where that fulcrum is placed relative to the effort and the load. And so that's— yeah, I think that's really all you're doing.

I think that's right. And, and so really, for me, the message is, um, we can't necessarily, um, work with the Campbell balancer the way we used to because skis have rocker now, and, and they, they just work differently. Right. The length of the running surface changes as we put the skis on edge now. And more and more, the tip starts to contact the snow. And that didn't used to happen with old designs. So it's a little hard to know how to use the Campbell balancer now. However, everything about balancing is the same. And it's quite possible. First off, a lot of running skis are still old design and they don't have any rock— or a lot of racing skis, I should have said, still have old design and they don't have any rocker. So for racing and for kind of go-fast skis, right, just frontside carving skis, a lot of them still don't have any rocker, and the Campbell balancer should be functional. But even if you don't have access to a Campbell balancer, the idea of experimenting with your binding position is absolutely valid. And just last week I talked to— I was talking about this because I knew you and I would be talking. So I was talking about this to the head of design for Stöckli, and I said, what do you do about binding positions? And he said, well, on skis shorter than 160 centimeters, we move the bindings forward between a centimeter and a centimeter and a half. And that's just an acknowledgement that typically we're thinking about women in that lens, but that's an acknowledgement that shorter feet need to be moved forward on the ski to get the pressure to the same place. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Interesting. So should we— maybe we should let you talk about the, uh, the more recent research with the Campbell balancer, because as we go, we sort of rewind the story back and you're in Snowbird and you went Ah, maybe we should do some research on that to see what happens.

So yeah, maybe you skipped over that. So, so the research at Snowbird was, um, we had 7 volunteers. It was supported by Nordica. Everyone was on, almost everyone was on Nordica skis. We balanced people on the CamelBouncer, checked repeatability, um, between Steve Bagley and myself. And then found the balance position for everyone, didn't tell them what the balance position was, and sent them out to ski with us. So two separate days, right? One day to find everybody's balance position, assign it to them, and then another day to go skiing. And we gave them skis, and we had a set blue run and they skied from me to him kind of thing, and we told them to make, you know, their regular kind of turns. And we made several runs moving their bindings forward and backward but never telling them which position was the balanced position and which position was the factory position. And at the end of each run, someone else was there to interview them and get their opinion of the run. And then at the end of several runs, we said, OK, let's go skiing for the day. Where should we put your bindings to go skiing? Every single person, without knowing it, picked the balance position instead of the factory position. And the average, if I remember right, was forward between 2.5 and 3 centimeters. So it absolutely worked. It absolutely made a difference. Everybody liked their Campbell Balance runs more than the factory position runs. There were men and women in the test. And it showed for us that the Campbell Balancer worked. And it certainly shows that there's reason to experiment with binding position if you're going to go skiing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just remember— I don't know if you've listened to the the podcast episode where I interviewed Yuri Franco?

I have not yet.

He's, uh, do you know who he is?

I don't.

He's, uh, sort of, I guess, the inventor of the parabolic ski, I guess, for Elan back in the day. He was, um, okay, that was his project to basically, yeah, take that, um, take that, like, figure out that ski, a carved ski.

Right.

Anyway, he, um, he was doing testing on what makes a ski skid, like what is it. And so he took like a child's ski, um, an adult ski, a women's ski, a race ski, all these different skis, and had them set in the snow on a consistent surface like across the fall line. And then he had like a, a pressure gauge So he would pull the ski like a side slip direction from the middle of the binding and pull it down the slope and see how much pressure it took before the ski lost grip and skidded. They all pretty much were exactly the same. Doesn't matter if it was a kid's ski or a full-blown FIS ski when it was done that way. The differentiating factor that made a ski skid was the placement of where the pull side or down the slope is from, which is just the— it's just the binding position thing again, right? Because there's basically a center point on a ski where it's like torsionally the strongest, and you're not— you're not sort of changing the interaction of the tip and the tail holding the same on the snow. And so that if there's a difference, you're going to get torque, a rotation, and then there's going to be a skidding moment because they don't line up. So It's essentially like it's acknowledging the same factor.

That sounds like— that's interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. So you'll have to listen to that one. I will probably get it. Honestly, you'll hear me in it and I don't get it a little bit. It takes me a little while to get it. And then, but it was a huge like breakthrough and understanding for me. And then in my lessons and teaching people, people just don't understand how important this fore and aft pressure on the ski is. It doesn't matter if you're like Ted Ligety and can put your hip on the snow, you're in the wrong spot fore and aft on the ski at a critical point. There's torque and the ski will break.

Yeah, I think that, uh, that it's important. I mean, in my store, we try and pick skis that are easy to ski. Very high performance but easy to ski. So I know I can just sell them to everybody. And then there are other skis that have a reputation for being a bitch to ski on— great skis, provided you don't mind skiing on a ski that's a bitch to ski, right? And but we tend not to pick them to sell in the store because I don't have a I don't have a story I can tell about them. I mean, the story is, this is a great ski, you'll like it, but be good, you know, be aware, ski it really hard. Or here's this other ski on the other side of the wall, it does everything just as well, but it's really forgiving and it's easy. I don't have a way to sell the ski that's hard to ski.

Can you give me an example of each of those skis from last season, maybe?

Not so much because we have the same skis historically every year, right?

Got it.

But if, if we would have gone back to what you and I were first talking about in the, in the '80s and the '90s and things, all of those German or Austrian skis— I mean, I remember reading in Ski Magazine, it didn't matter if I was reading a test on a Fischer or a Völkl or an Atomic, it was always the same. Great skis but challenging to ski, right? Stay forward, don't get in the back seat, ski hard. And then if I read about a Rossignol or a K2 or some of the others, it was always light, lively, fun, easy, you know, go play. And the difference as I got involved in the research and started measuring things was that absolutely the Fischer and the Atomic and the Vokals were all mounted behind the Rossis and the DynaMeets and the K2s. And when I could compare running surface, it was absolute. So it made it clear to me that the biggest difference between those skis wasn't the— it wasn't the design of the ski that made them more challenging to ski, it was a binding position. If you move the bindings forward, they ski just the same. Yeah, Rossi's a Völkl, right? Völkl's a Rossi if you get the binding positions right. Now Now things are more varied because of rocker and because there's just so many differences in skis now.

Yeah.

But their ability to be tuned by binding position isn't changed at all.

Yeah, you can play with that.

Yeah, so it's hard now. Certainly as I ski on Vokals and some other skis now, it's evident to me from the way they ski that on some of their skis they've moved the bindings forward. And when I talk to them about, for instance, the women's Aura ski from several years ago, right, when they brought that series out and we measured them, the diff— and we talked to them, the differences were two: the bindings were moved forward and the bindings were flattened, and they didn't have as much binding belt anymore. But binding delta isn't part of this discussion. Yeah.

Have you done—

that could be another—

I mean, have you done research? Have you been involved in research on binding delta as well?

I haven't seen any. I'm not aware of any. I've skied with varying binding delta. I've fixed people's problems with, especially with sore knees and burned out quads. By reducing delta. I know that a lot of World Cup—

quickly, yeah, just so people, if they're listening, because they're listening to this, delta is the difference in the heel to the toe piece height. Yeah, yeah. So, or, yeah, so measured in millimeters. Yes. So more binding delta, the heel is higher. So like, if extreme example, you're in high-heeled shoes Right. Yeah. And you fix some people by basically taking them out of high heels and putting them flat.

For sure. And the other interesting thing, it's kind of like the race thing and binding position, is that a lot of recreational bindings have less delta than they used to, but some of them still have substantial delta, as much as 6 millimeters and more. Especially tech bindings, touring bindings can have huge delta. And, uh, but World Cup race bindings, they're pretty flat now. Tom is flat. Yeah, Rossi's flat.

I remember back to, back to Telemark again. I can remember always that when I first tried, I think I like, because the different binding brands in Telemark tend to basically induce more delta, so put you on your tiptoes or not.

Right.

And I can remember finally finding a binding, um, the Hammerhead. It was like a 22 Designs Hammerhead binding, it's called. And it really pulled your heel down, and the toe and heel height was the same. And even touring telemark boots had that rockered sole, like the toe piece, right? So as soon as you moved your weight forward, it really rolled you like onto the tiptoes, so you're really overbalancing forward. And I see so many telemarketers, I mean, I don't notice anymore, but I remember back in the day when I used to teach a lot, part of the problem was trying to teach people who are basically just skiing on their tiptoes the whole time because the binding and the boot forced them there. So I, yeah, I really know, and you know, it's much worse because you've got nothing really as this cable tension holding your heel down, but in an Alpine binding, right, you've got It's really solidly down. So you kind of don't notice as much and you got this big stiff cuff. Telemark, you don't get any of that. So you just see people sliding all over the place, stemming and—

What happens a lot of times in alpine skiing with a lot of binding delta is people tend to ski with a lot of, with some ankle flexion and knee flexion and they lean against the tongue of the boot, but then they bring their back absolutely vertical to keep them from falling on their face and they end up actually skiing in the back seat and they don't have any hip flexion. So they're all locked up and they can't move anymore. Right. And they're in the back seat. Um, there was a time, I think that that's— you agree?

That's totally, yeah. 100%.

There was a time several years ago, I don't remember her name right now. There was a woman instructor in the US, who had kind of decided that all women should ski with a lot of delta. And this is one of the problems for me with the ski industry and probably most sports, is that, is that they jump on the latest fad and all that without doing the research. So she was making a big deal about how necessary it was for women to have lots of delta, and Rossignol introduced a whole line of skis with lots of delta. And in 2 years, the whole thing was gone, right? Because it's completely wrong.

It's wrong.

It's not to say there aren't some people that can't be better off with lots of delta, but in general, in general, for sure not. And boots already have delta built into them, right? So boots already have delta built into them, and then, and then they add even more in the bindings.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Have you seen, I mean, you're privy to, you know, you know, the next season's boots, or even just what you're seeing the trend in now, are you seeing the ramp angle inside the boot, so that toe-heel height difference, changing over years?

I think it's come down marginally, but not very much. The big difference is that bindings are flatter. And for the bindings that aren't flat, for instance, Head still makes some race bindings with, uh, with a 4mm delta. But again, that's kind of back to a racing thing where we would say— that's on their GS binding and speed binding— where we would say, okay, having a little bit of delta, um, they can get in a tuck easier. That may be, but also you don't have as much pressure on the tip of the ski.

Yeah, okay, so not as squirrelly, and so the ski doesn't respond as quickly.

So Again, maybe the ski is faster in a course. So the big difference has been in bindings, but even in their bindings that have delta, it's— they make a whole series of shims to take all the delta out if we want to. So we would just test with the athletes and see what they like, right? And we've done a lot of that.

Interesting.

I think, I mean, if it was my choice I think everyone should have zero delta, and especially for people that have lots of skis, they should all be set the same, right? Because you jump from ski to ski and, and Marker— this Marker binding has a different delta than the Tyrolean on this Head ski, and the Marker on this Völkl, and the Atomic. And, you know, people have lots of skis, especially if they live in ski country and they're good skiers, and then, and then they ski completely differently on each ski. I'd love to see everyone get all their bindings set up at either at zero or at the same delta so that at least the way they— at least their stance on each ski can be the same.

Excellent. So Lou, if we're sort of wrapping up, I guess like summarizing the key points, one is binding position absolutely matters.

Absolutely matters.

The research shows that. Yeah, so So to go out and if you can do some of your own testing and yeah, any, any hints on doing that? Like, well, you know, consistent pit, like the same run, like would you like those obvious kind of things?

Yeah. I, well, I think a couple of things I hope are obvious. Um, if you're going to go out and experiment with your ski setup, um, you don't change your ski setup and then go and ski the toughest run on the mountain with bumps that are over your head, right? I mean, you make gradual changes, and I would say on consistent, probably groomed blue runs, you know, something easy where you can feel the differences and you're not working on control, and then the real differences are more obvious. And then as you, as you understand the changes, then you can move on to more and more difficult terrain and whatever it is you normally ski. But I wouldn't do the experiment on the hardest run you can find, right? I do the experiment where it's, where it's easy and safe.

Yeah, yeah, be good if you had like a buddy, for instance, and you both went, okay, we're gonna go, this is 3 centimeters forward of our spot, and then they get to the bottom, they each, you know, write down little notes like, felt this pile turn was easy, da da da. So then you, because you might find different, like, like you pointed out, you're going to find different characteristics in the ski, different depending on the position. So at least, yep.

But if I was going to do the experiment, I wouldn't even decide, okay, I'm going to move it 3 centimeters. I would decide, I don't know how far I'm going to move it, So I'm going to move it 1 centimeter. And then if I like that more, then one more. And I go little jumps at a time so that it isn't a big change in my balance. And then I'd keep going until I don't like it anymore. And then I come back and, and, you know, slowly go back and forth. Yeah.

Great, great advice. Okay, cool. So there, uh, There, I guess, are the main key takeaways, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, which is pretty simple. So definitely something I'm very interested to do. And I'm going to chat next with a guy, Tim Caife, from New Zealand. And he raced for New Zealand. And he also was involved in coaching Alice Robinson, the up-and-coming New Zealand ski racer. And I asked him about this topic. And, um, and he said, oh well, we'll, we'll, we'll talk about it more. But he said he used it as a training— he moved her bindings for training effect. So, okay, to teach her things.

Yeah, I'd like— I'll have to listen and hear what he did. Yeah.

And then that was actually probably started the first— last season in New Zealand, he adjusted the So my, my slalom ski, the plate, the piston plate, the, the front toe piece area, there's two ways you can mount it, either GS or slalom style. So basically stiffens the forebody toe piece area or softens it, right? And for some reason, Vöckl set, set that piston plate up in the GS position even though it's a slalom ski, and he switched it Yeah, so the slalom position, and I— it was like my bump skiing was so much more enjoyable after that, and my turns felt rounder, if I want, you know, if I could put a descriptive word to it, because of like a 2 centimeter, 1.5 centimeter difference in the flex and binding hold on the ski. So I was, I was just amazed. I was like, okay. And then he did some other things. He did that to, to one of the other guys in the Rookie Academy's bindings who was having some trouble you know, with a brand new ski. And then, you know, he did some tuning, and then he did that to the binding. The guy ended up really liking the skis after that. And another girl on a pair of Rossis, she was in totally in the wrong spot. And it's like, yeah, so he's obviously got a lot of experience in, in bindings. And so I was just seeing all these people like getting, feeling better, more comfortable, getting what they want out of the ski through just binding adjustment.

And that's sort of, well, you know, one of the things that's interesting interesting, and this will be maybe the last thing and we'll sign off, that I hear all the time in the store. You may hear it from time to time too, but maybe me more because, you know, at the store we're talking about ski setup and we talk about tuning and all the things we talk about, and there's always a whole group of recreational skiers that say, I'm not, you know, I'm just a recreational skier, I don't need any of that, I'm not good enough to notice the difference, like it doesn't matter to me if my edges are sharp, I don't And it's funny because to me it's exactly the opposite, right? The less skilled I am, the better my equipment better be. Because yeah, if I don't ski that well and my edges are really dull, I'm hopeless, right? So it's exactly the opposite mindset. So if any— if the take-home message at all from all of this should be, it's that The less skills you have, the more you should play around with equipment setup and get it right for you because it's going to make it much easier for you.

Excellent.

Right? And it makes it easier and better for everyone, but it'll be most noticeable as you're, you know, as you're working on developing and you're trying to learn new skills and you're fighting balance. Um, it's when it's most important. Excellent.

Hey, so Lou, If, you know, if people are interested in seeking out some help from you and your shop, how can they find you?

Well, the shop is in Calgary. We see people from all over the world that happen to be in Calgary. Shop's in Calgary. The website is luse.ca. The research for Nordica and Atomic is on the website, but so are lots of articles about boot fitting. I mean, we specialize in boot fitting. So there's lots of articles and videos about boot fitting, about Delta and about equipment setup on the website. And there's going to be more generated this summer. And, uh, and then it's just a matter of calling, coming in, or, or, you know, learning from the videos and getting someone somewhere else to apply it if you're too far away to come by.

Because as I understand it, there's not many shops that have a Campbell balancer.

No, no.

So, but you do. And so, but we do. That would be the first.

Yeah.

So, so when, when I eventually get back over there, I'd love to come in and test it out.

Sure. And that'd be great.

Yeah. So, Lou, thank you very much again for your time.

My pleasure.

I think the skiing community is going to thank you for sharing your, uh, your insights and, and your research and your knowledge. So I'm thanking you on behalf of them already in advance.

Thank you. And, uh, this is great.

Excellent. We'll speak again soon.

Okay. Thanks, Tom. Have a good week.