Tom Gellie uses a LEGO skier collision to explain countersteering in alpine skiing. Steer the skis early to let your center of mass move inside the turn, creating edge engagement through gravity and ski geometry, not twisting.
This I think is really cool from Legoskier on Instagram. If you don't follow him, follow him. He's got some really cool stuff using Lego skiers. Anyway, what caught my attention, he obviously just sent these two little Lego skiers just down the hill and they've got no active control over what's happening. So as they run into each other, momentum up at this point is just taking the skier in this direction, down the hill, okay. But then this blue guy bumps into the girl Lego skier, okay, and changes the direction of skis from running in this direction to now— let's see when it stops— that direction. Okay, now the cool thing with this, how would this apply to you as a skier? Well, watch what happens. Momentum of the center of mass is going this way, but then the base of support and the skis head in this direction, so they're now taking different paths down the hill. And look what happens, the skier now starts to topple and move inside the turn, okay, just from a change in direction. So there we go, Scott edge early in a turn to start carving around in the next turn. Okay, a lot of people will start their turns by trying to actually direct the skis this way. Now motorcycle riders, good cyclists know this, countersteering. If you steer this way, you allow the center of mass to go in this direction, you can get inside the turn really easy. And effortlessly create early edge. So you could bend the ski now higher up in the turn and make use of gravity to help start your turn and the ski technology to start it instead of putting a twisting effort in this direction first. It's actually almost that blue skier made the skis go in this direction. So, hope you enjoyed that. Thanks Legoskier for the great video. And, um, yeah, see if you can utilize this and think about whether you start your turn by even— not even just like rolling over, you can actually get inside much sooner, much quicker by steering around this direction, which then results, because your center of mass is this way, in an early topple and an early edge engagement of your turn.
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