Gary Ward Interview

Hello and welcome to Global Skiing. This is Tom Gellie, and today I'm going to be skiing with someone a little different to some of my previous guests, and his name is Gary Ward. And so, Gary Ward, I'm going to let him talk about his background, but he's a passionate skier. He's not a ski instructor, but he knows a hell of a lot about how the body moves, anatomy, feet in particular. And so I'm really interested to chat with him about his thoughts on skiing, boot fitting, the body, and, uh, and much more, hopefully. So welcome to the Global Skiing Podcast, Gary.

Hi, Tom. Thank you.

Yeah, um, excellent. So Gary, for people that don't know you, um, can you tell us about what you're currently doing for a living, so what Anatomy in Motion is, and then I guess the background to how you got there.

Okay, yeah, so I— maybe I'll start with background to how I got there. I think that's more organic. Yeah, perfect. So in 1999, I began my ski bum career as a— in the Alps, where I began kind of working rental and Managing a team of ski instructors in France, which very quickly became running a technical retail ski shop, so selling hardware, skis, boots. We did clothing and stuff as well, so everything that got you in fine shape for the skiing on the hill, but the boot fitting side was the thing that really captured me and was what we spent the majority of our time doing. For me, I'd never done anything anatomical before apart from weight training and the usual stuff. This introduction to the foot as an anatomical structure really fascinated me and I was quickly hooked into it within a couple of days and became slightly obsessed with the idea that, wow, we can actually make subtle changes to people's feet and have a huge impact on their skiing. Which fast forward 15, 16 years has become— we can make subtle changes in people's feet and have a huge impact on their, not just their body, but their life, their livelihood, and their— the pain that they endure on a day-to-day basis, but also performance, which goes back to the ski thing. So modifying somebody's ski boots would get them out of pain, would also enhance their experience on the hill, and all around lend itself to a fantastic kind of week on, on the mountain. So pain and performance has always been something that I've been kind of highly into. So moving on from the skiing, when I did 7 winters, I think, moved on to personal training and sports therapy, sports massage, doing all the courses that I could find to help me work with people's pain and performance, um, and eventually decided to stop doing that and start teaching others. Because what I discovered was when you bring the foot into the world of movement and training and exercise and therapy, it— there was a big gap in the market. So Anatomy in Motion was born, uh, where I use my understanding of how the foot moves and how the foot leads into the rest of the body and how it affects different phases of our walking cycle, the impact it will have on our hips, our spine, our neck, our shoulders, even our hands and wrists and vice versa. And so Anatomy in Motion became this little pop-up workshop that ran around telling anybody who was interested about how to work with the body as a full holistic integrated structure to improve the intercommunication between one joint and another. So we're not treating one joint, but we're treating a series of joints. In fact, we're just treating the body And I designed the FlowMotion model, which is a simple look at gait. So in order to assess a person's body, we take a look at gait. We take gait, we look at heel strike, for instance, when the heel comes in contact with the ground, and we look at what every joint is doing at that moment in the gait cycle in all three dimensions. And I wrote it down and made sure it was right and studied it and Eventually we have 5 phases that quickly can become 10, but we keep it at 5 to keep it simple. 6th phase is the swing phase. Throughout this phase of movement, I discovered that every single possible joint motion that we have available to us must happen in that cycle. The cycle lasts— each step lasts between 0.6 and 0.85 seconds. That is utter chaos that we just wanted to bring some simplicity to. But it means that if you can't do something, if you can't flex your spine to the left, it's going to show up. There's going to be two particular phases in the cycle that you cannot access. It's also going to mean bringing it back to skiing, there's going to be accesses— sorry, it's going to be spaces in your skiing motion that you're also going to struggle to access. And so rather than not access it, what we do is we compensate. And then we all know about compensation, we all know about skiers not being able to turn one way better than the other. We all know about throwing the shoulders, and all these compensations can be minimized by taking a holistic look at the body. And again, so that you can not ski in pain and that you can ski on a better level than you ever have before.

So, um, going back to when you first started, because I have done— I also took a pretty keen interest in ski boot fitting after many years of just painful feet in ski boots because, um, I don't think ski boots are really designed, uh, fantastically. And I think everyone needs to customize their own ski boots. Anyway, I had some training at Snow and Rock in London and a couple of shops in, um, in Covent Garden. Yeah, yep. And so obviously that was through mostly Seedas. Who, who did you begin Where did you— like, who is the person that kind of gave you that interest in— Yeah.

We had 3 guys, I think, in 3 days who literally blew my head off. The first guy was Julian Mills, who is still— can be found in Chamonix. He used to work the footwork store, which is predominantly a Superfeet. Kind of set up. But his anatomy of the foot and introducing me to looking at gait was primarily that guy's responsibility. A second guy was a guy called Croc, good old Aussie, who is now in Sainte-Foy, I think. The third guy was the SEDAS, or conformat guy in France whose name escapes me at the moment. But yeah, we went down to the Conformable place, the home of Conformable, Sidas, in, in Guérande in France, every year in fact, to kind of update and work with the products and getting used to building the footbeds in the store. And then years later, when I'd actually finished skiing and was working quite heavily on Anatomy in Motion, a chap called Hamish Wolfenden, who used to write a lot of Write a lot of articles for, you know, the ski mags and stuff about boot fitting, and he had a master's in biomechanics in the windlass mechanism especially and its role in skiing. And so we connected really quite strongly. Sadly, he's not around anymore, but his legend lives on in my eyes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, cool. Do you remember like a particular thing early on learning about that you were like, oh my God, that pertains to me, that's my foot does that, or doing this allows me to, like, do you remember, was there a moment like that?

Well, the first thing that comes to mind, I stood up on the boot bench on the first morning, so I was in charge of this crew. So, pick me out, Gary, stand up on the boot bench and turn around and we'll have a look at your feet. And the first thing this Julian Mills said to me was, can you say quack? Turned out flat feet. You know, you've got high immobile arches. They would just collapse to the floor. The toes were turned out. And I think the biggest thing was, for me, which always stood the test of time, is how did I not even know that? And yeah, and there's this idea we can consciously treat stuff, unconsciously treat stuff, but unless you bring something into somebody's awareness, they don't know. We don't know what we don't know. And this was my— I think this was my biggest thing was What we do is if you can bring awareness to somebody, then all of a sudden they have a reason to either work with it or dismiss it, but at least they're aware of it. That was one of the big step-ups for me, which I think has always led, carried on with what we're doing. For instance, people don't know that they can't left laterally flex their spine, or they don't know that they don't extend their hip. Of course they think they do, but they're just working out a way to do it, but it's just not in this busy day-to-day life, we're just not aware of it. So I think that for me was one of the, like literally the first morning, you know those first minutes of, "Oh, this is going to be a cool session." I learned so much about myself in kind of milliseconds. And it was even a similar thing when I was personal training back in, I remember walking down the road and looking at people and spotting this guy in the mirror with his pelvis shifted forward and his feet turned out and kind of mine and realized it was me in a shop window and I got a massive shock. And so, I mean, the whole thing probably has just been a journey to me, you know, trying to work myself out.

Yeah. That's why I ask, because yeah, I definitely got into it probably more out of a personal interest to begin with, because I started realizing why, you know, certain parts of my feet hurt and and that sort of thing. And that it was amazing you can change all this with, you know, adjust like wedges and punches and grinds and all that sort of stuff. So, yeah, yeah, that's cool. So, now looking back, given your role in treating people's alignment now with Anatomy in Motion, would you say to someone, say your best friend or whatever is going to get their ski boots fitted, would you tell them that they'd get far more value if they first came and saw someone like yourself to sort out how they moved and their alignment before they went and got their ski boots and all that sort of stuff done?

Absolutely, I would. Yeah, 100%. I mean, not everybody will, but those who— it is— we have experience, or I should say we have experience, we have a kind of body of anecdotal evidence that we can change the way your foot moves and therefore change the foot's resting structure within an hour or so's work. So if we can do that, do you want to do that before you have your insoles built for your boot, or do you want to do it after? We've had people walk in with their prescribed orthotics who can't put them in their shoes because they make them feel weird, or they realter their alignment, which inevitably they would because they're set to the old alignment pattern. And an orthotic for me is, is, has got to be— it's kind of a down-the-line something, whereas if we can change the mechanics of somebody's structure, how they work, how they stand, even if they do need orthotics at the end of that, then we want to be setting it— an orthotic— to support an optimal aligned structure rather than supporting a suboptimal aligned structure. And so the same really goes for skiing.

Yep. I think it's— some people would find it difficult to believe, but you can actually change the way someone's feet look and sit on the ground in a really short space of time, like you said, in an hour. Am I right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, not always, but if you get down to the nitty-gritty of what's holding somebody's structure back, you can clear that, then you can have some pretty outstanding kind of outcomes. I have literally stood in rooms with people who are looking at their feet going, "I've got arches." Like, what have you done? It goes on. There are other podcasts where this has been discussed, but at the end of the day, if you can change the foot's role, which is not just to stand on but to experience movement on the ground and movement above, and you change the internal structure of the foot's relationship with the external environment. So it's not just stepping on a flat surface every step of the way, but it's able to experience different terrains, which we might use a wedge to create terrain, different experiences. We're able to encourage each bone to articulate in a three-dimensional way with the bone or bones that surround it, then all this is all awareness. Like, if the brain doesn't know that I'm supposed to— I can move that structure there because it hasn't done it for 20 years, it suddenly has the ability to move that, then it changes the muscle around it. And it's almost like muscles are an internal orthotic that we've lost the ability to use. So if we can recreate through joint motion the reaction in the muscle is to work effectively, then it has to change the foot structure. And that's what led to our, what we call, poor man's foot scans, which is just quick drawing around the foot measuring subtalar joint axis before and afters. And you can see some drastic changes in the subtalar joint axis. You can see some drastic changes in the range available to that in two particular phases of the 8 cycles a week. It would probably never pass an evidence-based practice process, but if you're consistent in your measuring, then you yourself can see the before and after effect, and your client can, and it brings solid awareness to them of what's possible.

Yeah, absolutely. I've started playing around with those before the course coming up, and it's been cool, amazing to see even with, you know, just measuring with your fingers how much, you know, it's not that accurate, but you can still see there's a definite, definite, different measurable difference.

So if you measure the same before and after, then you're going to see the change or not.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So if you had someone come in, your best friend again, and they'd taken your advice, they'd come to see you and you'd started working on sort of balancing their body and their feet and their spine and everything, so was starting to find more of a central kind of point. Then when you sent him to the ski boot shop, what do you think are some important aspects of a good ski boot fit so that when he's skiing he can still access all these things perhaps you've, you know, given his foot access to, for instance, functional pronation, supination, and all the articulations of the joints? What are some key aspects of a boot fit?

Primarily, the boot has to fit. I think that was the biggest, over all the years, the biggest failing for people who were renting or invested in boots, were that they were buying boots too big. I assume that you kind of agree with that.

Definitely, yeah.

And obviously it makes sense. If you're going to buy boots, you want them to be comfortable. When you put your foot in a boot that fits initially, it's not comfortable. And the first reaction for anybody doing that is to take their foot out and say, "No, it's too small." And so there needs to be trust with the fitter that they know what they're doing and that they're going to take you through a process whereby in an hour's time this thing is going to fit and it's going to be perfect. So that's one of the more most common pieces of advice that I, that I give people. And we used to base that on, as you probably know, take the liner out, stand in the shell of the boot, which I still know loads of people do— don't do. Yeah, today.

Yeah.

And you're looking at brushing your toes against the end of the boot, just taking a look at the space, taking a look at the space down the back of the, the boot. And we'd be looking at I remember it was something like between 0.8 centimeters to 1.2 centimeters, which I always thought it was still a bit on the tight side for recreational skiers. So around between 1 and 1.5, probably, for someone. And then you put the liner in, and I used to explain to them, I'd look at their foot, and if they were pronated, they're gonna find when they put the boot on, they're gonna find the big toe at the end, they're gonna find the medial ankle at putting pressure. They're going to find the lateral forefoot around the little toe putting pressure, and probably the instep, which is inevitably sitting in the wrong part of the boot, feeling pressure. So I'd probably say the boot's going to feel too small, you're going to feel pressure here, here, here, and here. Um, and then— and I just warmed them all up in the front so they knew that I was— knew what I was talking about. Yeah. And then we'd look at building the orthotic. So I shouldn't call it an orthotic because we used to build insoles.

Yeah.

And that was done relative to building around their middle, mid-arch, neutral arch, calcaneus-aligned, toe up in the windlass mechanism just to get a good neutral foot and filling the space. But knowing what was my own learning really rather than instruction, but if people had an orthotic that they couldn't move, it would cause a problem. And if they had an orthotic they could move too much, it also caused a problem. So that in itself was a kind of a fine balance between kind of enough support and enough— yeah, enough, not enough. And it's that idea that an orthotic, even if I talk about kind of in everyday footwear, then an orthotic or any support needs to both allow and limit movement at the same time, because you can't take movement away from the body, and those that do, do cause problems. So, um, and I think that then once you got the orthotic into the boot, then people would feel— they would naturally feel those pressure points that we'd made them aware of would disappear, and the toes would be pulled back a little bit, and they'd be able to feel comfort in the boot. I do, I do still think that probably insoles are required in a ski boot. I think you're probably— I wouldn't say foolish, but it's wise to have something in there rather than just the standard base plate, just to help the heel hold and create the space around the forefoot and optimize the movement so that you can transmit your energy onto ski edge.

Yep, that's interesting because in the last year since finishing my study in Rolfing and I guess becoming more interested in the body and the feet and this whole minimalist shoe movement and everything. I took my orthotics, or my insoles out, sorry, last season and actually found, and of course a lot of it could be placebo, but I found I really liked the way—

Interesting.

Yeah, it felt, but I guess I'll put this on top. The rest, so underneath my foot had no, it was flat. I had that completely flat. However, I've made sure the top of my foot has good contact. All the spaces that I guess like the navicular bone had room to just move enough. There was like an even contact all along the shin. So when I flexed forward, I had sort of the feedback against my shin was it wasn't pushing more in one place than another. It was kind of even.

Yeah.

Yeah. And I guess—

Did you modify the boot to make those things happen?

Yes, absolutely. And a lot of time spent doing my own kind of stuff and cutting the liner and kind of skiing on it and then coming back and changing things.

The only thing I'd say is you're probably going to stick yourself in the 1%, right?

Yeah.

When it comes down to my best mate, as you called him, who works in a bank, which I don't have a best mate, but if he's working in a bank all year and then he goes skiing one week a year and he might be able to ski, but You know, he's, he's, he's definitely in the 99%, and then that's where I'd say that that support is kind of needed to help. Not backtracking on what I said, I think it's cool that you've managed to do that. I certainly haven't tried to do that. One of the things that was— is close to you is there's a company in Spain called Podoactiva, and they have what I consider the best orthotic making system I've ever seen. and they decided that they would start doing the ski boots. And I kind of thought, when they measured me up and provided me with the insoles, I thought, that's just not going to work for me. That just— the arch isn't creating contact with my arch. I'll give it a go and I'll give you some feedback, you know, out of the respect we kind of have for each other's work. They were the best thing that ever happened in my skin.

Really?

I couldn't really— it's the way they move with you. It wasn't a foot that had freedom in the arch, but it was much more comfortable. The heel was really well held, and I could kind of feel what I was doing more. So I then had a sense that I was probably building up, or I had had my orthotics built up too high to really support the foot. 10 years before. So I was still using the same orthotics as I was years ago, which is probably foolish in itself. But having done lots of work on my feet and my skiing improved, I think I'm a better skier now than when I was doing my ski seasons because of the awareness in the body.

Yeah.

But then when those insoles went in and whatever they do over there, they really lit up my system and my feeling and the turn and the comfort and the joy. Yeah.

Now that's good to know just because obviously, like I said, the kind of 1% thing, I'm sure, you know, I have this idealistic view of, you know, I would like to be, you know, doing it all myself and making sure my body is reacting to exactly what it's feeling. And, but it's really good to know that you would still, you know, that's it's horses for courses and other people that, you know, it's—

It's also to know it's okay.

Yeah.

It's also to know it's okay, right? Because we get so obsessed with what we're doing and, you know, we'll be skiing naked next.

Exactly, yeah, yep, yep, exactly, exactly. Cool, I'm going to look up those people in Spain. Okay, awesome. So, what about, for instance, You know, because you've obviously seen people with issues, you know, feet issues, because their toes have been squished all the time, like, uh, width-wise. So do you think that that's an important area in a boot to be right? Because that— yeah, like, can you give an example of what perhaps that can do to foot function? Um, yeah. Yep. Like, say the big toe is adducted or pushed in towards the second toe?

Yes. I have a million thoughts bombarding me at once. Break them down. That comes down to toe box shape. I think it goes back to what I initially said, the right fit. The right shape boot for your foot is obviously better than taking the wrong shaped boot for your foot and modifying it, um, initially in terms of fit. I think the second part that I'd say in terms of fit is most people have toe problems because the boot's not the right size, the heel's not held, and they get— they, they slip forward into the ski boot a little bit, and that, and that pushes their toes into the narrowing of the toe box, which causes the compromise. Um, but then biomechanically, then the idea of Having— not having— I mean, I've always lived on the philosophy which I think came from, from Croc, was that your heel wants to be really tightly held and the forefoot you just want as, as big as a house, I think were his words. So you've got plenty of room and freedom there. Um, just trying to think mechanically of having the, having the, the toes all adducted towards the, that second toe. Yeah. What does that do? I'm not—

say for instance that, like, because pronation, functional good pronation, so with your ankle flexed at the start of the turn, is going to help you get on an early edge and set yourself up. So if your toes, big toes, were pushed in and your little toes were pushed in, what could that do?

Well, again, I'm all about the gait cycle. So when you, when you pronate the foot, you're gonna— if we just look top down at the foot, you should have an internally rotating ankle. And in front of the navicular forward, you'll have an abducting forefoot. And you, you probably find that the, the toes themselves also The toes also are moving laterally.

Laterally, yep, out to the side.

Yeah, Hallux valgus position. Yeah, all 5 toes. So at no point in the gait cycle do you find all the toes all closing towards each other? So i.e., the 4th and 5th toes facing left while the big toe is facing right?

Yep.

So in terms of having pronation restrict— that would, that for me would restrict would restrict pronation. It would also make it difficult to supinate because you'd then need the toe to kind of be opposing.

Yeah.

Uh, the— if you gripping, any gripping of the toes, yeah, inevitably that compact space, uh, the closing of the structures on the underfoot, uh, the narrowing of the metatarsals would lead to some kind of gripping.

Yep.

And gripping, if anybody can try this, but if you grip your toes and try bend your knee and try and pronate your foot, you'll notice that it's not going to go anywhere. Yes. So fine, people will use toe gripping as a way of minimizing their pronation, so they'll completely just avoid pronating by toe gripping. So in order to relax the toes, we have to put the mechanics of pronation back in into place, or minimize the overpronation that they're trying to avoid. I mean, for me, toes are really kind of sly, crafty characters. My little nickname for toes is the last line of defense. So if there's something wrong with the hip, I can try and modify by my knee. If the knee doesn't do it, I can try and modify with my rear foot. If the rear foot doesn't do it, then I can go to the forefoot. But if the forefoot doesn't do it, the toes have got to. There's no—

yeah, no.

And so, yeah, we really can't compromise their space and freedom for movement, which is actually quite complex. And it is I think, three-dimensional. Um, and obviously limiting movement there is going to work back up one into the forefoot and limit that movement around the metatarsals and the cuneiforms. Um, and then just what— if you just— if you compromise anything in the foot, the question you have to ask yourself is, where am I going to get that movement from?

Yeah.

And then we start looking up the chain. So it's— you're probably going to find in skiing that it's going to be hips probably going to be rotational. And if your hips can't do it, the shoulders will be doing it, um, and you'll feel uncomfortable at the same time. So why not give them space to breathe and let them move and do their thing? And, and yeah, optimize. It's an exchange movement. Biomechanics in movement as a whole body structure is an exchange. So whenever something can't do something, something else will have to take up the slack because you can't break this, um, kind of holistic chain. So something somewhere has to do what can't be done, and that's where— that's what we call imbalance and compensation. But it's actually a kind of functional requirement of the body, yeah, or responsibility of the body to make up for that. So the last thing we want to do really is compromise them in— yeah, buying the wrong boot. Yeah, buying a Lang when you should be wearing a Technica.

Yeah, yep, yep. So that's just made me think of, uh, Tensegrity. Are you familiar with tensegrity? Like, is that similar kind of concept in a way to this? Yep.

Absolutely.

Yep. So you take something from somewhere, like tension out, or add tension in, and somewhere else has to kind of take up that slack. Like, the body works almost like a tensegrity structure.

Yeah, 100%. I mean, it's an architectural model, and if you study the body closely, you'll notice that the majority of our architectural structures are already evident in our body somewhere. And so, you know, what came first, the body or architecture?

Yeah.

And, and there's probably no— it wasn't, I don't think necessarily that somebody invented architecture on the back of looking at the body, but they're just structures that work, structures that have a role, and, and they're present in both. But, and tensegrity is just one, and this brings in the kind of conversation of joints and muscles. If you have a tensegrity model, and for those who don't know listening, it might be like a child's toy where each bar, a piece of string, and some balls are all joined together to make a structure that has a center of mass where if you move any part of that a tiny bit, the whole structure has to morph and change shape. In essence, that is what the human body is doing. Every second of the day through, through the gait cycle, through your skiing motion, just standing still. And it brings joints and muscles in because it invites the idea of tension and compression. So if there's too much compression somewhere, there'll be too much tension somewhere else. And the only time that we can eliminate tension or compression is to have a system that's in balance. So the muscles are the area that become under tension. When we get length in a system, in a muscle system, it must mean that a joint is closing somewhere to create a compressive force. So we could have somebody who— they get pain on the, on the right-hand side of their low back, and that pain, you could look at it and go, well, that is completely compressed, therefore it's potentially a joint structure, or that space is completely open, therefore it's potentially a muscle tension structure.

Yeah.

But you know, the same— you're still going to do the same process for that person, and that's to create space on the compression, or to put tension back into the short muscles and take tension out of the long muscles, to create what I've coined as zero tension, which is where you've got no tension all around the body, means everything is in balance. So zero tension or zero compression, and zero being that kind of point, point of balance. So entering a ski turn, for instance, as you turning left and your hips right into the, into the mountain and your head's upright leaning away from the mountain, you can picture that whole left side of the body up the side of the hip through the left obliques. There's going to be a lot of tension through there and you're also going to be compressing a lot of the right-hand side. Now if you enter into a ski turn and you're already compressed on the right and have got tension on the left due to your natural postural setup due to a disc injury you had 8 years ago, it no longer causes pain, you probably fall into that term quite easily. But the chance of getting out of it and into the opposite is really difficult because you somehow have to now decompress the compressed area and shorten up the tensioned area. That's the kind of thing that affects the system. Look at it big picture, small picture. Generally, if we move one thing or one thing can't move, something else will have to do the work for it. Or something else gets a day off type thing.

Yep, awesome. So, I was going to ask you about, so if we've, I think I mentioned a bit before, if a pronating outside foot, say we're going to start a turn to the right, we use our left foot and allow it to pronate, so our center of mass moves a little bit to the inside of our skis. So if pronation helps move the center of mass inside of the turn, then what function does— do you think supination has, um, in skiing? So after that's— that pronation has happened, yeah, what, what in your head do you see the supination part sort of helping with? And where— and do you have an idea of where you think that would happen in, in the ski turn? In the middle, at the end? Just afterwards. Yeah, okay, um, so it's a good, good topic for talking about, isn't it, without, without visuals?

Without visuals, yeah. Well, first of all is, what if, if we need pronation in the, in the ski cycle, ski turn?

Yep.

Then we must need supination. We just have to need it. Okay. In the sense of the two come as a pair. If we take away pronation, we take away supination. And that goes to say, if somebody is stuck in pronation, then they've also not got access to pronation. Does that make sense? So they also take away— they both remove their pronation and their supination potential. This is half the problem with people, the stuckness into one side of the coin, i.e., pronated or supinated, just eliminates the fact that they can do either. And so that, that's one, one thing is, is the idea of supinating simply creates the opportunity to pronate. So there's one role for it to start with. If we're going to create the idea that pronation is important, then supination must be important to return out and drop back in. Does that make sense?

Yep, absolutely.

The feet have a relationship with your center of mass. So my— if I stand up tall, my right foot is— both feet are on the ground, pelvis stood over the top. If I pronate my left foot— anybody should be able to do this just standing up— just pronate the left foot and you should feel that your pelvis shifts across to the right. And if you can't feel that, just stand and take your pelvis to the right and the left and stop it when it's at the right, and you'll notice that the left foot has pronated. So you should be able to try to add a feeling thing to the no visual thing. Mm-hmm. At the same time, what you should notice is if I take my pelvis to the right, the left foot pronates and my right foot is either supinated, supinating with it, or is just pronating less, because pronating less is almost the same as supinating in relative terms. That's quite complicated. So when I'm skiing, If I'm pronating my right— my left foot to take my pelvis to the right, yep, then it makes sense that I would supinate my— I've got a picture of you turning away right in front of me. Yeah, so I'm going to do a left turn. If I pronate my right foot, yeah, my pelvis to the left, then it makes sense that I would be supinating my left foot to accommodate that movement of the mass over it. Yep, makes sense. So therefore, when I'm in the kind of, um, top of the turn and my hips completely into the hill, that's when I think that I would be looking to have that supinated foot coupled with the outside pronated foot, which is driving me, my mass, my mass inside. So that's what we would call a— what point of the turn do you want to call that? Uh, right, when my hips right in the mountain there.

Like the one in the photo, the photo you're looking at? Yeah. Yep, middle, we'll just say the middle, middle of the arc, middle of the turn.

Right in the middle of the arc, exactly.

Yep, yep.

So I've initiated my pronation, the skis have started to turn, that's transferring my energy onto the inside of my ski. At the same time, I think there's an element of beginning to supinate the left foot while still flexing the knee to put me on the outside edge of my inside ski, which is going to create the kind of parallel arc that enables us to carve the turn. So that's where I think the supination is probably at its most, because that also sets me up, doesn't it, to— as I come out of that turn, I'm going to start applying pressure on the uphill ski toe in order to begin that pronation again, bring my mass back to the center, and then continue that pressure through through the turn.

Yep, yeah, awesome. Cool, yeah, because I've also, after reading your book What the Foot, which for anyone that's listening is a really, really good read, and you can apply to any sport, any kind of interest you're into. But anyway, after reading that, I started playing with supination of my outside foot, so like in that photo that you're looking at in the fall line or middle of the turn after I've pronated, and I'm really low in the turn, at that point I start supinating my outside foot, because as you said, if pronation puts me inside, then supination starts to bring me outside, and if you read your book, also creates a rigid lever out of the foot. Which is something to really push off of, then if I want to be pushing off that ski and moving forward and accelerating, I need that, I need that movement. So yeah, so I started this, this, this last season with playing with the timing of that right at, right at that point. You're looking at the photo in the middle of the turn. I'm thinking about really strongly supinating and trying to get all those muscles, you know, basically what you say, it's almost every muscle is a resupinating muscle. So after you've pronated, you're really already starting to resupinate almost straight away. It's just when you get that maximum point is when you really get that sort of recoil effect that you see some of the top skiers, I think, in my opinion, kind of timing that exactly right. Their feet kind of, I guess, initiate that whole kinetic kind of whip.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The timing is— timing, it— the gate— everything comes down to timing. Muscle sequencing, joint action, optimizing a turn, walking to the bus. Yeah, you know, if your pronation happens a fraction too late or a fraction too early, it's going to throw everything. Yeah, I don't know if people kind of caught on to that. And that for me was where that transmission onto the edge and the, the idea that I move my foot the boot responds and the ski responds. The quicker that is, the better. The longer that takes, the worse, you know, the harder it's going to be to make up, recover the ground. But also that sets us into a pattern where I literally end up doing that every single turn, and so I have to find another way to, to make that ski turn. And that's when the shoulders come in and the over-rotations and the throwing of the hip, or, you know, all the things that we see kind of out and about on the hill. Yeah, but Looking at the picture again, just the, that supination and the idea of being interconnected. As I— that the supination should get that external rotation in the rear foot, which is going to externally rotate your tibia and bring your knee out. And then you just think about the relationship again, just looking at the 99% skiing around on the hill, that knee's inside, what we used to call A-framing.

Yep.

Making that kind of triangle with the, with the lower limbs.

Yep.

Then, you know, you can look at that and go, that's it, that's either not supported with a footbed, or they've got no awareness of how to supinate, or they don't have the structures in place to do that. Yeah, but it's also going to mean that they can't enjoy that curve and get the same experience that you or I would seek to get out of it. Yeah, yours being different to mine, but, but still, we know that skiing is about experience and feeling, and feeling your mass travel down this mountain at high speed on this slippery white stuff. But if, if they're still A-framing, then they're actually already on the journey back out of the turn before they've even enjoyed the turn. And that's not fun. Yeah, no. So if you've got both feet pronating together, it's the old analogy of just crossing your tips. Yeah. And that's not fun. So it is an integral part of the ski turn for sure.

Yeah. It's cool, I've been running some workshops in Sydney. We have this indoor ski slope. that is like a revolving giant treadmill. I don't know, you've probably got them in the UK as well.

I've seen them at the ski show, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I've been running some workshops there where we start out off the slope, bare feet, out of ski boots, just going through general movements of, you know, what pronation is, what supination is, and, you know, find, discover which foot you balance better on and which one has you know, are more of a responsive, wanting to bounce on the lateral arch, which one's more on the inner arch, and see if we notice that in skiing. And watching these people move around and walk, you see exactly the same problems and same movements they have just in getting around and moving on the mat, you know, without the ski boots on, as on the skiing simulator. So it's really cool. For them to realize, and I think people realize that these patterns that we have that can be seen in the FlowMotion model, your gait cycle thing, are just evident everywhere in everything you do.

They are. The way that the joints communicate all the way up the chain has proved to me to be evident in every single activity we do, whatever sport. Also, compensations, the way that we adapt to our problems is also— it's there. And that's why we like to think what we've done is created a map of how the body works on a global scale, and it hasn't let us down yet. So yeah, it's really exciting.

Awesome. So was there one particular moment when you were boot fitting back in Europe where you realized, you know, like, God, the feet are the key. So important? Like, you know, or was it just you saw just so many examples of people coming back where you'd modified their feet, and so you're like, wow, this has got to be something that we can take beyond ski boot fitting?

It was just, it was, it was just every day, um, the gratitude that people would come back with, you know. Um, had my best ski day ever. I think, you know, anyone who's done any boot fitting to— will have experienced that kind of feedback. The thing about— this is nothing against the kind of city-based stores, but the thing about doing it on the mountain was that if by the time they get to the top of the ski lift their feet are hurting, they're skiing down and coming back to the store. you had no choice but to field, there was nowhere to hide, and you were getting calls while you were out skiing. So the client you fitted that morning is back in, they wanted to know if you've got your— you didn't want that, so you had to get pretty good, pretty sharp, really quickly.

Yeah, in Covent Garden it happened to be the guys, the part-time guys who had to work on the weekend that had to deal with your mess up.

I know, yes, but that mess up would be 3 months later, you don't remember the customer.

Yeah, exactly, yeah, so you, yeah, exactly, being on the slope is totally different.

They were in your store every single night and you, by Thursday night you're like, oh my God, just go home.

Yeah.

You know, aside from those, the difficult ones and the challenges, which, you know, they probably came down in hindsight to biomechanical challenges rather than just boot fit challenges. and we would have had that conversation, I'm sure, back in the day. But the majority of people, and this is why people used to kind of come from other valleys to get fitted and wait until they got to resort to get fitted, was because the outcome and the feedback from people was, from nearly the majority of boot fits, was that the little subtle changes, like I said earlier, just made a huge difference. Best day skiing and first day of been comfortable in ski boots ever, and the joy and gratitude. And one of my highest values is freedom. And I think when— if you create freedom, like, you don't feel free skiing around. In fact, it really pisses you off skiing around in uncomfortable boots. And so there's that sense of— it's much higher than that, you know what I mean? It's just the idea of helping somebody, yeah, do what they love well. I think that was kind of the thing that really rocked my boat.

Yeah, yeah, cool. Do you have a strange or really cool story of one particular person that stands out?

Bootfit? No. We saw some stuff, I remember chatting to our last grouping in San Francisco. There was a lady who literally, I was chatting to her and I could see her toes had this kind of involuntary twitching where literally they're almost like piano fingers where she had no idea what they were doing, how they were controlled. I think they'd been sewn back on or something like that, but her fingers would kind of lift up in sequence, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, through the hole. And we were chatting to her and seeing this like almost like a mouse run across the bottom. I was like, what was that? What was that?

The Thai is just going, brrr.

We saw some stuff. There's another guy who had the biggest Like, he had 3 times the length in his big toe as the rest of the toes, and he was a climber, and he used to— wow, he used to fit his big toe— he learned to kind of just scrunch it all the way up to be the same length as his other toes in his climbing boots, and he wanted that doing to his ski boots, and we had to kind of basically rebuild the toe box for him to like grind a hole to put his big toe down into. Yeah, get some material to waterproof it and probably the answer.

God.

But actually, just in talking about these stories, we also— there was a guy with a clubfoot in resort who was one of the reps, and we actually had to just build a boot for him. Took a couple of different boots apart and, you know, new cuff and just boots that had been returned or whatever. We ended up building a boot for him, which was a really fun experience. So again, just to tick the box that this guy who's doing seasons out there could actually enjoy his skiing.

Yeah. So, would you, if you could build your own boot, or if you could talk to Lang or Tecnica or whatever to build your own perfect boot, would there be some things you would change? Like, do you see currently ski boots do the job well enough? Do you think there's some things that they could improve on?

I don't know, we used to, especially with Hamish, the Windlass guy, we kind of met actually over him mentioning at a wedding to somebody that he figured that ski boots needed to have a different flex point. And I turned around and said it would probably have to be around the big toe, and he kind of nearly fell over thinking nobody in their right mind would normally say that, but yeah, agreeing with him.

Yeah.

And just somewhere there's probably not enough movement around the big toe to, to help get more flex into the ski at that point around the ski's center of mass. Maybe. For me, I, I, I'm more interested in shoes. Ski boots do the job for me. I'm comfortable, they get uphill. Um, so I don't know if I would, if I would modify the ski boot, certainly without thinking.

So then shoes, yeah. Tell us what you think about shoes.

That's my big secret. I don't want to do shoes, but if you— the shoe has to have a center of mass that matches the center of mass of the foot. If you were to measure them, if the mass of the shoe sits medial to the mass of the foot, it's going to drive a pronation into your foot. Likewise, if it's too lateral, it will drive a supination. Into your foot or some kind of awkwardness. There's things like toes being dorsiflexed in shoes, that doesn't really work for the whole cycle. The toes having a varus forefoot, that doesn't work for the gait cycle. All of this stuff drives us into pronation. Having a really flat sole doesn't really work. Then the question is, do shoes really work and is there a way forward? I think my FlowMotion model is probably a way that we could do that, which I plan to sit down with a designer and see what we come up with. I'll keep those little gems to myself, if that's alright.

Yes, excellent. That's cool. Are there any movements you're playing with in your skiing? Because I know after chatting with you, just about an inability to— or just a difficulty in shifting my pelvis in a certain direction, I found what was stopping me was just being too rigid in my spine. And so once I changed that, and I mean, it wasn't a heap of movement, but just allowing that unlocked more lateral movement in my pelvis. And actually, in video made it look like I moved less overall. Like, I guess the movement had been spread out so much that there wasn't so much of an obvious move in, say, one part of the body. It looked more even and flowing. So is there anything you're playing with in skiing.

I have what you said. Uh, what, what we find in the, in the model, there are the 6 phases of movement. They are the swing phase, strike phase, suspension phase, transition phase, shift phase, and propulsion phase. Um, and while you and I have kind of chatted about this, um, a fair amount, uh, the majority of this limits— seems to limit down to the phases where the heel and toe are on the ground, so when we're actually in the tripod. So suspension and transition. The rule of suspension is that the tripod, which is the first toe, first metatarsal, fifth metatarsal, heel, are all in contact with the ground. And the rule of suspension is that the tripod is in contact with the ground or base of the boot and is pronating. And that, that's, that's when— that's the one chance that our foot has to pronate in the cycle and is same in skiing, and is therefore a really important phase of our movement. And transition is the other one, which is— and the rule of that is that the tripod is on the ground and the foot is supinating, which as we've already discussed is equally super important. So the final one is where the heel and gait is actually lifting up, but this happens while the foot is pronating, is where we shift our pelvis laterally, which is what you were saying. And I was just flashing back to— I had a session the other day with Warren Smith's son, Warren Smith from the Academy of Verbier, and we— he was— his posture required this shift phase thing. So once we kind of just got him gently moving into it, the first thing that the pair of them shared with each other was it's just like skiing, putting your hip into the hill. People who struggle to get their hip into the right, you have a wander over to a wall, put your right foot forward in front of the other, maybe have a wide stance and just gently start introducing that right hip into the wall. And you'll notice how your body kind of responds. You tend to lean away with your skull as your pelvis is moving into the wall. And you start to find things that stretch and move that you weren't aware of. This brings awareness to the brain and you might— and you'll start to find it carry over. So those 3 areas for me are always what I'm I'm keen on making sure are in play when I'm skiing. And the other interesting part for me, just because this is the interesting part for me, is when I am skiing and if I can't achieve something in my movement, I want to stop and go, why can't I do that today? What part of my body is holding me back? And that's where I'm always going to go. Is it the foot? Why can't I get into my hip flexor or my adductor on the left? Or why can't I get my hip over? What's going on, and that goes in for life with me. So we have a little check-in. We're fond of our kind of internal analysis, really, just checking in that we've got balance in our movement, and if not, why, and set about correcting it. But on the big picture, I like the idea of being able to ski, you know, a little pressure of the toe here and a little movement of my foot and my whole body follows allows freedom in the system. It makes it effortless and efficient as I cruise, cruise around the mountain. And I'm able to transfer those skills into different types of skiing, from carving to bumps to— yeah, you know, whatever.

Yeah, cool.

I like to feel the same on both sides, otherwise it starts to freak me out a little bit.

Yeah, yeah. Do you feel, do you feel you know almost exactly how to get your body kind of into that really centered position as possible? Like, do you feel you've almost got that, like, the holy grail of alignment?

I can have it.

Yes?

I know my patterns and I know my history and my, you know, Remember, the duck feet were a kind of response to 13 ankle inversion sprains, a broken jaw, a dislocated shoulder from a ski injury, and they interestingly all fall into the same pattern. So it's as if one— it's like I couldn't have broken another side of my jaw, or I couldn't have dislocated the other shoulder because I have to my body's reacting in a way to the original inversion sprains.

Yeah.

Which were, you know, a complete— they really screwed my body up. So there is a rewind button in the body where we'll just start defaulting to old things if things aren't right. So if you're tired, or like when I had kids and we were up nearly all night every night, my body started reverting back to the default stress patterns. And yeah, and I think do that. And so again, awareness is to be aware of that when stuff goes wrong, it's not that you have a problem, it's just that something has happened in your body that is— and the problem is a signal letting you know. That happens if I'm playing sport, tennis, skiing, football, whatever it is. When those things show up, it's just a matter of going, "Aha, I think something's not right," and checking in rather than running off to get a treatment.

Yeah, it's quite cool.

Full circle awareness is a big thing, right?

Yeah. Yep, absolutely. Yeah, and so you can just using your own kind of awareness and knowledge and obviously your sort of—

Map.

Yeah, your map, you can kind of fix yourself, can't you?

We try. Try. I just reacted to the word fix actually.

Sorry, yes, that was the wrong word.

Yeah, a lot of people want to be fixed or, you know, and it's just a language thing. I'd just like to change the idea of that. You go to a therapist, the idea is that the therapist shines a light on your problem and you get set about looking after yourself and becoming aware of it and doing the right things not to, not to do it again and again.

Where—

and you're asking a question where I'm in the 1% here. The majority of people are going to go running looking for someone, but we generally try to help people understand that we're not there to fix them, we're there to help them facilitate a way out, but they're actually going to do the work for themselves. And a lot of that, the deeper you go into that process, the more it is about creating an environment for people to heal themselves or creating an environment for them to do whatever they do better in order to access higher states of performance. Because it's just information that they are lacking. And that's, I think, as therapists, that's what we do, or we should set about embarking on ourselves to be the provider of, rather than offering a fix. So when it comes to, do I fix myself? I don't be fixed given— because I also had like half of— over half of a medial meniscus removed a long time ago, which is— and it's just such an anchor to my problems. So aside from getting that all glued back in, and then I don't know if a fix is actually possible. So I set up optimizing myself given the current state of awareness in my system. Yeah, it's not like hippie, don't I?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's good, that's good.

On a sending information out level, anybody who's listening who's used to, you know, you've got a shoulder problem and you're running off to get it treated, just recognize that it's probably not the shoulder that needs treating. It's your system that needs treating, that needs taking care of, and things need looking at in a different way in order to get you out of that space. Very good.

Well, I'm really looking forward to you coming out to Australia in October, and it's the first time you guys are coming out to Australia, isn't it? Yeah. Have you got a full course yet, or are there spots?

There's still spots. I don't know what the quota is at the moment, but it's doing very well.

Excellent.

It's doing very well. So, yeah, it will be a good course. Also, it's the immersion where we're doing the 6 days to present the full map, which we've not done before. We're doing it in London the first time in September, so you guys will be the second run for that.

Oh, good. So there will be someone else before us.

Yeah, lots of support material and the opportunity for when we leave for you to literally set yourself free without any of the— without any missing parts, which has sadly been a part of the process that people have had to— Wow, that's awesome. —up until now. Yeah, so something to be excited about. Yeah.

A lot of brain explosion probably stuff and overload and like lots of intense thinking. Lots of coffee. Yeah, lots of coffee. Excellent. So, it's going to be 3 days break, 3 days, is that right? Yeah. Yep. Excellent. That's cool.

We need that break in the middle.

And if people would like to find out about this course, because I'm going and I think it's going to be— I found out about— I should tell you this— when, who was it, I started listening to the Liberated Body Podcast last year, and I remember the lady Brooke Thomas interviewed David Weinstock from Neurokinetic Therapy, and I thought that was a pretty interesting one, and at the end he said, I'm playing, oh, I'm I started playing with pronation a little bit more because of this guy Gary Ward. And it was at that time I was kind of obsessed with the fact that, you know, pronation was actually not a bad thing. And then to hear that someone else was actually talking about this really kind of like sparked my interest. And then so I looked you up and found your videos and your site and then just, I guess, have followed and bought the book and And yeah, so to let you know, that's how I found out about you was Pronation. So you're the pronation man in my mind. Well, the pronation is okay, man. I'm proud of that.

I mean, there's a lot of foot stuff out there. There's generally good stuff, but most of it comes back to the classic short foot component of trying to reintroduce a supinating foot to minimize and take away pronation where the value actually is. That the body is set up to control and decelerate pronation. And then when you actually provide pronation to the system, it creates an interesting kind of lighting up of the whole chain. So everything from our hamstrings and our glutes and our low back, in a strange way, they're set up to minimize the pronation as well. So when all that stuff disappears and we start going, well, you've got pronated feet, let's supinate them, we're not switching the lights on in the brain to reactivate this stuff. So we end up on a kind of gravy train of no outcome. And that's what I feel. And many of the practitioners who come on my course will openly say, "I'm sick of people coming back with the same problem." Yeah. And so we need to look at things differently. We need to think differently, approach differently. And thankfully, that's what I've always done. And And when you study pronation for what pronation is, it's mind-blowing. Yeah, it's not just pronation. And the idea, right, nobody can really pronate, nobody can really supinate. And then there are the naysayers who will turn around and say, you know, you used to talk about a good healthy pronation and that's, you know, BS. But the truth is, I think there is an optimal space of pronation that you can visualize and see in the structure. And if we don't have that, we see problems. So I'm going to stick to my guns on that one.

Yeah, excellent. Thank you, Mr. Pronation. Sorry? That says, "Thank you, Mr. Pronation." You're welcome.

In terms of finding out where to go for the course, the very one simple thing to do is, if you are interested, is to email chris@anatomyinmotion.co.uk and you'll be sent a brochure and open up an inquiry about— into more details about the course. Our website is not providing that at the moment and is in a rebuild stage. So that's the quickest and smoothest way to go about this.

Or like Anatomy in Motion on Facebook. Like the Anatomy in Motion. Is that working? Are you— Yeah.

Facebook.com/anatomyinmotion. Or my page, which is forward garyallenward.com. There's certainly good stuff on there.

The book that I mentioned?

Whatthefoot.co.uk.

Yep, that's good. I can recommend that. Oh, and I should say, because I have people listening all over the world to this, so the courses are run— you've got some in America coming up as well?

We're in New York next week. Okay. Then we're in Bristol, UK, and London, and Toronto then in Canada, and then you in Melbourne, and then Dublin, Ireland before next year's schedule kicks off, which we don't know what or where just yet. Excellent.

Great. Well, anything you want to close out with to say about skiing and the body or— Anything else?

I think we might have covered it. Yeah, I think so.

But yeah, thanks very much for your time. It's been lots of fun chatting and—

It's nice to have a different spin on it actually, Tom, to relate it into something I'm interested in, skiing sports-wise. Yeah, cool.

Yeah, good, good. Well, I know you've definitely got me, because now whenever I watch people skating, I'm trying to think what would they look like when they're walking and what would they be missing, and so it's really helped.

It would be really good to watch both, look at both, watch them walk on a Coach's Eye app, slow it down, ski them, film it, slow it down, I bet you can see the same stuff.

Yeah, exactly. So, no, I've really, really loved that. Wicked. Awesome, alright, well thanks very much, Gary, and look forward to Looking forward to seeing you in October. You're welcome, mate. I can't wait.

Look forward to it. Cheers. Take care, buddy.

This episode is sponsored by Carv, the digital ski coach. And one of the updates I've really enjoyed this season is the addition of separate SkiIQs for moguls and short turns. In the past, Carv scoring was mainly built around carving metrics, which meant everything was viewed through that lens. But Carv have gone deep on that research and completely separated what makes a great short turn or mogul turn different from a carved turn. To give you an idea of how accurate it's become, the person at the top of the Carv leaderboard right now isn't a carving specialist, it's Olympic mogul skier Matt Graham. So the best SkiIQ in the world at the moment is coming from someone who lives and breathes bumps, and to be honest, my own highest SkiIQ is also in the moguls, which makes sense because that's my favorite type of skiing. What's really exciting this year is the addition of turn tempo, so basically your turns per minute. it's such a simple external output that's incredibly fun to play with. So good skiing isn't just about edge similarity or parallel skis, it's about how you interact with the terrain and whether you can change your tempo on demand. So seeing numbers like my quickest tempo of 117 turns per minute in the bumps gives you something concrete to compare, refine, and work toward. I've been working with Carv since 2020, and every year I'm genuinely impressed with how much the product evolves. They keep expanding what you can measure, and they're covering more and more of the turn types that skiers actually use all over the mountain. So if you're interested in tracking not just your carving but every turn you make on the snow, check out Carv. And a big thanks to the team for supporting this episode.