Harald Harb Interview

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.

Hello, ski-obsessed listeners out there! This is Tom Gellie from the Global Skiing Podcast. I welcome you back to another episode. Uh, this week I had a really interesting conversation with Harold Harb. And, uh, really interesting because we got into some topics that are very, very interesting to me and, uh, gave me a lot of insight and kind of, I guess, opened my mind to some reasons as to why boots setup was probably hindering some of the areas of my own skiing. Harold was really gracious with his time, and I really appreciate him chatting with me for almost over an hour and a half. It's a long episode, so you might need to pause and break in between and listen in two goes. But I think you'll really enjoy it, and I got kind of selfish and definitely asked some questions very much related to me and that I wanted to find out. But I think hopefully that if I'm really interested, then you guys will all be interested too. We get into topics such as cuff alignment, World Cup ski races and their ill-fitting boot problems, and Harold sort of being aware of, you know, what it looks like, how to pick out when it is a boot setup equipment problem versus an actual technical problem coming from the person's skiing technique. Is a wealth of knowledge. He's been around for a long time, really experienced, lovely guy. And yeah, I hope you guys really enjoy this episode. I'd encourage you to go grab your ski boots and just maybe try a couple of things we talk about, just to see yourself what's going on. Because once you start realizing this, I'd say you'll want to go out and get your boots and footbeds and everything checked so that hopefully you can get the most out of your skiing. Anyway, without further ado, this is the interview with Harold Harp.

There's domain down there.

Okay, okay.

Excellent.

Well, look, I'm going to start recording and just get into the chat. I sent you an email with some of the questions. Were there any things I guess you wanted to also bring up or chat about you think would be interesting for people to hear or would get into some of the good stuff with the questions I've got?

I'm really like open to what you want to get out of it. I mean, I don't want to necessarily have to unless you want that kind of stuff, background and my own experience. As a skier. I know you had some questions on there and how I evolved and how I got to where I am, which is very nice and all. But I don't know if that's your audience or who you're going to present this to is that interested in that. But I mean, obviously there would be some pertinent things that would be kind of substantial to back up what I do. But other than that, I mean, I could go on forever is what I'm saying, and I don't want to take up your time.

Well, I've got time right now, so we'll just see where it goes.

And can you cut and edit? Can you do that?

Yep, I can.

Oh, good. Well, then I can ramble a little bit, right?

Exactly, exactly. If you go too far off, we can just cut.

Because I've done a lot of this kind of stuff. As you know, we produce our own videos and we do go to the studio and we do all that stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, we can do some stuff afterwards. So, yeah, I guess the first one, it's good to always start, and I don't know too much about your background, but can you tell me like how did you get into the skiing game? Where did it begin with you?

Well, it's kind of— I inherited some of it. My father— I was born in Austria. My father's Austrian, my mother's Austrian. Were from near Innsbruck, a town called Schwaz. And he was a mountaineer, a climber, a pioneer climber, climbed with Hermann Buhl. And I don't know, you sort of have to be into climbing to know who Hermann Buhl is, but he was the first climber who climbed solo up an 8,000-meter mountain without oxygen on Nanga Parbat, which is in the '50s. And that was a quite a feat. So my dad was involved at that level in Austria, and he was also one of the first certified Austrian ski instructors. And before Austria had a national certification, he was Tyrolean certified. So there's a history of skiing, obviously, there, and mountaineering, and being in the mountains. So that's where it all came from. But I started skiing at 3 years old with my family. We skied like whenever we could in the winter. We just never skipped a day if we could.

Did you race?

Oh yeah, I was on a number of provincial teams in Canada, Alberta and Quebec, and then on the national team for 2 years.

Okay.

And raced World Cup and also Europa Cup and NorAms, that kind of thing.

Awesome. Do you remember having like a kind of a favorite coach or coach you would say really helped you improve or really impressed upon you some fundamentals?

No.

No.

That's good. No, it's really too bad. I mean, I had a lot of great coaches as far as they're friends and they're great guys and encouraging. Probably if I was going to pick a coach, It would have to be based on how encouraging he was and supportive he was, and that encouraged me to keep working and evolve my skiing. It was kind of more or less in those days, you know, I grew up racing in the late '60s and early '70s, and it was more or less, "Well, that was a good run," or "Do that again," or "Don't do that." There was very little technical knowledge by the coaches. And they said maybe stay on the ground or do kind of real broad-based widespread kind of advice. And you try to figure out what that meant and apply it. But it really wasn't directly a movement, nothing to do with movement. And there's an interesting side story that goes with that. I've been in touch with a number of my teammates over the years, and we went to a 50th anniversary that the Canadian ski team had, a reunion. And one of my closest rivals said to me, "I always thought you were like the best technical skier of all the skiers that we had," which was surprising to me because I never got that sense from the coaches or anybody else. But I guess it was something that the racers some of my teammates thought.

And they could see in your skiing.

Yeah, which is kind of interesting, you know, after 30-some-odd years of not seeing the guys.

Yeah, yeah, that's what they had to say. So did it really instill within you like more of an ability or a drive to find out within yourself what you needed to do rather than relying on other people? You had to figure it out, you had to try something and reflect on it.

Yes, absolutely right. What I evolved in my own methodology and my way is I remember very early on, even before I started racing, I hated the feeling— and this is nothing that I developed, it was built in— the feeling that I hated the back of the ski to move away from me. I just, I could not reconcile, even if it was really icy, I just had this feeling when I could sense it right away when the edge wasn't holding, the back of the ski would go away. And I think through that sensation, my reaction was to find a way to put the body in place so that it would stop doing that.

Yeah.

So that's just kind of the tip of the iceberg of how some people might evolve their own technique rather than depending on a coach.

Yes.

They sense a certain thing and then they work their bodies into a place where that thing goes away and they're looking for the thing that they feel better with.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's a very simplistic way of looking at it, but I think that for kids that's maybe very powerful.

Definitely, yeah, I love that, I love that. I can totally relate to it because I mean, I actually came from a telemark skiing background first. And that sensation you're talking about of the tail slipping, yeah, is so much more evident on telemark skis if you don't stand in the right place, make the right movements. And you're already at a disadvantage with the tele position because your hips are rotated more into the turn, so you have to actively really work to find that grip along the whole ski. And so there weren't many people— I mean, I don't know if you see it, a lot of telemarkers out there, unless they're a race World Cup racer, are just skidding all over the place with no idea of really using the ski and carving the ski. So yeah, I can really relate to that sense.

One of our coaches, one of our PMTS coaches who's certified through 3 levels, is a PSIA, US Professional Skier, a TELI examiner. And he was just here for a week with the national demonstration team, and I was on the hill with them for a couple of days, and I was watching them. And he was carving a teleski, whereas I was watching the rest of the guys, and they were slipping a teleski. And the thing about— he learned alpine skiing through PMTS, evolved it. And he's one of our best coaches. He now applied PMTS to teleskiing. As you know, when you pull your foot back in teleskiing and your knee goes forward, the conflict is the hip wants to come around with that movement.

Exactly.

It's hard to hold a countered hip, which gives you the edge and gives you the ability to create higher angles because with counteracting you can let your hip drop inside. Exactly. Without it you can't. You end up on your inside foot and you're supporting your weight on your inside foot.

Yeah.

So I've coached him in his tele skiing just through PMTS and he's evolved it. But one of the biggest things that helped him is we kept pushing him to do the canting or the alignment with his tele boots because he was under-edged. His knees were in and so no matter what he did technically he couldn't achieve what he was trying to do until we got his boot. And with teleboots, you can't put the plates and shave them. So we ended up having to do the canting under the bindings. And that's a long process because you go a couple of degrees here, a couple of degrees there, and you go back and forth. So yeah, it evolved to the point now where he is, to me, when I watch him from a technical standpoint, skiing down the hill, he's the finest of the group that I saw there.

Who is that?

His name is Walter Edberg and he works out of Alpine Meadows in California.

Cool.

And he comes to at least 8 of our camps. He coaches at least 8 camps for us. Travels back here in Austria also.

Now, I should say, I just realized, right now it's probably a good adjunct to say what PMTS is, your training system, for those people, because you sort of said he's been doing PMTS. So, for those people that don't know, Can you give us an outline of that?

Yeah, it is PMTS, or the letters for the words that describes the system, and it's called Primary Movements Teaching System. And the reason it evolved out of that name was because primary is the first in the order of. And so we saw right from the beginning, and I was always schooled by my father about skiing is about your feet. And you do your skiing with your feet and your ankles, and the rest of your body is supportive. And so we— our system is based on the kinetic chain and, and the alignment that goes with the base of the kinetic chain, which is right at the bottom, starting at the bottom of your feet, your ankles, and then going higher up the body. Because when you move and can adjust your skiing from the ankle and the foot, then you don't have to make such big movements higher up to make adjustments. If those parts are locked out of your movement capabilities, then you end up making bigger movements which put you further out of balance and you have to make bigger adjustments. And that's the basis for our teaching system. And the kinetic chain is very important in how to use co-contraction of the muscles so that you're creating balance at the joint, at each joint specifically, especially at the base. So the ankles, the muscles around the ankle joint and the foot which move it in or out, which is inversion or eversion.

Yeah.

So that's when you start to get involved with the system. We require our instructors to go through training of not only the anatomy and the muscles, but also the biomechanics about how they function. Excellent. So it's a very complete system from a training standpoint. It's more involved than any of the national systems that I've been involved with. And, you know, I've been involved with two systems at the highest level. One is the USSA Coaches Association. I was a master coach, which is the highest level, and also in PSIA, which is the demo team, and of course as an examiner and trainer for them. So, you know, having traveled and worked with the demo team and been to Interski and so on. I know a lot of the international skiers from the other teams and know a little bit about, maybe not everything, but try to keep up with everything that they're doing.

So how long did it take you to develop your— like, so talking about the evolution of your system, it's obviously been over a long period of time. You've kind of, yeah, like worked on writing things down, getting like a a process of delivering that and training people, and how long has that been going on for?

Well, I wrote— when I came out of racing, I was already using some of the methods that I evolved into the teaching system, and the teaching system is really based in ski racing movements, and in my view, The top ski racers have the most refined movements, the most efficient movements, but they do it at such a high level with such high forces and strength and power that it's hard to relate to for, for a low-level skier or beginner skier or intermediate skier. So basically what I did was reverse engineer what they do and step by step bring it back to the beginner skier in a way that they can access the world-class movement. Of the top skiers in the world. Now when I do the same for national teaching systems, regardless of country, it doesn't really matter. You know, in my view, the biomechanics of all the countries that teach skiing are exactly the same. If you start with a wedge and start steering the ski from a wedge turn and go to a wedge Christie and then try to create a parallel turn out of that, You can put little different names and labels on it, and you can be from Austria, or you can be from Japan, or you can be from the US. It's all the same biomechanics for the body to deal with, and that's what these countries don't understand. They don't understand that they're teaching the same thing because the biomechanics of it haven't changed, even if you've changed the names of the way you approach these different things. Our system is the only system in the world that is currently operational that is completely different from that. Ours is a direct parallel system that uses different biomechanics, different body parts, different movements from the beginning. So it's almost diametrically opposed from all the natural systems that are out there.

Mm-hmm, cool. So now as part of that training, do people Do people do your boot fitting course as well? Is that an option or is that a, that's a, like, that's part of it?

Well, there's a tale or a story that goes along with that. When we started, when I started with my own business and started camps, the first thing that we noticed was people were showing up with equipment that was not worthwhile teaching them on.

Yeah, yeah.

'Cause they were so restrictive that it was just such a horrible chore to teach them anything because they weren't balanced. They couldn't balance in the equipment they had and their alignment was so out of sorts that we couldn't really help them. It was all adaptive, adaptive skiing or adaptive movements. So we got into the ski shop and alignment business, which I had done prior to starting my camps. I'd done it with racers and I've done it in ski schools and I've done it in Aspen and in Telluride at some of our major resorts. So I'd had a lot of experience with alignment and footbeds and getting people set up correctly and put them in the right boots as well. So when we started our camps, we didn't want a ski shop. We wanted to teach people how to ski, but we found out very quickly that this was not going to work because every time you sent a skier out to get a pair of boots that was better than the ones they had, the ski shop people would convince them that was not what they needed and they'd give them something else. So we were frustrated. We've got to get the boots that work and we've got to sell them to our customers.

Yeah.

So then—

Control all the steps and then you know what you're going to get.

There is no system that anyone has in the world that does the complete thing from the beginning to the end as we do it. Yeah, we, we take people and we put them in boots, we put them in footbeds, we put them in the right boots, the ones that fit. And we don't do the size up fit so that you don't ever come back with pain and have— we have to fix it. We, we take the boot that is suited for your foot and then we stretch the parts that are touching, and then you've got the great fit that you need to really perform without pain, and you have comfort, but you have snug, a snug supportive ski boot. And then we do the complete alignment system that goes with it. And when people come to camp and do that at the beginning of the week, like we usually do pre-camp days, we call them, where people come in on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday camp start. They get to choose a boot, we do the alignment, and then during the week we ski with them for 5 days, and we get to see them for 5 days, and All of our coaches are trained in the alignment system. So on snow, we validate everything that's going on, and the coaches, we have a round table and we say, how's your group doing every day? What do you see that may be a boot problem? Do we need to do some change in the alignment? And we watch their video. Each coach has input on watching the video. And so by the end of the week, not only is the skier learning movements that they can use for the rest of their life. And every time they go out, they're using movements that improve their skiing while they're skiing. So it's not a degenerative process, it's an encouraging, evolving process in the right direction. But they've got the boots at work, so everything is supportive of what they're trying to do with their movements, and they're in balance, they're in the right place on the ski.

Yeah, that's, that's fascinating. I think I said in the email after Riley came back from your course, we just Skyped each other just to catch up, and you know, I was obviously chewing his ear off trying to find out as much as I could. And he just— because I myself have gotten into boot fitting and playing with stuff because I found that was giving me the best results, because I'm like, no, I feel it here, I need to change that, and experiment, do something, oh, it's worse, do something, oh, that's better, that's what I need to do. Anyway, I'm standing in my shells and I think if the listeners are here, they should pause and if they got ski boots, they should probably go grab their ski boots right now, pull out the liner, right? You agree? Yes.

Yep.

So, they can all do it and they can put their ski boots on a flat surface, no liner, standing on the— we'll just start with the boot board. And so, I stood in there and he was looking at me in my, you know, ski width stance. Stance and my shins, my lower leg was coming up out of the cuff and I could literally fit down the fibular side or the outside edge of my leg, just the end of my index finger between my calf, the outside of my calf and the shell. And I could slide all the way down to my knuckles on the other side, on the inside part of the cuff.

On the medial side, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And the left boot had a lot more room on the medial side, the inside, compared to the right. And my cuffs were pretty much maxed out, tipped out. And even my right boot has some sole canting of 3 degrees to tip the whole boot out. Still wasn't enough. So it was like a revelation to me of, like, because I eyeballed it and I kind of like, ah, looks, you know, I do look a little bit closer to the lateral, the outside edge. But it was like, when I actually put my hand down there, I'm like going, wow, on this inner side, I've got like 5 times the distance of my leg to travel before the boot gets contacted, and then therefore the ski gets pressed on the edge.

Yes.

And, um, and so yeah, I just realized I need to be way more cuff-aligned and And so my question is, how do you, if your legs are like that, and say my boots are, how do I modify my boots to do that? Like, can you go beyond the current manufacturer kind of abilities?

Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, let me say this. I can only see you from about just a little bit below the blue line on your jersey, right? And I can also already tell, I'm just going to guess, you're probably about 6'1" tall?

Yeah, I have a longer torso than my lower body, which is another question I'm going to ask you, but I'm about 5'11", just under 6 foot.

Okay, so close, 6', 6'1"?

Yeah, exactly.

And I'm guessing you have some tibial varum, which means your tibias have curves in them.

Correct.

Like this. And just because of the way you're the way your shoulders are built and your neck and your posture is very straight. So I'm guessing, but I can— this is very— we've done over 10,000 measurements.

Yeah.

Of individual people with over 40 different individual pieces that we measure in the foot and ankle and knee and so on up. So we have a lot of experience in seeing human body and anatomy. And so already because of what you said about your cuffs and where your legs were in them, I can see why you see— you notice that very, very obviously. And the boots, some— it depends on what company and it depends on how far up in their line you go. The further up, the more boots have more canting adjustment, offset type screws, cams, or Some have the cams that you pull out like Fisher, and you have to turn them around, or you can put different colors in. Others have just a screw that is a concentric screw that moves the whole cuff around. Head has a very good system that way.

Yep.

Some only, like Lang, only has the lateral side that is adjustable.

Yep.

So we've gone into the retrofitting business. We actually have different ones made to fit into different boots where they don't provide, the company doesn't provide them. And Dalbello has been very good to us. They provided us with a lot of the rivet type screw rivets that go in there for the cam adjustment.

That's what I've got and I'm maxed out.

Yes. So how do you put it on? We use the head screws and we use the Dalbello screws. Now When you cannot go further than what those screws can do for you, the concentric screws that are with the boot cuffs, you can drill a bigger hole. And then if it's on the medial side, well, we're going to get technical here, but you can drill it lower because when you tip your ski to the big toe side to make a turn on the outside, it doesn't matter if that slot is a little bigger. If you drill it lower and groove it out, it's going to go down and that's what you want if you want it to move away. If you want it to move towards boards, you've got a little bit of a different issue. You, you can move— you can drill the hole higher, move the concentric screw all the way so it goes— the cuff goes up towards your leg, and then put a rivet the inside. Move it out of the cuff.

Yep. So say the right, right boot, the inside ankle, you're going to move it up to get the cuff to tip out to follow if you have, say, tibias or shins that curve outwards.

Dart outward, yes.

That's what I was describing, yeah.

And then you can put a rivet in it to fix it, and that's very easy to do.

Okay.

And it also stiffens the boot, makes it more solid.

Yeah.

So these are some areas that are very sort of new to people because even some of the major boot manufacturers, and I won't name any, but They do a one fit system fits all. You know, when you go to their race room, they have one way of doing it. And if you happen to have the legs that fit into that one way of doing it, you're okay. But if you don't, you are in real serious trouble. Just one example, this year already, Maria Brim, who is a World Cup winner, changed boot companies and they gave her the one fit, one size fits all thing, and she had a horrible first race, and now she broke her leg within a very short period of time. I'm not going to blame it on the boot company, but I can say there's something suspicious about that when she's raced for numerous years without any issues whatsoever. So I know personally at the World Cup level, even the boot techs at the World Cup level have not figured this out. Mm-hmm.

They expect your anatomy to kind of adapt inside this boot, which it has to do, right? It's kind of more adaptable than a plastic boot, whereas you really need to make the plastic boot fit where you stack up the best, right? That's right. And then from there, everything's going to come from a centered position.

And I can cite numerous examples of World Cup skiers who've been held back and had years of frustration due to their boot setup. Whether some of them evolved to figuring it out, it took a while, and others never got it figured out and they had to retire with some kind of disappointment. And it's still going on now. I watched the World Cup right the first race and already started to see some of these things. And I've had some direct contact with the racers or their parents, World Cup winners, had made significant changes just over, like what we're doing, over the internet while they were in Europe.

I can imagine, I can imagine. So, did you get to, did you have a quick look at that video link I sent you?

I wasn't able to see it. I haven't been able to see it and I rebooted my computer and I haven't gotten back to it. I would really like to.

I would just, I mean, I can see it, but on my left, the start of my left foot turns, and through the end you can just see I have to work my knee so much harder, and the tail will wash, I get sort of a bit of a down stem as a result, and you know, I feel I'm pretty in tune with my body because that's part of what I do as a business now, is out-of-ski-boot body alignment stuff. Stuff. And you know, I can— it's funny, if I have my boots undone, I ski better.

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.

So let me, let me ask you a couple of questions about this. Okay, so this is— it might be interesting for skiers also. Also, because they may not have direct contact with me, but they can ask themselves these questions.

Perfect.

So is your, is your feeling at the top of the return when you set it up to be on angle, like say above the fall line, setting up the angles, do you feel there that ski is gripping or, or too grippy and it wants to go straight, or do you feel immediately that ski wants to flatten out and skid away from you?

More the latter. I, okay, yeah, and I can see it, and I've all, like, I work on it with trying to just make a tipping, even everting my foot, trying to get it out there, but it doesn't, especially as I start to pick up speed in the shorter turn. It, it doesn't. The top, the very top of the turn is, is, is like nothing's going on.

So what's happening is basically you've got like the, the cooking spoon in the big pot. So if you have a circle like this, I don't know if you can see my hand like that, and you put a pencil or a pen in it, what's happening is your leg is doing this a long way before anything happens at the bottom. So if this is the bottom of the ski and here's your ski boot, you're getting a lot of this without getting any of that.

Yeah, the leg moves, the ski doesn't. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I just couldn't figure out, like, I was like, I've cuff aligned and everything. And now when I— because like that test of standing in your ski boots, my shin just has so much space on that inner side that I can see now this cup, pen in a cup analogy. It's just the pen is moving before it hits the edge of the cup.

And the way to do that is it's a combination— it will be a combination of what's happening at the base, which is the angle down here. And, uh, you know, a wedge, a wedge in this direction may be part of the solution more than what you have. So hot. So in other words, you fill in this space. So what it does when you stand on it, it actually is doing this to the ski like this. And also taking the cuff and modifying it so it comes closer. And, you know, with Riley, we have evolved his boot setup. He was already a pretty fantastic skier, as you know.

Yeah.

And we're just— he's evolving and we're helping him evolve it. Because he's very sensitive about the way he feels on skis and boots, so I can just talk to him over the internet or text him and he can experiment it.

Yeah, he can walk on it and give you feedback.

Last couple of years, you know, we've been doing that and it's great.

Yeah, that's awesome.

He's a special kind of guy because he's very open and he wants to experiment and he's been through the bad scenes. He's been through the bad footbeds. People have made him footbeds that didn't work and he's been through the bad alignment and he may, you know, even have tweaked parts of his body the wrong way, you know, with injuries, slight injuries. Due to bad equipment setup. Suggestions of equipment, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's more serious with a skier like him because he generates 3 to 4 times his body weight on a ski and in his body when he makes a curve at the angles that he creates. So you're talking about a major amount of force going through the body and if it's misaligned, you've got meniscus and you've got tender tissue in there that can be torn or disrupted.

Absolutely.

And then we're not even talking about our lower backs yet.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's a real serious issue.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So misalignment can be damaging long-term or even short-term. Short-term, if you're misaligned and you're going over rough terrain, that impact in your lower spine, it all goes up to your lower your back.

Absolutely.

And it all ends up there, and it travels up your body, those forces do, if you're misaligned. And your body then, with muscular activity, tries to resist it and protect itself. But what you're doing then is you're being adaptive and you're tightening up and you're not getting the full benefit of the skiing experience.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So it seems it was, it was interesting while he was telling me about the whole, like, the whole boot fitting process is is very detailed, isn't it? You're measuring everything, calcaneal angles, foot rotation, abduction, adduction, and tibial angles, femur angles, length of everything, and I love it. I think that's— I mean, like, why wouldn't you? If you're going to lock someone in position, you need to lock them in the best position because it comes back to your, you know, like damaging the body question again. Like, I know how very small differences in timings of, of like getting the hip to flex, you know, a bit earlier so the knee doesn't have to flex as much, and, or the ankle. So, and those sorts of things can take knee pain either, you know, gone in a second, or knee pain back in a second.

Yes, absolutely. Even counteracting with your hip and so that the femur rotates slightly outward instead of inward to create angles can make— because what you're doing then is you're either twisting the femur over the tibia or you're rotating the other way. So you're taking the stress out of all the mechanism that's holding the knee in place. The knee is not supposed to do this. It's not built to do this kind of twisting action. And in skiing, if you ski incorrectly, you're putting a lot of twisting force into your turn if you're turning or making a ski turn incorrectly.

Yeah, absolutely.

And people don't realize it because maybe they're young enough or they haven't done it enough that those little pains and aches haven't shown up yet that could turn into long-term disability.

So what was your kind of discovery or road along this? Was it through back in a certain periods like, oh shit, you know, like I can't ski, I've got this new boot from, you know, whoever it is, and they say it's the best new one, but I just can't do it. Like, is it through that, or was it with their boot fitting mentors? Is it like, you know, like what was it that got you really that detailed and in depth into like the boot fit?

There were a couple of stages that happened as I was coaching One was my own experience. I went from a boot that was great for me. I raced on it and did very well. I'll just mention the brand. It was a Lang. We sell Langs. We love Lang boots if they're set up right. But it was too strong a boot setup for me. The cuffs were too far out and I was forcing, had to force force the cuffs and the boot over, and I had to use— and when I got it over, it was so strong that the ski would go straight, and I had to twist and use more upper body to get it around the corner. And I skied like that for a couple of weeks, and I finally said, no, this is not working at all. Went back to my old boots, and I was like at home. So then I went and looked at the boots, put them side by side, and I could see the angles of the lengths. The blue lengths were going like this, and my other boots were like much straighter. So I just took them to the grinder, and I started grinding away on made them level, immediately I could ski again. It was like night and day. It was just so obvious. Then the same period, I had a skier who— and I do the dryland training and physical training with my athletes too, so I have quite a bit of background in training, just developing their bodies and getting them in shape. I had this skier who was just a phenomenal athlete. In every test that we did and all of the training, he was number 1 or 2. But when it came to skiing, even his brother who was not as good physically was beating him. And you could see it, you could see it on the snow on a steeper hill whenever it got icy, started the turn beautifully and right at the highest point of load, right after the apex when you come across the fall line, His ski would flatten out and kind of drift and it would slide and then he'd have to hit it again and try to grab. If you do that once or twice every turn, you're just out of it.

Yeah.

So I did it. I knew about canting and I did the canting right.

Yeah.

But he still had the issue. So then I went, it's got to be in the foot because I always was a foot skier and my father was, you know, was very strong thinking about it. Skiing is about your feet and tipping your feet over, and that's how you get your ski on edge. So I knew in my own skiing I had to, you know, evert my foot or tip it, put pressure on the big toe side, put the ankle bone into the boot to lay the boot over and get an edge and hold the edge. So I said, there's something going on inside that kid's ski boot. So I said, we've got to— and his father was a doctor.

Yeah.

And that kind of helped us along the process. We said, Well, we've got to take him to a podiatrist and see what's going on. Then immediately we saw a change when he got footbeds. He was able to hold that edge.

Now, can I guess? I'm going to guess.

It's a line of force.

Can I guess? Was it in the forefoot?

Well, he had a forefoot varus going on. Varus, yeah. He also had pronation, so his arch would collapse when the pressure came on.

Calcaneus eversion. Forefoot varus.

So, and even midfoot, even midfoot eversion.

Okay, wow, like really loose. So if, if listeners want to like maybe pick up one of their shoes and now maybe holding in front of their face, the heel at their nose and the toe, the, the toe box away from their face, they held the heel of a right shoe and twisted it out as though they were turning the heel to say towards 4 o'clock, and then they took the toe box and tipped it up so it was rotating, the front of the shoe was rotating up towards 10. That's what this kid's foot was kind of stuck in, isn't it?

His foot was basically— can you see my shoe?

Yeah.

Okay, slipper. So his forefoot was like this.

Yeah.

So this was not touching the ground. See that? So this was high.

Because it's an audio thing, they won't be able to see, but Harold's lifting the big toe side only of the front of his slipper up.

So that's not touching the floor, and so when he has to push his toe down, his first toe or first ray or first met head down, the big toe basically, the kinetic chain starts to react and the knee goes in but the tail of the ski washes out. And, and then his hind foot and his midfoot would also kind of collapse. And so now this is one scenario for somebody, but you can't make that footbed so supportive so that the arch blocks the foot from making the movement of eversion. You still need eversion in your skiing.

Absolutely.

And that's the magic of a footbed where, uh, you have to be very discerning who you go to to make a footbed. You will find that some podiatrists and some boot footbed makers will make that arch so rigid that it actually locks up the foot, so you haven't gained anything. You've actually kind of regressed.

Yeah.

And there's— that's the real secret in making a footbed. You have to make it pliable enough so that the foot can move, but not so unsupportive so it collapses. Or too rigid so it doesn't move at all. It's a real science to be able to build footbeds correctly that way.

I can imagine.

A lot of—

because I know Riley was saying, you'll do something and then you'll go out and you will run through a series of tests to see if it's worked. I guess there's— as you said, in the kinetic chain there are so many things and you changing at the bottom, you do you don't know the effect it's having up high. So you need to test it, right? You need to see how that person feels with it.

We have the luxury, and we're the only ones in the world that have skied with over 90% of the people that we've done alignment for, which is a huge database of results. And we can quantify the results. And that's unheard of in the ski industry. Nobody has done this kind of work before. We've got so much documentation, we've got so much information, and the strange thing is no one in the ski industry has come to us and said, "What can we do with all this great scientific information you have and make it better for skiers?" Not one boot company, not one ski shop in the chain, not one ski area or ski school has said— they're not interested enough to say, Wow, that's a wealth of information. We should be in the medical field. You would have people all over you trying to figure out, wow, this is great information. We can help people with this information. But in the ski industry, it's about getting the boots out the door in the shortest period of time and selling as many as you can. It's volume. You know, stay alive. You know, to some extent, I sympathize with that because the ski shops have to survive and they have to do volume. We don't do volume. We do fixing. Yeah. You know, that's the difference.

Yeah. Amazing. I wish I could teleport over there right now, get you to fix my boots. Go ask him. Because I can already tell in my head, I'm just picturing what it would feel like. And I know, like, the first thing that comes to mind is I just feel in my shorter turns I'll be able to get my hip further in. And my knee less far in and just feel stronger.

Well, let's do this. If you will send me some photos of you standing in your boots with just your footbeds without liners, you know, in your ski stance from the front, and then show me the side of your boot so I can see the mechanism a little bit.

Yep.

And then I'll look at the video of you skiing.

Yep.

And then You can tell me how much bottom canting, if you've done any bottom boot canting, and we can evolve the process and maybe do another— then you can show the before and after and describe to people where you've gone.

Yeah, exactly. That's what we'll do. I'm hoping to get skiing in Canada at the end of January, but that will give me some time to work on it. I mean, I'm almost almost thinking of really starting again. I mean, I'm lucky I— with Riley, we work with Dalbello and Vokl, so I, you know, can get another pair of boots and maybe just start from scratch.

So this would be for your alpine equipment? This would be on alpine equipment you're talking? Yeah. Okay, great. That's really— we can do both. We could do, you know, tele or alpine, but, um, yeah, yeah.

But if you— the tele one would be interesting. I don't feel as out on my Tele boots, the Scarpa boots seem to fit my leg a little better, make it a little bit easier. But yeah, definitely the Alpines where I'd like to begin. Anyway, getting off track, getting a bit myself selfish here. Let's see. Okay, actually, so I wanted to ask you about This idea, people don't take into account like tibial length, femur length, and then, you know, torso, right? How can that— if you're sort of, you know, keeping in mind that it's— we're talking so people won't be able to see— how could you explain how those things can really affect someone?

Well, the simplest way to explain it is if you're, if you're want to test yourself, for instance, and there is a sort of a predetermined overall body stature that would put you in one area. The 6-foot or taller individual who would stand just flat on the floor and just bend their knees a little bit and see what happens to where their hips are if their femur proportion is longer relative to their tibial length. Puts your hips farther behind your heels, which makes sense, right? If you've got a long femur and you bend your legs, your hips are going to be further back. It was very interesting the other day. We were on the slope and doing some of this work and— excuse me, I've got to turn this off real quick. We were doing some of this work and we saw two 2 tall guys that fit exactly that syndrome. They were 6'1", 6'2", and they were both skiing down in the back seat like crazy. And they're all on, on advanced equipment, you know, race boots and race gear, and they could not get out of the back seat. They were in the back seat, their hips were back, they were never— they never were able to move their feet underneath them and get their hips ahead of their boots and their turns. Yeah. And they were losing control and getting more and more speed all the way down where it steeper. And I, and I would say to the group, I said, you see that? That is your typical scenario of the femur length dominating your fore-aft position. And so we have a solution. We have solutions for that. And we've worked with people with that scenario and we fixed as best we could and the people are standing much more in the center of their skis. So we have started years ago measuring femur, tibia, hip, torso, sternum, and overall legs. And we modified boots with the same people to see what results we got. And we modified skis. We have actual— we actually have skis in our inventory that have lifts on the heels and lifts on the front. And so we can take people out and we've experimented over years and put them on the toe lift skis and we put We put them on the heel lift skis and we watch them ski and get their feedback and videoed. We have an inventory of what the results are based on different bodies, different skis. The pre-mutations that you can get at with fore-aft are way more complicated than side to side.

Yeah. There's way more movement, right? Yeah.

There's so much more— so many more places your body can adapt.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, and then everything changes from one year to the next. The boot companies change and the binding companies change their ramp angles from the heel, the delta from the heel to the toe. So you've got constantly evolving things that you have to take into consideration and different models of bindings have different ramp angle. A race ramp angle, a binding will not have the same ramp angle as a recreational ski. Binding. So it is very intricate to get involved with fore-aft balance, and you have to do it on a one-on-one basis. And, you know, in skiing, we love to have these catch-all things where, where we will catch one problem. We see the backseat problem, and everybody will say, you got to make the boots softer. Yeah. And that's not the answer. It's not the answer. That's, that's the throw, you know, throw the bucket out with the bathwater or whatever it is. Yeah, it doesn't work. That's not an answer for that problem. The, the, the answer is diagnose it for the individual with his limb length, the way he stands, what kind of boot equipment he's on, what kind of ramp angle he's on, and figure it all out and then make the changes and see results. Yeah, you can't just do a widespread shotgun approach to these things.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So then can you also go the other way with the femur length, tibia length? Can the femur be kind of proportionately kind of shorter and the person is constantly overflexed. Yeah.

And you'll see that the other additional factor there is sometimes people have a lower calf or a big calf, shorter people do. And when they have that shorter femur and longer tibia, it's great to be forward, but you're sometimes over forward, too far forward, overflexed, so to speak. And you're in a low hip position, which is really hard on the quads.

Yeah.

And it's tiring. And you do get some benefits in skiing that way. You get a lot of rotation from the legs because they're flexed. The more flexed you are, the further your femurs and legs can go back and forth. So you have more range of motion. But on the other hand, it's tiring and you don't want to be down there all the time. You never get a straight leg, you know, to rest.

Yeah, yeah.

So absolutely, we can do the opposite with that kind of a skier. And we do.

Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, that's awesome. I need to be measured up to see what, see what comes out, what the, what the measurements spit out. Um, so Harold, what, what are you like specifically? Like, do you do much to your own boots and equipment?

Um, well, I have a— when, but when I was ski racing, I didn't do anything. I just used whatever boots, uh, my sponsor was providing at that time, and I switched boot companies once while I was competing. My Lang boots worked very well for me as a racer. The leather boots, I was in that era that switched from leather to plastic, just that I was in that age. So I went through that process of going from leather, hard leather, fiberglass reinforced leather, the le trappeur French boots, that was out at that time, and then went into plastic, into a Lang, and that was very good for me. I didn't have a difficulty switching. My legs are neutral enough so I could switch without problems. I know world-class ski racers who couldn't ski on plastic boots.

Right. They just switched and it just totally mucked them up.

It mucked them up to the point where they were, they used to be top 5 World Cup skiers and they couldn't make the top 30.

Yeah, wow.

Couldn't break into the top 30.

Just equipment.

The boot was so strong and too responsive that it just made their skis go straight all the time, every time they put them on edge. So they had to learn how to twist the skis and feather them, and then you go, you keep getting speed. Yeah, exactly. And I have talked to some of the, particularly a Swiss racer that I knew when I was racing, and he went through that, and I met him years later 20 or 30 years later. And we were reminiscing about our racing career and I mentioned to him, "I know what happened to you." And he said, "What do you mean you know what happened to me?" "Well, why you had to retire and you didn't get results." I told him about his boot scenario and he was so bowlegged that he couldn't get— and the plastic boots. In the leather boots, you could do with your ankles and you could play around.

Sure.

Higher cuff, stiffer cuff, you could not make those adjustments. Your leg dictated your alignment at that point. So you were really hampered, restricted, and blocked up. So yeah, it was in some ways that transition I went through was— I was very happy with the transition. It helped me.

Because you're kind of in the middle of like—

Straight.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And your feet, are you pretty neutral?

Yeah, well, I have what they call a functional flat foot, so I don't need a footbed, which is kind of ironic because I'm a big proponent of good footbeds. But I only use a very rudimentary, just a mold that has no, even a flat spot on it, because my foot just sits so well on the floor.

That's interesting, because I went through a stage, I had foam-injected liners and like quite a firm footbed. And then just through getting into now rolfing and this sort of movement alignment stuff that I'm into now, decided I wanted to get rid of all that. And now I don't ski with a footbed. O'Reilly's made me a very minimal footbed that, if anything, just gives me like a good grip So my foot's not sliding around.

Yeah, it's like— we call it a comfort footbed. It just contours the bottom.

Yeah, exactly. And that feels good because I've— with the one that's supported under the arch, I couldn't— yeah, my eye— it was like you're talking about, I was locked in that part of my foot and I had to over-move in other areas. So that's really interesting that you also don't ski with a footbed.

Well, I had a bad experience as a 6-year-old. Like, you know, in those days, podiatrists used to say if you had flat feet, you were going to have sort of bad feet for the rest of your life, and you wouldn't be able to run, and you're going to have all kinds of issues. And so they built me these special shoes with arches, and I, I walked one day on those shoes and my feet hurt so much I never put them back on again. And so I already knew at 6 years old, and that you put like a golf ball underneath your arch was not going to work very well for my Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, perfect, perfect.

Now what was the next thing I was gonna say? So you don't have many modifications to your boots, you sit pretty well in it.

Now that I have a knee replacement on my right leg, which eroded away with arthritis over 37 years, it went 2 degrees bad on the medial side. They corrected all that with the Knee replacement, I don't do anything on my right leg. It is dead straight. And no plates, nothing, no adjustments. My left, I tip—

Fore-aft stuff, do you do anything? Like, you're pretty bang on, like your tibia, femur, and all that sort of length, fore and aft?

I've been really fortunate. If anything, in my ski career, I was a little forward, more forward than most guys. And so I was lucky to be able to be forward. And I had to learn how to back off. Rather than be too forward.

Okay.

Because I, I got too much tip pressure, so I was always the one who was having to get on the heels a little bit, let the skis run out, instead of the other way around where guys had to get forward.

A random question then, just then, Bode Miller came to mind, you know, like what, what sort of things can you tell, tell us about looking at him, his body shape, boot setup? That made him want to use the tail a lot more, or is that something else?

No, Bodhi, I coached Bodhi's uncle when he was a teenager, so I know the family. And Bodhi has long femurs, and he grew very quickly. From the age of 19 to 23, he grew a couple of inches. And when he was 18, 19, and 20, he was a very good slalom skier at that time. In slalom, he was one of the top. He won a slalom. He won every event. So he won slalom when he was on Fischer's. And he was on a Nordica boot at that time. And he did extremely well. And he was centered on his skis at that time. He wasn't that extreme way back, that evolved as he grew.

Okay.

And his femurs and his bones solidified more and, uh—

And the muscles grew and got in his— obviously around his rear end bigger and so there's more weight back there.

And he stands very upright, obviously, and you can see that. But the amazing thing about Bode, first of all, you have to keep in mind that Bode is probably one of the best athletes we've ever seen on a pair of skis. Because he could have been a top athlete in almost any sport he decided to be in. He won the Superstars thing, you know, where all the top athletes compete at different events that they don't normally do. He won the overall Superstars thing against football players, against tennis players, you name it, every sport, and he was the overall champion on that. So that tells you what kind of back— athlete he is.

Yeah.

So he's an extremely strong guy. He has amazing balance and he was able to figure out how to make— help Head develop skis for him and boots that supported that stance so that he could be on the tail without overbending. There's a funny story about Bode testing slalom skis from Head. In summer. They had 18 pairs of skis lined up at the base of the area, and he would put one pair of skis to the other to go up to the lift. And he would put on, in one instance, he put on a pair of skis, he skated to the lift, just skated without skiing, without even getting on the lift, got to the lift, said to the rep, these skis suck, walked back and got another pair. He didn't even have to go down the mountain on them. He could tell they were too soft just by skating.

Yeah, wow, wow.

So, so, you know, that's— yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so then any other— like, watching this last Sölden race, any other things you kind of saw? I guess— okay, here's, here's the question I was thinking of. When can you see— when do you know it's more of an equipment issue compared to a technical issue, like, like the racer or the skier just doesn't know how to perform the movement versus it's their equipment that is blocking that movement, right? Have you— like, I mean, I guess it takes a lot of experience and, and seeing and stuff, but are there things you look for?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Um, I study it all the time. I watch slow motion. I do all of that. Um, And the most glaring thing at Sölden, because you mentioned that particular race, was Kristoffersen, who was in 8th place about 2.5 seconds out, which is a long ways for him.

Yep.

And the Rossi boot has been beefed up and made stronger from last year's model, and he could not get that ski over on the angles that he's used to getting them over on. So he was fighting equipment and there's a perfect example like what you, your question, there's the answer right there. Here's a world-class skier who was not able to deal with the equipment in that particular race right away off first race. And you know, I can tell you another story that happened with Mikaela Shiffrin, who is obviously Olympic champion, world champion, you know, globe winner in slalom. Two years ago when she started the season, she was in the new Atomic boot with the carbon fiber top, Blacktop boot. And I hadn't seen her ski all summer or fall, but I watched her, one of her, one run on a slalom the beginning of the season. And she was not finishing in the top 5. She was in the 7th and 8th place, down, you know, 2, 3 seconds down, at least 2 seconds out of the first place. And I watched that run and I said, this is impossible. That's not her skiing. It was just, she was so out of sorts, so off her game, so off her skis, so out of balance. I immediately texted her mother and I said, "Aileen, you have got to put her on her last year's boots immediately." And her mother responded and said, "Yes, I trust what you have to say. We're going to put her on her old boots." The next slalom race, the next The net difference in time was 3 seconds and she won it. And there was no training in between, there was no coaching in between. That was just a boot change. So even at the world class, as I said earlier, at the world class level, the reps don't know, they don't see it. And the coaches think the reps know everything and they don't get involved in the boot setup. So there's a disconnect. She was third in the next GS on the old boots and she wasn't even close before that.

Yeah.

And she was in the wrong boot all summer training and all fall. So you can imagine what a waste of time that was for an athlete at the world-class level to be in a boot that she was actually struggling with.

Yeah. Yeah.

Wow. So that's an instant switch from one day to the next, just changing the boot.

Yeah.

Same brand.

Yeah. And in that boot, would the main characteristic changes be a stiffness thing, a cuff alignment thing? Yeah. A stiffness thing?

It was mostly a cuff. It mostly started at the cuff.

Okay.

And then I don't know if they tried to fix it by doing anything underneath it.

Okay.

But I know the cuff was too strong. She couldn't get the boot over and her leg over and the angle of the ski over.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that puts you in the back seat because every time you put the ski on edge, it shoots out in front of you.

Yeah. And there you are.

And so now you're in the back seat. So she's totally out of balance. She's never in the center of the ski.

Yeah.

So yeah, that was just another experience I had with an elite racer, you know, that just confirms what we see on snow every day with regular skiers.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

So then on the other end, not an equipment thing, I guess. You'd see the technical element as perhaps not being at that top end, more your kind of, you know, like a skier that, you know, does like 3 or 4 weeks a year, or even just hasn't quite reached a level of really, you know, knowing how their body moves. Would that be right? You see more like, you know, say their boots are set up all right, you know, Like, when can you— what are some things, main things you, I guess, look for technically? You know, like, it's kind of like, okay, this has got to be— they've got to be ticking this box, like, you know, whatever it is. What are your kind of top 3 things you're looking technically at that the person is performing with their movements?

We get skiers— I mean, almost every skier we get who is new in our program is taught by traditional teaching system methods, right? And if you're a skier and you're watching this, you know that you were taught to turn the outside ski and then try to catch up with the inside ski to make it parallel. And that was, you know, from the snowplow on, basically snowplow turn on, that's what you were trying to do. The problem with that whole idea is that if you're trying to get your new outside ski or stance ski or balancing foot on edge to get into the turn before you do anything with the inside foot, the inside foot is always going to be delayed or behind and trying to catch it up. And that's why people, they always say one of the biggest concerns skiers have is, I cross my tips. Well, think about it. If you're turning the outside ski and the inside one hasn't caught up, the outside ski is going to cross under the inside ski as you go down the— and that didn't get better with shaped skis, it got worse because the shaped ski is more reactive, right?

Yeah.

So now, so one of the first things we teach and see is we teach skiers how to get the other ski on edge so it gets out of the way and goes downhill first, then the big toe edge ski or the outside ski can go and look and be parallel. With the other one. And we do that right from the beginning, as soon as we see people.

Yep.

And when you see—

that's kind of like number one.

Number one.

Yeah.

Number one. Yeah. And then number two is because they were putting that outside ski on edge and then it was kind of locking into an edge, they'd have to drive their knee and the upper body would follow it so that you create a rotational impact, which is called an angular momentum type impact on the ski.

Which wants to keep going that way.

Yes.

Yeah.

Then, and they didn't know how to stop it because they were never taught to use it properly. Once it started, it's very hard to reverse it. So that's the next thing we deal with. So, and sometimes if someone has got a real upper body thrust, so to speak, to get the skis around, we deal with that first because you can't really use the feet and the legs and the tipping actions if your upper body is the most powerful unit in your skiing. Yeah, absolutely. So it can go either way depending on how aggressive that skier is with the upper body versus lower body.

Love it, love it. Yeah, it's just kind of like when I look at people, people's movement, a lot of the time where the problem is, it's moving too much and other areas are under-moving. So if you work on the bits that are under-moving and forget about the other stuff and let it kind of all balance balances out a little bit more.

Yeah, at some point you have to address the major or the bigger body parts because they overpower the smaller ones.

Yep, yep. So then would there be after that, would you— any other thing? Like is there a third thing you kind of look at?

Well, during this whole process we teach them to balance on all four edges. We're really big on— in skiing you have to be able to ski on all four edges. Even an intermediate skier learns how to ski on all four edges in our system. And when you learn to ski on all four edges, you're familiar with what the skis can do. And most skiers have no idea how to use the outside edges on their skis. They never use them. And we teach people how to transfer to the uphill little toe or the one that's on the outside before you start into the new turn.

Yeah, yeah.

Absolutely. That— what that does, and, and what people, you know, will go, well, why do I need to do that? That sounds like it's a precarious balancing point. What that does is once you learn how to do it properly and put your hip in the right place so you can balance there, you start every turn in balance before you even go into the turn on the new ski that you're about to stand on through the whole turn. Whether— whereas every other system that teaches skiing, national systems, move the base of support away and then they try to catch the body up to that base of support through the steering action of the outside ski. And we put the base— we put the body over the base of support before you enter that turn. So you're not fighting for balance the rest of the turnaround to try to catch up to that ski which you never were in balance with to begin with.

Yeah.

So our system is completely opposite almost in every way you want to break down the steps. And it's opposite in an advantageous way, not in a detrimental way.

Yeah. So a friend of mine, Gary Ward, he's got a system called Anatomy in Motion. And he used to be a boot fitter. And finally, similar kind of story to you, he'd be fitting boots all season and someone would come back in after his career corrected some stuff and I was like, "What did you do? My back pain's gone. I've had the best holiday. It's easy." And so, led him to going and going outside of that and developing a system of movement of looking at like, if the foot's doing this, what's the knee doing? What's the hip, blah, blah, blah, all the way up. Anyway, so, he's kind of mapped out what he calls the Flow Motion Model, which is basically what every joint in the body is doing at different phases of the gait cycle. So heel strike, foot flat, you know, early toe off, early heel off, toe off, that sort of stuff. Um, anyway, I've become really interested in that and very much thought about phases of skiing kind of in relation to gait. And what you're talking about there of transferring to the little toe edge early is just like when you walk, as your foot swings through and you place the heel down, you keep moving the foot forward. You leave it there and you bring the center of mass, starts shifting forward over the top, meet the foot, starts to come down more with the fifth metatarsal, and then you find your whole foot. And then from there you put your balance on it, and then you start shifting forward again towards the other foot. And it's just exactly the same thing. It's how our body's kind of built to move. And how we're proprioceptively wired. We want that sensation first before we kind of, you know, if you try and walk around standing, go straight to the inside part of your foot, you're off balance.

It all really boils down to a very simple aspect of confidence. When you're in balance, you're confident, you're more willing to do more things, move better and you have a well-being about you when you go down the hill in skiing and you start to take, you start to be able to ski faster without getting scared because you're in control when you're in balance and that's what we're really after. The bottom line is it's all about balancing on your skis and that's everything that we do is based on the understanding of balance and building better balance for skiers in movements and in equipment. And, you know, our background when we evolved this, we, you know, a lot of these ideas came out of my teaching and my coaching and my own skiing, but we didn't just rely on that. We went to research it, we went to study it, we went to PhDs in numbers of fields who were skiers and brought them in and worked with us. We have a PhD in biomechanics that works with us who's an instructor. We have two physiotherapists, one has a doctorate in physiotherapy. So the study of the human anatomy in movement, we've approached it from a number of different areas. So it's not just the skiing side that we've studied. We've studied it from the the functional side and many other ways of looking at how the body works.

Yep, so important, so, so important. Um, so, uh, another kind of personal thing, what are you, what are you working on and playing with in your skiing? Like, what are you excited to get out and be like, right, I'm really gonna nail this this year, or I'm gonna really refine this movement, or like what where— what are you playing with?

In my own skiing, I'm always trying to get more angles and more energy out of the ski. And that's about— to me, skiing is a sport of relaxation. It's not a sport of force. And when you look at skiing from a standpoint of relaxation, I can describe where all the relaxation points happen in a turn or in a ski while you're skiing. When you release a ski at the end of the turn, you're flexing or letting go of the tension in your legs. That's relaxing. When that happens, the forces from the turn and gravity can pull you over to the other side, and you relax the body so you can tip your torso in the other direction so you can counterbalance for the new turn. That has to happen through relaxation, through force. If you force it, it won't happen.

Yeah.

So I'm— and then when you start into the turn, you have to bend the inside leg so it doesn't support your body weight in any way, or else you can't build angles. Because if there's weight on that foot, you can't get your hip down lower.

Exactly.

Yeah. So you've got to bring that leg up. You've got to bend that knee. You've got to relax the hip so it can kind of fall or settle down closer. Closer to the ground. And all you're doing on the other leg is— you're not trying to push on the other leg, you're actually letting the other leg stretch out and stay on the ground without overbearing or over-digging the ski into the snow. Because you don't need to dig the ski into the snow until you go back across the fall line because there are no forces. The forces are minimal, they're just centripetal and some momentum pulling you to the outside.

Yeah.

So really, people, when you watch skiers, they're trying to dig the edges in too early and not develop angles. If you, if you relax and develop angles, then you'll have the angles you need to deal with the forces later on in the turn. So the upper third of the turn and half should be developing the outside, not the digging in or the holding. The holding of the edges and the, and the bending of the ski that we talk about to get energy out of the that happens from about halfway down through the bottom of the turn. So it is a relaxing sport. If you think about it and you approach it that way, you're going to have much better results and you're not going to get as fatigued. Your inside leg doesn't have a huge muscle contraction when it's bending, so you get new blood flow to that leg while the other one is more tight, more contracted. So it gets restricted from blood flow. And then when you start switch legs, it's the opposite, so you get new oxygenation to the muscles that you're not using as extremely on the outside leg. So if you do ski that way, and that's what we teach, you can ski all day and ski longer runs without your legs burning on you, for you.

Yeah, that's so funny because I totally agree that. I really have enjoyed the last sort of few years finding skiing is far more therapeutic and real. Like, I feel better after a day of skiing because my whole body's just moved and joints and muscles have gone through their ranges of motion. And I'm, yeah, just with that idea of what can I do less, how can I do less to get more? Like, how can I let those joints just really just easily go through their ranges and do less. It's like yoga on skis, you know, like you could totally just do skiing and you'd be a very healthy, happy person if you do it right.

We find that we detune the size of movements more than we add size of movements to most skiers that we teach.

Yeah, yeah, very interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

Because they're inefficient. The big movements are inefficient and they throw you further out of balance. And another really— you know, you asked me earlier what are the key things we focus on. One of the key things, one of the major things that is in almost every skier on the hill is they are extending their legs at the wrong part of the turn. When you extend your legs at the wrong part of the turn, you're actually pushing your center of mass out of balance. And most people don't realize that they're actually making themselves go out of balance with the movements they're using. So when— but when you do that time and time again and you're used to using it, you don't sense that.

Yeah, absolutely.

And then when we try to change it and say, no, you're going to keep your balance over your ski and over your foot and over your leg and not push yourself away from that, it's a complete reversal. You know, we're talking training the brain as well as training the body. And the understanding and the grasping of the concepts and the movements is all part of it.

It's funny, I don't know if you'd agree, but it's almost, you know, when you introduce something that's so foreign to a person that their beliefs are that this is the way it's done, and because I've read it in a manual, and all these people that I've seen, you know, ski really well tell me this is the way and you tell them to just try, just see what happens when you do it a different way, the way I'm suggesting, it is actually more the psychological, like the mental part that is the harder part to come over, isn't it? Because it goes against what they believe and there's a lot of, you know, a lot behind that. And you're challenging not just, you know, use these joints differently, you're challenging what they've learnt and time spent, money spent. Spent invested in whatever they're doing. And so it requires people to really let go and just see what, you know, for themselves. What happens if I really just try it?

Well, we're really fortunate because our client, the skiers that come to us, are highly motivated individuals. They're ready to learn, they want to learn, and they are motivated. And so we have the best job in the world because we have pre-selected people and they're fun to work with because they're so motivated and want to learn that it's just a kind of a sweeping enthusiasm that goes on from one session to the other. They're ready.

They were ready when they paid for the course.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's That's totally— that's the same for the people that have the best success with me getting out of pain. They're already ready to just forget whatever they've done.

They're ready to let go.

Yeah, yeah, they're ready to let go. So, I guess, so thanks very much for taking the time here. Is there any other things you wanted to mention or talk about? I guess if people are interested, you know, where can they go to find out? Some more info about maybe a boot fitting course or the PMTS course, do you want to just let us know how people can do that?

Yeah, we have our own website which is harpskisystems.com and most of the information is there about what we do, our camps, alignment sessions. I, on YouTube, have, and Diana, my partner, we have over 50 videos, instructional videos for free that we give out more free content than any other ski system in the world. And it's all very in order and it's easy to follow. And it takes a beginner progression all the way to the advanced and then on our forum, we have a forum, a PMTS forum that can be looked up on Google, and we also have a blog. So there's just endless amounts of information we put out for free to the public, to skiers, so they can see and start to learn on their own. And we have— I've published 4 books on skiing, and we have DVDs that go with the books. We also have downloadable instruction material off our website. So if you're living in Australia and you can't come to our camp right away, you can get the instruction from our website.

Yeah, that goes for anywhere because you'd be surprised, most, most of my listeners are actually from the States or Europe. So, oh great, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, uh, well, it was interesting, we had 7 people at our last alignment training session. 2 were from Australia, 1 was from Taiwan, and the others were from the US. And we got people from all over the world coming to our camps. It's phenomenal. It's great to see. We're very happy to have all the real distant people come to enjoy skiing.

Yeah, yeah, fantastic. So have you got many camps coming up now?

Yeah, the week after this we have the Tech Camp, which is an instructor kind of very focused camp. Then there's another one before Christmas, which is a blue camp. And then we go through the vacation period without camps until January 7th. And then we start right in. We have 10 camps scheduled for the season, 2 in Austria, and then we'll be in New Zealand end of August into September for our 2 camps.

Well, I can tell you now, I'm going to look and see how I can get over and do your boot fitting course. I'm really, really interested in that. And, you know, I'm definitely one person that would love to find out more of like this info, you know, the thousands of people you've measured, just to find out more, you know, like the data you've gathered on people with these types, you know, these lengths of femurs equal this kind of thing. These people with lots of, you know, movement in their ankle tend to exhibit these, all that sort of info, that's so valuable, that's awesome and can only—

Along those lines, here's one thing that most people and doctors, physios, or even orthopods have no idea that this actually occurs in humans. We're the ones who figured this out. We didn't figure it out, we just came upon it because it repeated itself so often. In humans, more than 85% of humans have a more valgus right leg than left leg. And if you want to check it on your own body, you can see if you go along with the 80 to 90% of all humans. That means they're more pronated on their foot, they're more everted on their calcaneus, and they're more— their knee is more in valgus when they flex forward on the right than on the left. And on the left, the foot is more inverted. Inverted, which means the arch is higher, the calcaneus or the heel bone is tipped outward, and the knee tracks more outwardly. And even men and women, regardless, it's— that is a huge percentage that is biased in that direction.

Yep. Yeah. And so for people, valgus is when their knee goes— tips inwards, right? People can— when they can test that, I get that. I'm part of that 85%. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool, that's fantastic. Well, again, thanks very much for your time. Hang on the line, I'm just going to stop the recording. But yeah, thanks very much again, Harold, and I hope everyone really enjoys it. I mean, this has been one of the most enjoyable conversations for me because I got to be a bit selfish and really ask questions pertinent to to me. So yeah, thanks very much.

Well, we'll carry on with that, and, uh, it was my pleasure. I really enjoyed it.

So excellent, excellent. Thank you.

We'll continue on, I hope.

That's it.

This episode is brought to you by Carv, the digital ski coach. Now, one of the features I've had the most fun with all time is simply the fact that Carv tracks every single turn you make. I treat it a bit like Strava, so at the end of the day, it tells me exactly how many turns I've done and those numbers keep adding up across the season. So last season in Australia, I had a few days where I was doing nearly 2,500 turns and my legs were tired, but it was really cool to try and have that number there motivating me, and I'm quietly working my way towards my 1 millionth turn with Carv. So the other metrics I've been diving into lately, and these are new for this season, are very unique, and these are turn corridor and turn radius. And I don't see many skiers using them, but they tell you a lot about the shape and flow of your skiing. So the turn corridor shows you how far you're traveling across the hill, or the time almost between apex to apex, and how long you're taking to transition. While the turn radius measures the actual arc you create once you start the turn. So these can be different, you can have like a very wide corridor, say 18 meters, but a lower turn radius, or the other way around. So when you compare the two, it opens up a whole world of experimentation, and it would be a bit like a race coach will set different types of race courses to influence a racer or skier to change the timing and mix it up. So I encourage you to look into this if you've got Carv and play with it and see if you can manipulate it, because it's only going to improve your versatility. So I keep my Carv on my boots every single day because you never know quite know when like a change in technique technique or a new ski resort or skis will show up in the numbers. And it's great at the end of the day being able to check that, or even after the fact. And I'm really looking forward to the day I open the app and I see turn number 1 million. So if you want to explore your skiing in a completely different way, check out Carv, the digital ski coach. And thank you team for sponsoring this episode.