An instructor teaches short-turn skiing using three stance positions: frontside-heavy, neutral, and backside-heavy. A pole drill helps Mark feel forward pressure and edge grip. Backside-heavy stance creates tighter turns and better control, while frontside-heavy causes skis to wash out.
Chapters
All right, so today my goal is to get across fore and aft balance but with a couple of different terms. So the, the terms are going to be your stance being frontside heavy, neutral, and backside heavy. So these are the words I'm going to be maybe using, and I'm going to try and get across to Mark why and when he'd want to use frontside side heavy stance and when you'd want to use a backside heavy stance. The only way you can make a ski turn is— there's two ways. One, using the sidecut. So the more the ski is tipped over, the more the ski has a possibility of bending, and therefore it will cut around that way. I have a 25-meter ski on. How long is yours? 13. So his is much shorter. When he tips it over, he's going to do a shorter turn. If I want to do a short turn, like a 6-meter turn on 25-meter ski, I have to use the other method along with it, which is being able to steer the ski or skid it. So this frontside-heavy, backside-heavy thing is going to help you enable you to steer the ski more easily and then stop it from skidding and making it grip. Sometimes I'll put a pole here and encourage someone to like knock the pole over so they would fall forward over and try and knock them.
Got a good backside position here, both of us get it, but again you'll see there's less of an effort between the two of us driving forward to get tip pressure for frontside heavy. So you could say he's just missing that point, and you'll see how his skis don't hook up, they wash away, whereas this part of my ski Bites and it hooks and pulls me around.
Feel how that makes you work the skis into a much tighter radius. Yes, yes.
Look how he's able to maintain much better upper lower body separation through the end of the turn as he's focused on backside heavy, neutral and backside heavy. I mean, look where he's facing, look where all this is as the skis continue to turn across, whereas here they've all gone together.
I feel it. Yeah, that's a new feeling. Yes, I feel at the end of the turn I have a little bit more deflection across the heel.
