Pre Ski Season Prep | Balance Training Exercise

Hey everyone, this is Tom Gellie, and today I'd like to give you some interesting movements that you can do anywhere, anytime, that will relate back to skiing, but also help you in feeling what your body can do and how to move it better. Because I know all around the world there are people that are just desperate to be skiing. You know, people in Europe, great, great snow, but they can't go skiing. Uh, certain parts of Canada are in lockdown. It's not as easy. People in the southern hemisphere that usually travel to the northern hemisphere to go skiing, we can't because of this COVID period. Anyway, I'd like to hopefully get you off your bum, onto your feet, doing some movement in this video. So, so right now I'm saying get prepared, maybe take your shoes off. In fact, do please take your shoes off unless you're on the subway or something, or you can't, and get ready to, to do some movement. So, so pause it now if you're not, and then get ready and come back. So what I'd like to get across is a few things. One is about base of support and center of mass relationship, and simply put, when the center of mass is over a base of support, so it's my left foot at this moment, it's my right foot at this moment, it's my hands and my feet at this moment, all those are me changing the base of support, and if I'm stable, it means my center of mass is within the perimeter of my base of support, and I'm not toppling. So if you've seen some video from Carve where I talked about toppling, which is actually getting your body to move outside of your base of support to create movement, this is taking a step back to show you how to actually find stability within movement and actually get to the very edges of where your, where your center of mass and your base of support where is it, so say in this point here, how far can I go, how far can I take it before I would topple and fall over. Because the bigger your spectrum, the bigger your range you can have within your body before you do fall, then the more options you've got in your sports and in particular in your skiing. But if you're very limited then you're limited. So those are going to be the main goals. So let's get started. The first thing I want you to do, so we're going to balance on our, on our right foot, and the first concept I want you to understand is for something in the body to have freedom of movement. So I'm going to be trying to draw a circle all the way around this foot, not a big wide one, but just brushing the toe, which means that there's a whole, there's a whole bunch of joints that have freedom of movement. In order for that to feel really easy, there has to be somewhere that feels stable, and the more stable that feels, the more freedom I've got with the parts that I'm moving. The less stable it is, so for instance, if I I just go to the front outside edge near my pinky toe, balance there, and try and do the same movement, you'll see it's much harder because I'm less stable, I'm balancing on a much smaller base of support, so it's easy for me to topple outside of that, making, making me not want to move my legs as much, and it looks far more jerky. But I find more stability over the whole foot, and things move easier. Okay, so principle number 1: if you want something to move, if I want this arm to move, it can't be— everything needs to be stable around it, and it can't be part of the base of support. So if my weight is predominantly, in this example, all on the right hand and the left foot, I can't really move my right hand nearly as much as I can move my left, and my right leg can move because it's not a base of support, so it's got freedom. And the more stable I feel on the base of support areas, the more freedom I've got in my whole body movements. So stable point, more stable gives more freedom with the part that's not being used as a base. So let's explore that a little further. You've done this circle, okay, what I want you to try and do is start making that circle bigger, wider. This is going to challenge where, so as soon as my leg goes out here, some of my weight is going out into this leg, it's taking it away from this foot. So if you notice, medium-sized circle where this part of my body is, bigger size circle, I have to counterbalance my upper body this way to get my leg further out and away. So if I keep moving in bigger sweeping circles, I start needing to adjust other parts of my body to allow more movement. So if I want this leg to go out even wider, if I put my arms way out here, see, now I can get my foot to go even further. I bring my arms back here, I can't reach my foot as far. Here I can go further because there's weight counterbalancing the other side. And same, this big circle. As I'm doing the circle, if I keep my brain focused on the foot that's on the ground and try and feel the whole tripod of the foot, including the toes, and if I'm constantly aware when I lose a bit of pressure, say on the pinky toe here, the pinky toe side, I'm now reducing my base of support, so it's going to be harder for me to stay balanced. If I go, hang on, keep the base of support big, this is no longer as difficult a balance move. And conversely, around here, this side of the circle, if I consciously am aware of the big toe side of my foot that's on the ground and not letting it roll off like that, I can stay grounded, stay stable, this can move further. Okay, so one part of your brain stays on the foot. So the left foot now, small circle to begin with, slow at first. If you're really not great at balancing, you could even put another finger on the wall. That's going to give your base for support a very different feel, but please try and do it even if you're falling. Just on one foot, and as I'm going around here, focus is on the foot. If you've got Carv, it would be like those sensors underneath your foot. You're trying to light all the sensors up evenly the whole time as you go around. And then as you start feeling, ah, I've got this stable bit here, the more stable I am, the more freedom I've got with other joints to move. So now I can make the circle a bit bigger, or I could go a little quicker. I'm going to go bigger right out here and say these endpoints right here where it's very easy to topple. Get your base of support right first, and then think about if I want my foot to reach further to make that circle really wide out here. If I don't adjust weight going out this way with counterbalancing weight going this way, oh, I can't reach it out wider. Bring it in here, my body will automatically bring the leg in. Stretch the arms, I can stretch the leg further and really get a workout on my glutes in this position. Great one for your glutes, okay. So that's the first sequence. Balance on one foot, pay attention to the pressure, think of the carve sensors under your foot, always lighting all of them up, particularly these, the forefoot up around here, because notice how much wider this is than my heel and how much flatter this is compared to my heel. My heel is round, round things roll. The forefoot doesn't roll as much. So if I'm really conscious of ball of the pinky toe and the big toe, ball of the foot, that gives me my side-to-side stability. So back to skiing, if I'd warmed up like I had now with some really interesting stimulating movement for my brain, getting the proprioception to my feet really warmed up, and I've broadened my body's movements within my, just my left foot and my right foot being my base of support, now when I ski I'm going to feel much more stable because my brain is aware of, even when I'm here, it knows where to find the base of support. It knows if I'm here, my body is here, how to find that base of support. I know this is not skiing, But this is just challenging and getting a whole bunch of information to flow into your nervous system, that you can then just switch off and start skiing and know that it's calibrated and working. Like even if you walk around now after doing that, you may even start feeling like there's a whole lot more motion going on in your feet, your hips, your back, your knees, that wasn't present before. Warming up and doing the exercise. So expand that spectrum of where your body can move within this base of support. Okay, here's a show-off one, dragon pistol squat like this. Huge part of this comes from feeling stable on this foot, okay, and knowing at all moments when my foot is here changing how to stay within the base of support. Okay, it's, it's more that, and the strength comes as you work on this first, in my opinion. So let's go to a slightly different example. The more examples you're going to get, the broader idea. So if we're in a kind of a quadruped position, like a crawling position, Now my base of support is much bigger, includes this whole entire thing. So let's challenge also our ability to move weight from the knees and the hands, or outside of those points. So left hand is going to stay on the ground. I'm going to reach my right arm out as far as I can, and again, I'm going to try and do a circle or an arc all the way around. Start with not reaching too far, then start pushing it a bit further. Should say, at this point, if anything like this in any of the exercises causes pain, just stop. Do it— do the other side, make it, make it easier for yourself. Don't push through pain. Challenge is fine, but pain is, pain is not. Let's not push through that. So I'm making it wider. Now watch this. If I take the opposite leg off the ground, now when I reach my arm out in front, if I take my leg behind me, I can get further. So leg on the ground I fall over. Or 3 points of contact and knee knee, that's as far as I can get before I feel I'm going to fall over. I move this back, now I can get another good few centimeters. So now we do it with the other leg counterbalancing, so we're getting much further away. There's no right or wrong here, it's working within your base of support. And if we go back to the other concept I mentioned, if we want this freedom in this part, make the, the points touching the ground stable. So I really like anchor my toe, my knee, and my hand. Think about that staying within A really good base of support, especially out in these challenging places. And now I can get much further holding the ground with the wrist and the fingers. I can even try and go out in front. Oh, try not to use the free hand as a base of support because remember, when it becomes a base of support, it doesn't get to move. You want it to move and make the other things work harder as a base of support. Stability point. This is just skimming the surface. Swap sides. Again, 3 points first. Warm up. Gradually getting things wider with this arc. Not putting it down for a base. Now focus on that right wrist really hugging the ground, the fingers, all of them hugging. Now let's take the opposite leg and take this movement into a bigger range. Oh, there's no— you know, you can do it slowly. I think of it like When your iPhone compass— maybe you don't have to do it so much now, but when it used to need recalibrating, you had to pick it up and tilt it in all different directions. In fact, the Carve, the Carve sensors, when you first hook them up, you have to do this with the boot. That's calibrating the full range so Carve experiences rotation, fore and aft, lateral motion, all the different pitch, yaw, roll things, you're doing the same with your body. Okay, really calibrate it wider so you can deal with a bigger spectrum of balance problems. And you will feel your muscles— the closer you get to the edge of toppling, the more your muscles kick in and work harder to stop you falling. Okay, so there's the second one. So if I go back over the points: base of support, center of mass relationship. Do some exercises like these to warm up how your nervous system senses those two things and really expand the range. Because the bigger the range in all directions, if you can go as far as you can here as far as you can there, your brain sort of centralizes that and puts you right in the middle. So for example, if you can't really go very far here but you can go really far there, it'll put you in the middle of those two points. That's something I learned from a guy named Gary Ward, excellent educator. So you're trying to expand all the dimensions, so you put yourself in the middle at the end, or you don't even have to think about it, your nervous system will do that. So that's point number 1, thinking about what's stable and what's free moving. Okay, so in terms of a ski turn, what's stable? Outside leg, the more stable that is, the more freedom I have to place this where I want it to. But if this is a base, now it's kind of stuck, I can't move it much. The better I am here, I can put this wherever I want it. I can put my hands wherever I want when it's stable. If I don't feel stable, my arms are going to be doing things to try and create that stability. So let's bring it back to skiing. And then finally, finally, that video on carve about increasing early edge angle through toppling, hopefully that makes sense now, because if you're aware of the edges of your base of support point, as you finish a turn, need something to lean against there, but as you finish a turn, if you know where the point is where, okay, I'm balanced, still balanced, still balanced, still balanced, now I topple, you can make that topple really find instead of just having a small margin for error and then suddenly, oh, I'm toppling and I did too far, I'm on my inside ski, this happened, nah nah nah nah nah. So that toppling one is really, I mean, even if you didn't do this, you went out and you just practiced that all day, the same thing happens as this. Maybe you fall a few times trying it, and then you start going Oh, look at that! I can get all the way over here without toppling, and then I want to topple, I just let it move a little here, and I get a very controlled topple. So there's the link. I hope you guys enjoyed that video. Please leave a comment or any questions around it. I really hope people are doing okay and we get back to being able to to ski soon, I know it's really frustrating, I feel it myself, but my best piece of advice would be use this time if you're really into skiing to work on some things that you don't usually when you're just rushing off going to the slopes. Get back into your body, work on improving it, work on improving your understanding of how skiing works, and then you're going to fast-track getting back on snow. Shameless plug for my own website, that's what Big Picture Skiing is about. It's about helping everyone, no matter if they're on snow or they're in their office or at home, understand, do the movements better, understand all the things, physics, biomechanics going on, so that their skiing progression is faster and they get over the hurdles much quicker. And that's why I'm working with Carv, because We're trying to make that blend into, into that, into the software and technology, which is really cool. So there's some really cool stuff coming. Thanks for watching. You guys have a great day, and cheers.