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Foot distance while skiing?....
- Thread starter GA49
- Start date
A wide stance can create unnecessary challenges for skiing in most situations and conditions.
Wide stance will impede your ability to tip your skis to higher edge angles (although too narrow can do the same).
Wide stance makes skiing moguls much more difficult.
Wide stance makes skiing in 3D snow (powder and crud) much harder than it should be.
What is a wide stance? You can find your body's natural stance width by either jumping into the air and landing on your feet or by hanging from a pull-up bar (or holding yourself up on a counter top that has a right angle section) and slowly lowering yourself to the ground. Anything wider than that is unnatural and unnecessary.
Note that many folks confuse horizontal separation with vertical separation. The distance between the skis should not be judged when a skier is in a turn with high edge angles and the inside ski retracted.
Wide stance will impede your ability to tip your skis to higher edge angles (although too narrow can do the same).
Wide stance makes skiing moguls much more difficult.
Wide stance makes skiing in 3D snow (powder and crud) much harder than it should be.
What is a wide stance? You can find your body's natural stance width by either jumping into the air and landing on your feet or by hanging from a pull-up bar (or holding yourself up on a counter top that has a right angle section) and slowly lowering yourself to the ground. Anything wider than that is unnatural and unnecessary.
Note that many folks confuse horizontal separation with vertical separation. The distance between the skis should not be judged when a skier is in a turn with high edge angles and the inside ski retracted.
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I'd also add that it depends on the student and their ski level somewhat. Someone trying to get to real/consistent parallel turns might be OK with a wider stance for balance/stability, as they learn to ski more parallel and tip their skis more. But the goal and reasons to go a bit narrower - to a more natural width stance - are as Noodler noted above.
This of course gets back into the whole discussion of stability vs. dynamic balance. When in the learning progression should a skiing student begin to learn to truly balance on their skis and stop using a wide stance for stability?
There's no exact reference for it. However close you can get that feels functional for you in both tipping and ability to shift weight foot to foot.
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If you balance on the outside ski in a turn this question becomes pretty irrelevant. Most people who worry about this don’t.
As long as your feet operate independently you can go pretty narrow. Going wide so that your skis are on opposing edges makes no sense for parallel.
There are some body conditions which might force a wide stance. Extremely bowlegged with no correction, canting. You have to go really wide just to get on an inside edge.
Some women have very large Q angles. I’m not sure what the geometry of “hip width” would be.
As long as your feet operate independently you can go pretty narrow. Going wide so that your skis are on opposing edges makes no sense for parallel.
There are some body conditions which might force a wide stance. Extremely bowlegged with no correction, canting. You have to go really wide just to get on an inside edge.
Some women have very large Q angles. I’m not sure what the geometry of “hip width” would be.
Keep the feet within the guard rails of the pelvis.
Googling "guard rails of the pelvis" comes up with nothing. What do you mean by this?
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Do you work with any women racers with huge Q angles? I saw a college racer getting alignment checked that had an enormous angle, more on one side. How she can race at a high level with those forces on the knee is beyond me. Just looks like it would get destroyed.
And add in the pitch of the slope. Razie's avatar comes to mind. I'm sure there are others.
If you place your poles on the outside of your hips firmly and into the ground, that wide should be max.
Yes. Q angle is really a one plane description. Often these women have femoral anteversion as well. So the leg is rotated forward at the top of the femur. This requires an approach where the cant is important & a lower stack height that can allow for a slight pivot - which just happens to be the dominant GS technique at the top of the turn. These racers will have lesser ability to internally rotate through the duration of the turn, so the exit must be coached a lil different too. Hope this helps.
But that's more factoring in vertical separation, right? We're only talking horizontal separation, which I don't think depends much on the pitch (to my thinking anyway). One knee will be flexed more than the other on a steeper pitch, but you won't have to have a wider stance.
Width varies with purpose. Watch:
Freestyle (mogul) on world cup - boots/skis nearly touching in moguls, then wider stance going into the jump and landing
Freeride world tour - stance width varies throughout the run
Downhill skier on world cup (generally a bit wider stance for stability)
Slalom skier on world cup (generally a bit narrower stance to be quicker between turns)
Narrower you get, the less stable but more maneuverable for short turns. Quicker foot to foot. Longer turns favor a wider stance. Quickness between end of one turn and start of next is traded for stability when widening the stance.
Play with different widths while you ski and see what feels 'good' for whatever you are doing. Exaggerate the narrow and wide to be sure you are really doing something. An inch or two can feel like a mile.
Freestyle (mogul) on world cup - boots/skis nearly touching in moguls, then wider stance going into the jump and landing
Freeride world tour - stance width varies throughout the run
Downhill skier on world cup (generally a bit wider stance for stability)
Slalom skier on world cup (generally a bit narrower stance to be quicker between turns)
Narrower you get, the less stable but more maneuverable for short turns. Quicker foot to foot. Longer turns favor a wider stance. Quickness between end of one turn and start of next is traded for stability when widening the stance.
Play with different widths while you ski and see what feels 'good' for whatever you are doing. Exaggerate the narrow and wide to be sure you are really doing something. An inch or two can feel like a mile.
So there are people coaching this and in the same decade qualified ski instructors saying keep your feet bla width apart?
My personal take is that the advent of fat skis and shaped skis has been bastardized by Americans to a large degree to entail a super wide stance to 'lock n ride' ; Most coaches and especially instructors I encounter in the EU are more conscious of an appropriate narrower stance. As a sidebar, true short turns or short swing turns have all but disappeared in the States. A lot of this has to do with stance.
^ Which looks better? I'd argue that Reilly's wide is conservative.
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Hmmm… you may be on to something with the short turn population. Maybe we need a fitbit type thing to count turns instead of vert or runs.
Between people tracking # of runs or vert, fat skis, speed, park, there’s a lot against the short turn. Parkers tend to go straight down and slash. Moguls are a hope?
Short, long, moguls, fun-
This is what my experience has been. The closer stance seems to provide better control, turn continuity and thus higher confidence which creates a compounding benefit effect because confidence is so important.
I'm keeping inside edges about a single boot width apart, which is slightly more narrow than a natural stance, but not significantly. But the positive effect seems to be there nonetheless.
Perhaps the prevailing wisdom of skis being as wide as a natural stance is a decent general guide but not a hard rule?
I don't think students are told this very often and can obsess about keeping the stance wider than what might be optimal for them... IMHO of course. I'm not an instructor obviously.