JESinstr, now you've done it. We're deep into the weeds.
At the 30,000 ft level, teaching skiing is about teaching redirection as a means to control velocity. We don't have to teach going straight.
Maybe we do, at the beginner level. As you say, "a dynamically centered balance" is the first skill that a new skier must get decent at, to facilitate everything else. We're generally going to start out teaching this while leaving turning entirely out of the equation, to keep things as simple as possible.
Also, I've seen cases where a new skier tries to make a straight run, but unintentionally veers off in one direction or the other. Going straight actually requires everything to be in a fine balance--edge angles, rotational forces in the two legs, lateral balance, fore-aft position of the two skis relative to each other. Maintaining that seems a very natural thing to be able to do, but it can be a challenge in this unfamiliar slippery environment.
At any rate, the only way for HK to initiate a redirection at this low velocity and relationship to Gravity/Fall Line is to use rotary. This is a great exercise to build rotary skill, but it is the only situation in which rotary first is appropriate IMO.
Which brings me to a conundrum in this thread. If what I said above is true, then based on the low velocity environment in which we teach beginners, shouldn't we be using rotary first which has been the tradition?... Or maybe something else.
0 Both the Carving Process and Rotary produce redirection of the ski but using different mechanics and rates of redirection. Velocity plays a strategic role, not only in enabling ski function but in fear factor as well.
For sure, most turns are a blend of the carving function of the ski and rotary, but for a beginner to get the most "bang for the buck" out of a lesson, what should the primary focus be? ...[T]his is about what comes next.
For me, it is all about teaching beginners GRIP which is focusing the carving function of the ski through edging and pressure management first and Rotary as complementary but not an initiator.
The skills concept, and the five fundamentals, are great ways to organize one's thinking about skiing mechanics. However, in reality, edging, pressure, and rotational movements don't exist in isolation. Whatever you do in applying one of those skills has immediate impacts on performance of the other skills. Elements of movements that can be described as edging, pressure management, or rotation are
always present in
every effective overall movement that a skier makes to affect ski performance. Accomplishing one element will usually require simultaneous application of the others.
Focusing for the present on rotary movements--the ultimate purpose of all such movements is to alter the angular momentum of the skier. That angular momentum can involve the entirety of the skier's body and equipment, or it can be concentrated to some degree within some part of the "system,"
e.g. the legs, boots, and skis. Since conservation of angular momentum is an invariable principle of physics, any change in the angular momentum of one physical body necessarily requires a change, in the opposite direction, of the angular momentum of another physical body. To make this happen, there has to be an engagement of those two physical bodies allowing forces to be exerted between them. In skiing, any change in the skier's angular momentum is offset by a change in the angular momentum of mother Earth. For the incredibly massive Earth, it's just a miniscule change in velocity, but it's present.
So a skier seeking to change his angular momentum has to be able to exert forces against, and receive forces from, the snow. That requires some degree of edging and pressure. It can be in one direction or another, depending on the rotational change the skier is accomplishing, and when it's happening.
A skier who isn't engaged with the snow--in the air or on totally flat, frictionless skis--can only create counterrotation within the body. That's not our usual goal.
A skier who achieves
no change in angular momentum won't be able to start a new turn.
So I hope people will consider this an accurate description of how creating ski turns always requires some combination of edging, pressure, and rotary movements.
Getting back to what we teach beginners. We don't have to instill all of the above explicitly. The totality of skiing movements in any effective turn is complex. If in teaching we focus on a few key points, the student will generally figure out most of the rest. It's really about getting the student to fire up the appropriate already-existing neural pathways, to create a fine blend of fundamental movement building blocks that by and large the student already knows how to do. That's what DIRT is all about.
Very young children won't be able to ski the same way as adults. They don't
walk the same way as adults. Their skeletons and muscles aren't fully developed, but most importantly, they haven't established and gained control of the complex network of neural pathways. Look at how a toddler learning to walk staggers around. It gets better steadily over time, even before bones and muscles have grown much.
There's more than one way to skin a cat! A variety of teaching approaches should and do work. The idea I floated upthread was to have the student focus on continuous smooth changes in foot to foot balance (or weight, or pressure). If the student is blending appropriate degrees of
muscular tension and
mobility in joints and muscles up the chain, this should produce decent turns. If there's too much of one and too little of the other, there will be issues. A student with the skeleton totally stiff may be able to make direction changes, but not turns. A student lacking muscular tension won't be able to hold an edge.
For a first timer, or for any novice, really, as a prerequisite to this foot to foot balance approach, I would actually want to do at least a couple of things. First, plenty of sidestepping uphill and down, so the student understands how to create edge angles and what the effects are, and to instill muscular tension. Second, walking around in ski boots, then skis, along S-lines, to instill rotational mobility of the femurs (among other things).
Whatever initial approach you use as an instructor, you need to be ready to assess the effect it's having on the individual student, and to take action to address deficiencies. If the student isn't producing or allowing the correct rotational movements, work on that. If the student isn't producing strong edging, work on that. If the student isn't succeeding in regulating pressure in some plane, work on that.
You can't neglect
any of these elements.
.
