There isn't a single thing written about that I disagree with. My hope is just to add a bit of insight, which may or may not make things clearer. The problem with writing about skiing, is that often times crucial elements get left out, which I'm sure I'll do. Before we talk about shortening the inside leg, it's important to understand what has to happen before we can begin to unweight the inside ski.
When we ski, we want to finish our turns. To me, that means a couple of different things. The first, it means I want to make a round "C" shaped turn. The second, and this is what I want to emphasize, allow your feet to catch up with your body and come back underneath you, so your center of mass (COM) is over your feet or base of support (BOS), BEFORE WE MAKE OUR NEXT TURN. This is something that you have to FEEL. When that happens, your skis will now be flat on the snow, and your edges will be released. If you think of your feet as a tripod (the three anchor points being your heel, the big toe knuckle and the little toe knuckle), your weight will be evenly distributed across all 3 points. Since your skis are flat, the edges are released, your COM is over your BOS, your skis are free to start sliding into the fall line. This position offers the best bio-mechanical balance point to begin our next turn. So what's next?
So, If you want, you can stand up and try this. With feet together or shoulder width apart, lean your upper body side to side out over the floor. Try to lean as far to the side as you can. There is only so far you can lean your upper body right? So, now try moving/driving one of your hips forward. For the sake of this discussion, whatever hip you move forward will be considered your inside ski side. What happened? Your knee and ankle joint flexed or started to bend on the leg of the hip you moved forward. You may have also noticed that if you were wearing a pair of skis, your belly button would now be oriented or pointed towards the tip of what would now be your outside ski. From this hip forward position, now lean your upper body out over what would be your outside ski. Did you notice you have a greater range of motion than you did before you moved your inside hip forward? This greater range of motion is what allows us to PROGRESSIVELY weight our outside ski by being able to lean farther out over our outside ski. This in turn unweights and shortens our inside ski and allows us to either tip to a higher edge angle, or steer the inside ski. On a personal note, I used to be obsessed with carving. Now I find that I like to steer or schmear my turns. I find this more useful in a wider variety of snow and terrain conditions. For example, on icy steep slopes, the lower edge angle allows me to gliiiiiiide across icy patches of snow without blowing me up by falling to the inside of my turn. Conversely, when I would try to carve across an icy patch of snow, the harder I tried to dig my edges in, the more I would blow up and fall to the inside of my turn, putting me out of balance. Anyhow, the inside ski...now that we have a fundamental understanding of what has to happen, we can discuss steering the inside ski.
With our weight on our outside ski, the inside ski is mostly unweighted. Using our glutes and rotation from our femur, you can pivot or steer whatever turn shape you want with the inside ski, and the outside ski will follow suit. You can even steer back up the mountain for greater speed control and a smaller turn radius if you want. In my skiing, what is critical as I progress through the turn is to continuously and actively pull my inside ski back, creating a lot of pressure with my shin against the front of my boot. There is about a half a boot length of lead change when I do this. This is what keeps my COM over my BOS during the turn (balance), and I can still actively steer my inside ski.
Keep in mind, with all this talk about having your weight on your outside ski, it's important to understand that you can't just "dump all of your weight" on your outside ski at the start of a turn. One of my instructors calls this "MURDERING THE SNOW." So why can't we do this? Dumping all your weight in one fell swoop on your outside ski creates a compression, which shortens and over flexes the outside leg, which creates a blockage of movement. In other words, the joints are over flexed, and you have now used up your range of motion and the ability to absorb terrain changes. You want your joints available to absorb bumps and other terrain changes. That's why I mentioned earlier about PROGRESSIVELY weighting the outside ski, which happens as a result of shortening the inside leg, while the outside leg stays longer in comparison to the inside leg. Hope that makes sense.
So, just as a curve ball, understanding that the outside ski will do whatever the inside ski does, what's happening when we decide to do some javelin turns and steer or carve our outside ski under our inside ski, where the tip of the inside ski is pointing in the opposite direction of our outside ski? Just some food for thought. ;-) Cheers.
. Thanks all for your responses.
