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What is “Edging”?

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Average Joe

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I am a ski instructor, not a race coach. I can do a beginner's version of a stivot, and a not so bad pivot slip. I've got a question.

While a skier doing pivot slips straight down the fall line can tip the ankles without doing much else and get the skis to cause left-right travel down the hill, ankle-tipping alone isn't how a stivot is converted from a sideways skid to a forward carve, is it? Can your racer's ankles withstand the sudden increase in pressure that ankle-tipping can encounter at the peak of a high speed stivot?
In the pivot slip I described, the skier stays within a narrow corridor, preferably on a steep. If brushes are set, the distance apart might be 2 ski lengths. To stay within the corridor one has to keep their torso and hips down the fall line to keep the skis from tracking left or right. I'll switch directions when things start to drift, but in good conditions one can slip quite a distance inside of a narrow corridor.
The race stivot is a different animal. There are more "moving parts", course set, and race line in play. When and how the racer pulls the trigger to engage will vary. I'd add leg extension and retraction as an additional dynamic factor here. At high speeds on injected snow /ice a racer won't be relaxing the ankles much!
 

François Pugh

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Can your racer's ankles withstand the sudden increase in pressure that ankle-tipping can encounter at the peak of a high speed stivot?
I guess that would depend on the athlete and how heavily reinforced the feet and ankles are by the boot and liner. Even my small delicate ankles can take a lot inside my antique heavily posted Koflachs. Apparently I would ski better with more mobile less supportive boots. When I get new boots we will see if that's true.
 

LiquidFeet

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My comments in red below, yours in italics. You posted:

In the pivot slip I described, the skier stays within a narrow corridor, preferably on a steep. Yes, that's a pivot slip. If brushes are set, the distance apart might be 2 ski lengths. To stay within the corridor one has to keep their torso and hips down the fall line to keep the skis from tracking left or right. Surely your racers don't use pivot slips when skiing flush brushes! I'll switch directions when things start to drift, but in good conditions one can slip quite a distance inside of a narrow corridor. Yes, that's a requirement of pivot slips, go straight down the fall line without left-right travel, facing downhill. On icy steeps, its easiest, once one learns how. In mashed potatoes on the bunny slope, not so easy ever.

The race stivot is a different animal. Understood. You said in that earlier post, the one I was responding to, something about the requirement of ankle tipping (eversion/inverson) for directional travel, then talked about pivot slips and stivots. I wondered if you were indicating that when a racer wants to convert the sideways skidding part of a stivot into directional travel around the gate, that conversion required the introduction of eversion/inversion, aka ankle-tipping. Thus my question. There are more "moving parts", course set, and race line in play. When and how the racer pulls the trigger to engage will vary. I'd add leg extension and retraction as an additional dynamic factor here. At high speeds on injected snow /ice a racer won't be relaxing the ankles much! So I think your answer is no.

I think I misunderstood what you were indicating about ankle action.
 

razie

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Grip and Edging are two completely different things. In my understanding.

Grip is a result and in my opinion a result of good steering skills as you listed, Edging, Pressure, Pivot (I would argue Timing and Coordination and S&B have to play a role as well) and I would disagree that the Technical Reference is more functional focus, it's just more outcome focused.

In my opinion the goal of the ski teacher it to work out simply is what "action" creates the grip for the client. I can create more grip adding angulation and I don't necessarily require angulation for grip depending on speed/turnshape/conditions. I can also create grip through methods that may not be technically sound in traditional ski teaching, however they create "grip".

The CSIA has just tuned in to say we think Angulation is the best way to create grip. How do you angulate? Well utilizing the body, adding new motor patterns...essentially teaching "Edging" from the skill system that you listed before.

But perhaps that client is not ready for "edging" because of a stance issue, if I correct the stance grip will increase as the skier is more comfortable on the outside ski. Therefore I can create grip for that client without talking about edges.

In the end its the 'action' that leads to the outcome, be it "tip the foot more at the start of the arc" or "move the hip inside" etc whatever the teachers and student decide the cue needs to be for them (internal/external/drills/brushes/corridor/thought etc) that will in turn create (relative to the student) higher edge angles and/or better and earlier balance on the outside ski.

It may not be a traditional "edging" move..I can provide more grip if I am balanced to the outside ski earlier in the arc. That's 'timing and coordination" or "pressure control" and 'Grip' as an outcome is relative to the skill level of the student.

This way I feel the CSIA hasn't pigeon-holed teachers to only teach "Edging" and think that that is good enough. Rather give an outcome "Grip" and explore moves, actions, skills or whatever you wanna call them to create that outcome with the client. It allows for much clearer understanding "I want to have more grip on the steep groomed slope" how we get there is up to the student and teacher with the teacher leading the experience, and utilizing actions/skills/drills etc. that actively and directly get the client closer to the outcome.

My point simply though is that the CSIA haven't changed what edging is. It's simply tipping the ski over, we just don't think it's the end goal. We don't call it grip. The two are not necessarily synonymous.

Thanks.

yah... well... that just means "ski like this" - i.e. no uniform mention of actions... which is where you started your post, but lost it on the way. So... there are no "actions" uniformly taught. Other than steering, really. That will be likely addressed in 2-3 years, when the "best of breed" current manuals will be thrown out the window, like the previous manuals and re-written to become the new "best of breed"... and the newly created concept of "grip" may be replaced with some other better description of what we will manage...?

Having said that, there is value in the current approach, however, it looks like it was designed to work around the concept of "we don't teach actions"... so there will always be a lack of consistency between teachings. So we have the deep physics of how skis work (COM/BOS differentials etc) and outcomes (grip, gliding) but no clear agreement on what's in-between... i.e. what the skiers are actually meant to do... which is why I think the manuals will keep undergoing massive revisions for the foreseeable future...

The current approach goes like this: I see there is too much skidding when I gave the task of "carving" so the person needs to work on "grip". How? Uhh... there are some drills... and a lot of non-standardized "blurb" that can be thrown about, non-standardized so different from teacher to teacher.

Now try teaching tennis that way. How many kinds of "grip" are there and how exactly are they performed? What articulations move how? Any rookie tennis coach can answer that question... while your answer to "what is edging" was to demonstrate we don't need to teach edging, but angulation (so totally losing the focus on the lower body, which is technical reference 2) and really, not even that, but just work on the outcome of grip! Also, not in fact angulation, which is created from separation, that's technical reference 3, isn't' it... but by specifically saying that angulation is a result of upper and lower body separation (reference 3)... we just lost reference 2... which is why edging cannot be explained with the current CSIA technical reference... and, of course I can create grip without angulation or the lower body, in the face of reference 2 and 3... but this is when reference 1 was created to say "use all joints" - with a faint Yoda accent... and since it dind't really fix anything, reference 4 came along to say "well, coordinate all those movements we didn't talk about until now and it all works out!".

I'm pretty sure in fact that these references (except the one with the ski design) describe soccer as well as a number of other sports (use all joints, turn with the lower body, coordinate movements, separate upper/lower) being simply a commonality of how we move in sport.
 
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LiquidFeet

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So Razie, your Canadian professional ski organization says out loud, or publishes somewhere, that ski instructors/coaches are not supposed to teach actions, aka body movements? Is there an accompanying explanation?

What is your organization?
 

razie

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No, I don't think it is forbidden. But not asked of anyone either... although at my last CSIA course, there was a focus on being "prescriptive" i.e. "do this" but no standardization on what "this" is... and the blurb during the course changes of course every couple of years.

Here's the technical reference :


I'm both CSIA and CSCF. I get a discount when renewing both, too ogwink
 
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LiquidFeet

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Yeah, that's like what PSIA does in the US. Vague overviews of how to understand "control" or "management" without reference to the phases of a turn or anything in particular that a skier is supposed to actually do as a turn starts, develops, and ends.
 

geepers

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@razie - my experience with the CSIA seems to be a quite different from yours. Then again I approach it trying to understand a framework in which to develop my skiing and skiing knowledge rather than seek faults in order to rubbish the system.

Last 3 seasons been doing L3 Advanced Training and Advanced Teaching courses. At least one of each per season, sometimes 2, so it means experiencing a number of different instructors. They've all been L4 course conveners so it may have affected the perception. There are differences in focus and explanation - but not unduly more than I've experienced in learning any other topic from different lecturers. I doubt whether any 2 people on the planet would teach, say, organic chemistry or physics in exactly the same way. In fact there's likely to be variations in the approach of any single L4 just due to the different snow conditions and situation from one day to another, from one run to another and even from one pitch to another.

But there's a consistent theme - if a participant wants to pass CSIA L3 Teach assessment then they better be able to tell and show their students what they need to do (e.g. which joint to bend by how much), where in the turn, why (cause and effect) and link it to specific Tech Refs. And they need to do that individually for each student in the group and there needs to be a resultant improvement in each students' skiing.

Watch the 1st seven minutes of this video for example - presenter is Ken Paytner who is some sort of CSIA tribal elder known as 'Dr Ken' for his focus on ski technique. This example isn't quite as rounded in the TR aspects as an L3 candidate would be required to invoke today - it's from 5 years back - but it's not hard to work it out.


Those Ken Paytner talks are worth watching for extra insight into CSIA approach to skiing.

Not to say that current CSIA approach is the be all and end all and that it can't be improved. I'm not sure if there ever will be a perfect ski training system that will exactly define how instructors should work with the full range of paying students (from beginner to experts, young kids to aged adults, from fit to barely breathing) across all snow conditions (from glacial ice to pow) for all types of tasks (from beginner turns to expert carving or bumps) within the confines of the typical resort ski school lesson. But if you can create one and summarise it in a few bullet points that I can keep in my head whilst out on snow then please, please lay it out.
 

razie

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I'm not out to bash anyone, just applying critique where I think improvement is needed - in my opinion, they could do so much better on the technical side. The reflective learning and all that, is good. The reason I'm trying to progress along that CSIA path is not in order to bash it, but to understand better and it is true, that as one moves higher, it gets more specific and interesting.

And we know that other countries do better, because we can see their skiers at the Interski... there's a lot of them (Australians, NZ, Swiss, Austrians to mention a few) so the potential is there... so the only question is in my mind, how do we progress from what we have now to better.

Btw, I did not say at any point that one can pass certain levels without knowing how to ski or teach to standard, just that the technical part is not standardized in detail in any manual that I know of. It is explained and taught to some extent by word of mouth at those training courses, but there will always be differences in how different trainers explain the things that are not written in a manual... so one's mileage will always vary - and your experience seems to confirm exactly what I stated...

Why can't it be that there is a clear technical manual, we all read and follow?

Laying it out? Here's one model of exactly what to do, my 1-2-4:
green-upper-body2-numbered.jpg

1. tip the feet on edge
2. use the upper body to balance as needed on the outside ski
4. counteract the rotation and
3. the skis will turn

The more you do 1,2,4 - the more grip you have, so the faster you can go and/or the tighter you can turn. It wouldn't cover all about bumps for instance, I guess - but realistically perhaps that's why these "generic" frameworks fault out, because they try to be too "generic"? Even though a few skiers jump and some ski bumps, most skiers still ski groomers. Or at least should learn to...

Here's another one, more detailed and more specific, that I just made up:
1. release the previous turn smoothly: untipping the feet while flexing and relaxing
2. continue to tip the feet onto the new edge, while staying relaxed over terrain
3. balance on the outside ski, angulating as needed as grip increases
4. counteract the coming rotation of the skis
5. keep your ankles closed (dorsiflexion), to stay balanced fore/aft

You'd hear JFB talk a lot about relaxation and skiing in suspension versus skiing in compression... I think the one above captures that too, as well as bumps and rough snow etc - although that's more tactics.

Then of course, we have this more complete framework:
1. tipping
2. flexing
3. dorsiflexion
4. counterbalance
5. counteract
6. use of poles and upper body coordination

These all teach one specifically what to do to ski well, from a technical standpoint, i.e. the "what". Then of course you have tactics: the "when", the timing of the "movements" you do...
 
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geepers

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I'm not out to bash anyone, just applying critique where I think improvement is needed - in my opinion, they could do so much better on the technical side. The reflective learning and all that, is good. The reason I'm trying to progress along that CSIA path is not in order to bash it, but to understand better and it is true, that as one moves higher, it gets more specific and interesting.

And we know that other countries do better, because we can see their skiers at the Interski... there's a lot of them (Australians, NZ, Swiss, Austrians to mention a few) so the potential is there... so the only question is not whether we do better, we know we don't - but how do we progress from what we have now to better.

Btw, I did not say at any point that you one can pass certain levels without knowing how to ski or teach to standard, just that the technical part is not standardized in detail in any manual that I know of. It is explained and taught to some extent by word of mouth at those training courses, but there will always be differences in how different trainers explain the things that are not written in a manual... so one's mileage will always vary - and your experience seems to confirm exactly what I stated...

Why can't it be that there is a clear manual, we all read and follow?

Laying it out? Here's one model of exactly what to do, my 1-2-4:
green-upper-body2-numbered.jpg

1. tip the feet on edge
2. use the upper body to balance as needed on the outside ski
4. counteract the rotation and
3. the skis will turn

The more you do 1,2,4 - the more grip you have, so the faster you can go and/or the tighter you can turn. It wouldn't cover all about bumps for instance, I guess - but realistically perhaps that's why these "generic" frameworks fault out, because they try to be too "generic"? Even though a few skiers jump and some ski bumps, most skiers still ski groomers. Or at least should learn to...

Here's another one, more detailed and more specific, that I just made up:
1. release the previous turn smoothly: untipping the feet while flexing and relaxing
2. continue to tip the feet onto the new edge, while staying relaxed over terrain
3. balance on the outside ski, angulating as needed as grip increases
4. counteract the coming rotation of the skis
5. keep your ankles closed (dorsiflexion), to stay balanced fore/aft

You'd hear JFB talk a lot about relaxation and skiing in suspension versus skiing in compression... I think the one above captures that too, as well as bumps and rough snow etc - although that's more tactics.

Then of course, we have this more complete framework:
1. tipping
2. flexing
3. dorsiflexion
4. counterbalance
5. counteract
6. use of poles and upper body coordination

These all teach one specifically what to do to ski well, from a technical standpoint, i.e. the "what". Then of course you have tactics: the "when", the timing of the "movements" you do...

I'd be a little wary of reading too much into the overall system based on what we see at elite level at Interski. I also happen to like the way the top Aussie guys like Lorenz ski however I know a couple of Aussie instructors much further down the totem pole and I know they wouldn't be able to explain in any meaningful way what was going on. (Hasten to add that does not mean they can't help appropriate skiers improve.)

If I was the argumentative sort I might point out that in the case of the 1st 4 points it's kind of confusing:

1. tip the feet on edge How? Which joints, where? Hard to tell from the photo.
2. use the upper body to balance as needed on the outside ski Again, how? By laterally tipping, I guess, as we haven't yet got any separation mentioned at this point.
4. counteract the rotation and Well, this is confusing - 4 before 3...And that's before we get to how much counter-rotation is enough vs too much
3. the skis will turn Well, that's a result rather than an input. In any event I'm on a really steep pitch here and as I wait for the skis to come around by themselves I'm going faster and faster. Yeah, too fast for these old bones, don't like this instructor. If comes to mind that this is may not work so well in the bumps. :)

Of course I'm being nit picky. The point is you'd need a whole heap more material to fully explain your system. And you may be able to explain all your points in person consistently every time but we can only speculate if the Razie disciples are going to be reciting the Commandants in exactly the same way.

At that point we've only covered a certain type of groomer skiing. Now all that's left is steeps, crud, bumps, park, etc.

BTW have you read the fairly new (last season I think) CSIA booklet "Science and Skiing"?

Always appreciate your skiing perspective. Got some good insights into skiing from your posts and web site - even if they are not things I can necessarily use in my skiing. Just prefer if the rhetoric was toned down.
 
Thread Starter
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Appreciate the inputs from all over now four pages of replies. Reading through the posts, it looks like PSIA replaced “Edging” with “Edge Angle” at some point, while the CSIA references “Grip.”

I’m guessing that the majority of instructors in the US still use “Edging” to describe the outcome of edge engagement, despite the change in official language.
IMO, instruction guidelines that won’t commit to a specific movement pathway to skill development aren’t worth much. Describing the skill (an outcome) instead of the stance or movement that creates the outcome prevents most of the students from reaching full potential.
 
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My comments in red below, yours in italics. You posted:

In the pivot slip I described, the skier stays within a narrow corridor, preferably on a steep. Yes, that's a pivot slip. If brushes are set, the distance apart might be 2 ski lengths. To stay within the corridor one has to keep their torso and hips down the fall line to keep the skis from tracking left or right. Surely your racers don't use pivot slips when skiing flush brushes! I'll switch directions when things start to drift, but in good conditions one can slip quite a distance inside of a narrow corridor. Yes, that's a requirement of pivot slips, go straight down the fall line without left-right travel, facing downhill. On icy steeps, its easiest, once one learns how. In mashed potatoes on the bunny slope, not so easy ever.

The race stivot is a different animal. Understood. You said in that earlier post, the one I was responding to, something about the requirement of ankle tipping (eversion/inverson) for directional travel, then talked about pivot slips and stivots. I wondered if you were indicating that when a racer wants to convert the sideways skidding part of a stivot into directional travel around the gate, that conversion required the introduction of eversion/inversion, aka ankle-tipping. Thus my question. There are more "moving parts", course set, and race line in play. When and how the racer pulls the trigger to engage will vary. I'd add leg extension and retraction as an additional dynamic factor here. At high speeds on injected snow /ice a racer won't be relaxing the ankles much! So I think your answer is no.

I think I misunderstood what you were indicating about ankle action.

My point is that, on injected snow in a WC course, a stivot would have more weight and pressure variation than edge angle manipulation versus a stivot on groomed packed powder.
 
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Steve

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PSIA may not use this anymore, but PSIA Instructors sure do.
BERP
Balance
Edging
Rotary
Pressure
 

Mike King

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Yeah, that's like what PSIA does in the US. Vague overviews of how to understand "control" or "management" without reference to the phases of a turn or anything in particular that a skier is supposed to actually do as a turn starts, develops, and ends.

Perhaps you should read the motor control learning literature which shows, with experimental verification, that students learn more quickly with better retention when they are given an external focus (outcome) as opposed to told how to move.
 

Steve

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All generalizations are false, including this one. People learn differently. Yes an outcome focus is important, but I can attest from my own learning, and I know of others who feel the same way, that I learn movements when i learn what to do, what to move, a muscle or joint to focus on.

Where the differences are is hard to say, perhaps my learning as an adult has something to do with. Having a baseline of motor skills developed as a child might make it easier to learn from an outcome approach.

I know in my keyboard playing that I never think about fingering or what I'm doing with my hands, arms, fingers. It goes well beyond that what I don't have to think about. So yes, I can focus on outcomes and it really helps my playing.

Someone who is a newer player, or perhaps started later in life, needs to be given specific physical things to do. Fingering is a huge part of it. Someone has to show you how to cross your fingers under.

Bike riding hurt my wrists until the bike fitter coached me to keep my elbows in more.

Any "conventional wisdom" that says "that students learn more quickly with better retention when they are given an external focus (outcome) as opposed to told how to move." is just worth the paper it's written on in my opinion. Proves nothing.
 

LiquidFeet

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Perhaps you should read the motor control learning literature which shows, with experimental verification, that students learn more quickly with better retention when they are given an external focus (outcome) as opposed to told how to move.

I've read it. The results did not impress me. They directly contradicted my experience as a teacher, which I've been doing all my professional life.

I have been an art teacher, now retired. My students learned from me how to draw, how to paint, how to make sculpture. I intentionally did not give them "external focuses." Instead, I taught them how. I taught them how to hold a brush, how to hold a palette knife and mix colors on a glass palette. How to hold charcoal, how to stand at an easel, how to evaluate proportions, how to smear charcoal, how to layer charcoal on top of charcoal and use an eraser as a drawing tool. How to apply paint to a canvas in liquid form, and as a stiff paste, how to layer wet paint on top of wet paint for different effects. How to plan a composition before starting. How to choose a color scheme. How to shape clay. How to evaluate a clay sculpture's form for proportions. How to manage and balance the density of information across a whole composition. A good deal of art making is motor activity. Another big part of it is conceptual activity. The two blend, but the technical comes first. It provides the tools for conceptual sophistication.

By the time they left my courses, they knew how to do things they didn't know before. It was their choice what to do with those new skills they had been working on after that.

Teaching advanced art students was different from teaching beginners. In those classes we focused on how to make decisions based not on technical effects but on how the complete work of art might be read by viewers. We worked on creating and embracing ambiguity. We worked on communicating with each other about how the work was progressing so each class member could consult with others for advice. We focused on how to deal with conflicting advice when it came from friends, and when it came from different teachers. My class members were working on finding their voice. On discovering who they were as artists.

One could stretch the concept of "external focus" to mean what I taught in my advanced senior art courses. But I think it's an unjustified stretch, given the way the research is presented as a one-size-fits-all-situations pedagogical approach.

IMO, my teaching, which I believe has been successful, does not match what that research says works best, @Mike King. Should I get to teach a seasonal ski program at some point, I'd use the approach that I used as an art teacher and adjust as needed. In the one-off lessons I now teach, there's no way I'd stop teaching people how to make turns.

Experience matters more than some promoted idea of how everyone should teach.
 
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karlo

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atch the 1st seven minutes of this video for example - presenter is Ken Paytner who is some sort of CSIA tribal elder known as 'Dr Ken' for his focus on ski technique. This example isn't quite as rounded in the TR aspects as an L3 candidate would be required to invoke today - it's from 5 years back - but it's not hard to work it
he says, to steer, get up higher on edge and bend the ski. That's not at all what I thought of steering. To me, steering is rotational input, something we actively do. Getting on higher edge, we effect a tighter turn by allowing the ski to do what it does, carve.
 

razie

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Just prefer if the rhetoric was toned down.

No rethoric, just plain, specific and argumented critique!!

Perhaps you should read the motor control learning literature which shows, with experimental verification, that students learn more quickly with better retention when they are given an external focus (outcome) as opposed to told how to move.

I think many took that as a "haha, nothing for me to teach, just do like this until I tell you you look like this". And from here to degrading national tech standards... Instead relying on a plethora of approaches like questioning, guided discovery, reflective learning etc - all seemingly predicated on reducing the technical content...

There is truth behind this, but it needs to be qualified and 7sed judiciously. First, it is correlated to the level of the athlete (the more experienced the more this is applicable, since there is a foundation). The more body awareness one has, the better this works etc. Get a dyslexic noob and show him a result, to see what I mean...

It's all within the larger concept of decision training and it is about using certain tools and an approach, not about not teaching fundamentals...

There is also a ton of research that the best performers have very detailed and finely tuned mental models... and a lot of research into how "hard skills" should be taught, to create these mental models...

he says, to steer, get up higher on edge and bend the ski. That's not at all what I thought of steering. To me, steering is rotational input, something we actively do. Getting on higher edge, we effect a tighter turn by allowing the ski to do what it does, carve.

This is very clear to some, apparently... I would ask if steering is an input or output there...?
 
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geepers

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he says, to steer, get up higher on edge and bend the ski. That's not at all what I thought of steering. To me, steering is rotational input, something we actively do. Getting on higher edge, we effect a tighter turn by allowing the ski to do what it does, carve.

Well I would call that rotational input pivoting.

A dictionary definition of steering "To make something or someone go in the direction you want." So we can steer a ski by pivoting or by tipping it on edge and bending it. CSIA Tech Ref #2 Turning is led by the lower body and the ski design.

Presenter is talking about big turns, expert skiing. Which is basically CSIA-speak for wide radius, pure carved turns. Tipping to a higher edge angle will tighten the radius so the ski is steered in the direction the skier wishes.

Have you ever heard the expression "steering with the throttle" in motor racing? The steering wheel is not the only way to control the direction the vehicle is pointed.

Hopefully we won't get into a multi-page discussion on semantics.
 
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geepers

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No rethoric, just plain, specific and argumented critique!!

If you say so...
multiple tibia fractures, dislocated pelvis and what looks like a few torn ligaments hanging out of his knee​

This is very clear to some, apparently... I would ask if steering is an input or output there...?

Ok, a twenty page discussion on semantics coming right up. :rolleyes:
 

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