An Easier Way to Make a Wedge

Challenge to ski instructors:  Now that most of us are back on the snow for the 2011-2012 season, let’s bump up our game so that the new crop of never-ever skiers will have a successful time in their learn-to-ski lesson.

Let’s change the way we teach a wedge turn.  The conventional wedge uses our outside leg to initiate the turn:  our left leg/ski turns right, so we turn right; our right leg/ski turns left to make a left turn.  Most of the time this works well for our students.  After all, it is skiing’s most basic rotary movement.  Except for one minor point . . .

If the learning hill is too steep, or the student is going too fast, or their muscle strength isn’t up to par, the student opens that wedge so wide it may as well be the wing span of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner.  An exaggeration maybe, but we all know that this huge wedge is awkward, exhausting, and completely ineffective.  Plus it also jams up the uphill leg so that our never-ever skier is contorted like a pretzel.

An easier way to make a wedge. Use the inside leg to initiate the turn.  Your student turns the left leg/ski to turn left, and the right leg/ski to turn right.  And no trying to remember opposite sides of the body here either.  Plus the skier’s body aligns itself more naturally to the snow so the “other” leg follows much more easily than in our conventional wedge.

Now all you need to do is . . .  Coach them to contract the appropriate thigh muscle to provide some added turning power.  Right leg, right turn—contract the right thigh; left leg, left turn—contract the left thigh.

Then watch them ski!

Ski Muscle of the Week #8: The Rectus abdominis

This is the world-famous “six-pack” muscle.  If it’s in shape, you can wow an audience with it should you be daring enough remove your shirt—as well as manage your Center of Mass (COM) while skiing.  If not, your trunk goes all over the place—and so do you.  These “abs” help you move your hips and lower trunk relative to your upper trunk.  In skiing, proper use of the “six-pack” keeps your stance erect.  I’m sure you’ve watched skiers skiing with their nose pointed at their ski boots.  Without any serious abdominal muscle contractions, their upper trunk flops over their hips.  But worse than that, that lack of abdominal engagement requires them to use their upper body to help them turn—yuck!  They could also stand to contract their glutes (Ski Muscle of the Week # 6).

So let’s give ‘em a workout:

Captain's chair.  You need to elevate yourself off the floor for this one so that our legs can dangle freely.  Most gyms have equipment for this exercise.  With your feet hanging off the floor, lift both legs from the hips. 

Bicycle crunch exercise.  Lie on the floor with your hands held gently behind your head.  Lift your knees about 45 degrees.  With a bicycle motion, alternate touching your opposite knee and elbow.

Ab crunch on an exercise ball.  Rest your lower back on an exercise ball or other flexible exercise equipment that will cradle your back.  Place hands behind your head, and slowly raise your upper torso to about 45 degrees.

Ski Muscle of the Week #7: The Hip Adductors

We all know about upper and lower body separation as the key to advanced skiing. Those terms, however, lock us into thinking about a body divided into two parts. So bear with me for a moment as I divide our skiing body into three parts: legs, abdomen, and hips. After all, our center of mass (COM) is located in our hips, or pelvic girdle. With this model, we have an upper control (abdomen) and a lower control (legs) to keep our COM steady as we move down the slope. Our hips and COM are now independent from both our legs and our abdomen--skiing is now more than just keeping our shoulders facing one way and our feet another. Those hips become a dual actor: an anchor for our shoulders AND the pivot for our legs.

Are we ready for exercises? The hip adductors (adductor brevis, a. longus, a.magnus, pectineus, and gracilis), are located along the posterior and inner sides of the femur and move the leg closer, or in toward the body. Remember the old style of skiing where we kept our legs and feet touching each other? We really worked our adductors to squeeze our legs together to accomplish that dated technique.

With our modern stance, we strive to keep our legs a hips' width apart, but we still need our adductors to keep our legs from opening up too widely. That very wide, “desperate to stop” braking wedge that we made as a beginner doesn't make much use of our adductors, because those are the muscles we would use to close that wide wedge into a more balanced and comfortable stance. 

So here's the workout:

Hip adduction. Start with an athletic stance. Lift one leg to the side. Work up to 3 sets of 10 reps.

Side hip adduction. Lie on one side and lift the upper leg. Be sure to point your toe.  Your adductors work as you recover the leg.  After you exercise the upper leg, cross that leg over the lower leg and lift the lower leg.

Plie. A great exercise from ballet. Simply, a squat while keeping an erect spine and functional tension on all the leg muscles. Toes are pointed out.

Lunge.

Wall squat.

Leg raise. While lying our your back with your knees comfortably bent, lift your legs toward your chest. Please perform this slowly and be mindful of hyperextending your back.

Ski Muscle of the Week #6: The Gluteus Muscles

The Gluteus Maximus, along with its little sisters, the Gluteus medius and minimus, are my favorite skiing muscles because a simple squeeze of these “butt muscles” can cure a lot of skiing ills. Do you ski bent over like a gorilla? Do your arms freeze to your chest while you ski down an easy beginner slope? Are you constantly poking the snow with your poles to turn or stop? A simple squeeze of these large muscles and you automatically recenter yourself and rediscover the ability to ski with your legs.

Here's why: The Gluteus Maximus is one of largest and strongest muscles in our body. Together with its sisters, they help us maintain an erect trunk and steady our femur over our tibia. Because they are on the opposite, high side from those overused quadriceps (see Ski Muscles of the Week #3 and #4), strong glutes help distribute the forces experienced in skiing to the top of your femur, rather than just the front. At the end of a long ski day, judicious use of your glutes will mean thighs that are less strained, arms that are relaxed and ready to help you balance, and upper and lower legs that become stacked and, therefore, ready to act in unison. In short, that simple butt squeeze improves your stance and that makes you a more confident skier.

Best thing about this muscle: Stand and squeeze your butt muscles right now. You will instantly feel your hips thrust forward and move over the top of both femurs—this simple action helps keep you out of the back seat, because squating or leaning backward now becomes very awkward—try it and see for yourself!

Exercises for the glutes:

Bridge.

Deadlift.

Reverse lunge.

Sumo squat.

Hip extension.   Lie face-down with your legs straight, toes on the floor. Bend your legs at the knee. Squeeze your right glute. Lift your right thigh off the floor. Lower and repeat with your other leg. Work up to three sets of ten repetitions.

Snow should be falling in mass quantities any time now! See you next week . . .

How to Use the Muscle of the Week

First, let me give credit to the woman who gave me this idea. Last March at Loon Mountain, I took a two day "Biomechanics of Skiing" clinic from Sue Kramer, a PSIA examiner out of Bromley Mountain. On the second day of the clinic, she assigned each of her students a muscle. Our assignment was to ski with an emphasis on that muscle and report to the group about how that muscle influenced our skiing. This was the ski lesson I had been longing for, as it answered the “how do you do that” question that is so common among ski students and so often unanswerable by ski instructors. 

The Muscle of the Week concept serves two purposes:

 

1. It helps the reader target a particular muscle. You learn where that muscle is and what it does while you ski. Plus, I provide exercises to help you strengthen it. 

2. When you ski, you can now actively use your Anterior Tibialis or your Gluteus Maximus and feel the positive influence of that muscle on your skiing—and call on it when you need it. Tips of your skis coming off the snow? Contract your Anterior Tibialis and see if that helps. Skiing like a gorilla? Contract your glutes and recover your upright stance. So instead of the “keep your shin against the tongue of your boot” answer that I find so frustrating, the Muscle of the Week lays out specific actions of muscles and how they help us improve our skiing.  So next time you are on the snow, pick one of the muscles and ski with that muscle contracted--your skiing will improve, trust me. 

 

 

Ski Muscle of the Week #5: The Hamstrings

Ski Muscle of the Week #5:  The Hamstrings

Three muscles make up the hamstrings:  The Semitendinosus, Semimembraneosus, and the Biceps femoris.  These three are found on the back of your thigh.  You can feel the tendons of these muscles behind your knee.

 

As a group, they flex or bend the thigh at the knee, and extend the hip.  You can feel these muscle actions when you walk, as the hamstrings play a principal role in that activity.

How do they influence your skiing?  A skier who effectively uses their hamstrings will be able to keep their upper body stable while their legs do the up-and-down pumping action required in bumps.  Don’t do bumps?  That’s okay, you’ll still use the hamstrings when you carve because they will help you keep that inside leg the appropriate length to glide over the snow.  Remember the Rectus Femoris from last week?  The hamstrings act in conjunction with that muscle to keep the inside leg as short as it needs to be. 

Exercises for the hamstrings:

Knee curl.

Hamstring curl.

Flutter kick.  Do this one lying on your back.  Keep your legs locked and toes pointed away from your body.

One-leg kneel.

Bridge.

Ski Muscle of the Week #4: The Rectus Femoris.

This is the fourth muscle of the Quadriceps group.  It’s separated out from the Vastus group of Week #3 because it performs an extra action that the Vastus do not.  As with the Vastus muscles, the femoris helps us make our leg long and strong.  But in addition to extending the leg at the knee and hip, the femoris also acts as a lever to flex the leg at the hip.  Here’s why this is important:

1.  Skiers need a long outside leg to carve their skis.  The Vastus and Rectus muscles accomplish this by helping us use our outside thigh like a strong pole.  That strong pole (with a bit of bend at the knee) flattens the outside ski so that the inside edge of that ski slices and carves the turn.
2. While our outside leg is long and providing the power for the turn, the inside leg is short and helping us maintain our balance as well as our movement down the hill.  The Femoris, then, when it's the inside leg, helps us shorten that leg by helping us lift our leg from our hip and toward our chest. 

 Here’s some pictures to explain:


Here my left or outside leg is long; my right leg or inside is short; both are doing a good job of supporting me in the turn—I’m carving, not skidding.  My zipper matches the vertical of the shrubs in the background, and my right ski pole is above the snow.

When I don’t lift my inside leg enough, I get ski and balance confusion:

If I did a better job of lifting my inside thigh toward my chest I would lose the confusion and both skis would do a better job of tracking in sync.  And my stance would be ready for the next turn.

In my opinion, this muscle action of the inside leg also helps answer a long-standing question that skiers ask ski instructors:  how much weight is on your outside leg and how much is on your inside leg?

From the point of view of the Rectus femoris, the amount of weight you put on the inside leg is related to how high you need to lift the leg to keep your skis headed in the same direction.

Exercises for this muscle:

Supine leg raise.

Jump squat.

Leg extension machine.

Knee extension machine.

Walking lunge.

Leg press machine.

     Deadlift.  Please don’t use too much weight—the best way to hurt your knees is too overdo this exercise.