Here’s ski team member Garett Shore’s take on some diverse on snow presentations.
Interski 2015…. well what can I say. It’s been an amazing experience….it’s been a honour to be part of the nzsia team and a privilege to watch some of the best technical skiers in the world rip it up.
As well as watching some great skiing the workshops and indoor lectures gave a real insight into what each country values as important for their organization and there is clearly more than one way to do things.
During the Congress I attended on snow workshops from Croatia, Australia and Korea.
The Croatian workshop was lead by their coach Dan J. It was a big group (80+ people) but he did a great job of presenting the technical philosophies of their system which focused around keeping the ankle engaged on the front of the boot and moving with the ski, there were a lot of similarities between their system and the nzsia the one major difference is the look for a 2 footed initiation with a natural weight shift to the outside ski in the fall line.
the Croations present to 80+
The Croatians were one of the stand out performers on the demo hill so what they are working on clearly works.
Day 2 was the Aussie on snow workshop. This was lead by Richard Jameison, APSI technical director, and Riley McGlashan. Their workshop was based on the balance between strength/discipline and freedom in high end skiing. They introduced this through 4 fundamental concepts:
*leg turning creating separation
*balance on the outside ski early in the turn
*inclination with angulation to create edge grip
*Pressure control to allow the Centre of Mass to fluidly travel down the hill.
With each of these concepts they introduced a drill to highlight the specific movement focus for example, “stork turns” for balance on the outside ski and “outrigger turns” for pressure control.
Richard did a great job of delivering the technical content, and as you can imagine Riley did a pretty good job of demonstrating it.
The last workshop I attended was the Korean one. There was a lot of interest in this workshop as they skied awesomely on the demo slope using quite an interesting technique.
It proved to be a fascinating workshop…they had 3 demonstrators that could not speak English do all the skiing and one of their technical staff do the presenting. The workshop started with some background on the skiing environment they have in Korea, which is hard snow, no off piste and busy runs. So based on that everyone wants to learn how to do short turns, the interesting part was the steps they presented were not based on biomechanics or physics but more on asthetics and what the Korean skiing public want.
the Korean workshop
We started off in a wedge focusing on weight shifting from foot to foot with no rotary movements so the ski was meant to slide down the fall line. The focus seemed to be on moving from foot to foot while maintaining upper body discipline, from here we moved to parallel with the same focus, then the speed was increased with a bit more grip and the emphasis placed on wide arms and the pole plant.
While their was no real technical steps or “how’s” it gave a great insight into why they ski the way they do…which by the way is pretty impressive.
Words and pcitures – Garret Shore