Shake up your Skiing with CST®

by Adam Steer

Adam has worked 20 seasons in the ski industry, teaching recreational skiers and coaching elite athletes. He is one of a handful of Course Conductors in Canada to work at the prestigious Level IV certification of the Canadian Ski Instructor's Alliance. Adam has also travelled widely as one of the top Examiners or the International Inline Skating Association, providing Instructor Certification and Examiner Training in Canada, Europe and the United States. After years of training with "conventional" methods, and attaining the National Strength and Conditioning Association - Certified Personal Trainer qualification, Adam stumbled upon CST and has not looked back since!

One of the most magical and exhilarating aspects of skiing is the seemingly gravity defying ability to hover inches from the snow as you balance against the inertial forces that are pulling you towards the outside of the turn (photo). If you aren’t familiar with skiing, picture a sport motorcyclist making a tight turn at high speed and you will be able to imagine the same banking effect against the forces that are trying to pull the bike and biker to the outside of the arc (photo). The feeling of laying yourself over as those inertial forces build throughout the turn is indescribable.

As an elite level ski coach, I see very few skiers who have been given the opportunity to experience this piece of paradise. Most people I see on the slopes, even seemingly very good skiers, are stuck in a rut of stiff, robotic skiing that prevents them from tapping into the flow required to perform this feat of multi-planar balance.

The problem often lies in our perception of good skiing, and the way that skiing has been taught and ski technique communicated in the past. All too often our skiers are taught to ski through "positions," "poses," or "stances." I hear things like: "put your hands up", "push your arms forward", "press on the front of your boots." Please understand that I do not for an instant profess that instructors and coaches don't know what they are talking about. Each of these directions, in the moment, may indeed be valid. However, let’s consider a different approach. How about looking at "why" the skier’s hands are not naturally moving higher, for example. If the fundamental structure of the skier is lacking, it will be impossible to make lasting changes in the ephemeral property of stance.

A stance is a fleeting thing through which a skier passes in an instant, only to move onto and through another in a constant search for balance. Imagine balancing an umbrella on your fingertip. The umbrella is never "balanced." You must continually readjust your finger under the center of mass of the umbrella in order seek a new instance of balance. The moment that you stop moving, the umbrella will tumble. There is no “perfect stance" for umbrella balancing. The same is true for skiing. There are fundamental principles of balance and structure which, when applied, will lead to recognizable stances that are similar from one good skier to the next, but there are not perfect stances.

If we seek to perfect or copy a stance instead of searching for the proprioceptive awareness of good balance and structure, we will never discover a true state of Zero Position (Sonnon, Body-Flow p54). One of my favorite tools for helping my skiers to develop a sense of their own structure and to detect areas of excess and inefficient tension in their bodies is to shake things up a little. The exercise focuses on being able to "shake your hands with your legs." It is essentially an on-snow version of a CST vibration drill. The idea is to send a wave through your body to shake your hand by dropping your mass down towards the ground and then absorbing it through mid-foot into the ground. If the skier is relaxed, this wave will travel up through the body and into the shoulders, arms and finally the hands, causing them to "shake." If the skier is holding unnecessary tension, this wave will be impeded somewhere along the line and the hands will remain stiff.

Through experimentation, the skier can usually discover where the wave is being blocked. The natural inclination is to think that the problem is in the hand, arm or shoulder, but more often than not it originates in the trunk or lower body and irradiates from there. By having the skier experiment statically (standing still), they will discover how changing their structure affects the tension. By working with the alignment of the body segments (equal flexion) and with the fore/aft and lateral planes, they will discover how movement affects structure and how structure affects the tension in their bodies. In essence they are discovering true balance, where all forces pulling on the body are zeroed out so that muscular recruitment is only used to hold their structure in place, instead of to hold them upright. Structure holds them upright instead.

Once they get the feel for this statically, we can move it back into a dynamic sphere on easy terrain in a shallow arc, and then gradually increase the difficulty of the terrain, turn shape and speed. Once skiers start to integrate the concept of looking for a state of natural structural alignment instead of looking to reproduce a "stance," they are ready to start exploring the lateral balancing that will lead to the astounding and gravity-defying feats mentioned earlier.

This is an interesting example of how CST principles extend far beyond martial arts into any endeavor of human movement. CST encompasses universal principles of movement, principles which are wholly transferable to other domains with careful thought and experimentation. My experiments in working CST principles into my understanding of skiing have been rich and rewarding, and I am excited about the implications for my students and for myself.

Publisher: Scott Sonnon - Senior Editor: Ryan Murdock

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