I am a beginner at skiing and I have a lot of difficulty doing the movement for the pizza/wedge shape. I have significant leg muscles but I find it very difficult to rotate my skiis, either because I don’t know what muscles to use or because the muscles needed for that movement are weak.
Is there a kind of a cheap device that I could buy to practice that particular movement?
There are machines for that.This one has been around for a long time.
If you already have “significant leg muscles” you probably just need more time on skis.
I have watched strong (muscle-wise) beginners make a lot of progress in just one season by skiing once a week or so.
If you are limited to one trip a year, it is a lot harder to progress. Lessons would probably help.
This will sound like a cop out, but more time on the slope.
The reason it is difficult to rotate your skis is that you are trying to use brute force vs levering the fundamental methods that skis use to turn.
While there is a fitness component, a wedge will eventually take about as much effort as standing does, but as you don’t have the muscle memory or the trust/experience to know that it is work you are expending massively more effort that you will be fairly soon.
Unfortunately the cheapest device for this is a ski ticket, or try cross country randonee skiing and “earn your turns” If you are close to snow but not lifts. This is the exact same phenomenon you experience with guitar playing or any other a new motor skill.
Improving your cardio health and lunges do help a bit, but muscle memory is what you need to develop right now. While I no don’t often snow plow unless I am grabbing something out of a backpack, or taking off a jacket etc…I can hold that position for just as long as I could stand in one position without much physical output.
You are tense, over correcting and don’t have a balance model to fit this use case, but it will come quickly if you can get more days in this year.
I could never do that wedge thing, and even if I could, it didn’t do anything. Like rat avatar said, just practice. Find a slope that’s got a nice bunny hill and a good size ‘not huge’ hill. Do the bunny one a few times, then go hit the bigger one, over and over and over and over.
Don’t worry about the wedge thing. Concentrate on slaloming and not hitting anyone. And by slaloming, I just mean big back and forths, not actual slaloming. Even if you’re going 10 or 20 or 30 feet back and forth…even if you’re cutting half way across the hill. At this point it’s more about maintaining control, not picking up speed (most hills prohibit ‘bombing’ the hill) and learning how to turn).
At a certain point you’ll find you’ve gotten much better, you’ll be able to ride up on the edge, you’ll be able to go from the top of the hill and and cut right into the the tow rope without even stopping.
But, yeah, it’s just practice. Plan to spend 4 or 5 hours on the hill at time and expect it to be at least your 3 or 4th time out before you feel really comfortable.
And don’t hesitate to ask if they have a trainer that can take you out.
Lastly, I don’t know where you are, but if they’re putting down fake snow, you may want to hold off a bit until there’s some real stuff. The fake snow is a bit harder to ski on, it’s more like hail.
One last thing, if it just doesn’t click for you, rent a snowboard a few times. I skid for a few years and then switched to snowboarding and loved it. It’s totally different, but I had a lot more fun doing it. It’s been 20 years since I did it regularly (I may have gone once or twice a year after that), but I’m pretty confident I could still get on a board and make a few runs down a hill without killing myself.
My 19 year old tenant moved to aspen to ski more and became an instructor, he came back to visit a couple years later and his legs looked like tree trunks, he was a skinny kid when he left.
Former competitive skier and life time ski brat here.
As previous posters said, it’s more about technique than power. Most people of average fitness can perform the stem/wedge christie without additional strength training.
The issue with your technique is “rotation”. Most beginners try to rotate the skis by swinging their upper body or some other similar wrong technique.
In a correct ski turn, whether basic or advanced, body rotation is not what should be going on. What should be going on is weighing and un-weighing, ensuring that the majority of your weight 70 to nearly 100 percent is on your downhill ski, on the inside edge. Obviously, the better you ski, the faster you ski, the shorter the turn radius, the more weight transferred.
It’s easier to show than to explain but I’ll do my best to talk you through it:
Practice, practice, practice linking your turns and letting the skis run across the hill between turns. Remember to trust the skis to carve the turn for you. Do not swing your shoulders, arms, trunk or anything else. To check your speed on steeper runs or if you think you’re starting to loose control, maintain the carving in step 7 until you are skiing slightly up hill and your momentum/speed starts to bleed off and you’re back to a comfortable pace, or full stop.
P.S. If you insist on ski specific exercises, plyometrics, weight training, running (particularly up hill) and various balance and core building exercises will help. But your technique will only improve with skis on.
As others have said, practice and improve your technique. Ski another day or two, then take a more advanced lesson. Skiing with proper technique, as Quicksilver describes, is physically much easier than brute forcing a wedge. I went skiing last week for the first time in 6 or 7 years. I’m horribly out of shape, and quickly tired myself out by turning with the back of my foot, and forcing my skis. Once I had a run or two under me to get the feel back, and I was turning properly again I was putting in so much less effort that I felt like I could go all day.
It will also get easier as you get a “feel” for snow, and get better balanced on your skis.
“When in doubt, go faster and use more edge.” – some ski instructor I had.
I can turn modestly alright but I just need the wedge in case that the turn radius is too large and I am spilling out of the slope. The wedge is the only thing that I know to reliably slow down without hitting something. The thing is I am not going to travel for skii every week, but next time I do intend to stay for several days, maybe that will help.
QuickSilver nailed it in one. Memorize that post.
Your best bet is to take some ski lessons from a professional, who can help you use what you already have by explaining and demonstrating the technique and helping you get the hang of it.
When you make a turn while skiing down the hill, you are creating an arc. Skis are flexible and are shaped to make them form an arc when you put weight on them. For the most part, turning is about positioning your body to make it easy for you to put the right amount of weight/force on the right part of a ski at the right time. A good instructor can get you doing this in fairly short order. These days, skis pretty much ski themselves, with much of the steering being no more than applying weight to the front of the ball of the foot of the ski that will be the downhill ski during your turn while at the same time angling the ski so that it’s inside edge rather than the entire flat base of the ski rides into the snow.
Obligatory ski porn – note what the skis are doing, and how the entire body makes them form arcs in a dance with gravity. Now what do you have to do to get most of your weight over the inside edge of your downhill ski to make it arc? It all starts with getting an athletic body position over the skis when double stemming / snow plowing / wedging / pizzaing, and then apply the gas pedal with the front of the ball of your foot of the ski that will be downhill when turning. Don’t worry about muscles for now. Have a look at how even with wedging, the skier has an athletic body stance, gets the turning ski up on edge, and applies weight/force to it to make it bend into an arc and cause a turn. Not much physical effort at this level, so learn technique rather than build muscles for now. Notice how the skier progresses from wedging through to parallel turns without an increase in physical effort.
So much for the party line. Personally, I find the wedge turn more complicated than a parallel turn, so don’t get hung up on it as long as you are progressing in some sort of turn and are skiing in control. With a wedge turn, one side of you body is trying to turn one direction, and the other side of your body is trying to turn the other direction, such that the two competing turns cancel each other out and act as a brake while you descend the hill. Once you get fed up with fighting yourself, you start only working one ski and ignore/un-weight the other and lo-and-behold, you find yourself making a lovely controlled turn in one direction. In other words, don’t sweat it if you don’t grok wedge turns at first.
If your primary use of a wedge is to brake, try cheating during the wedge brake by lowering your butt. It’s bad form for progressing to stem-christies and full christies/alpine parallel (it puts weight toward the back of the skis rather than over the half-chord of the skis), but during wedging it will tend to get you up on your edges which will significantly reduce your speed. Drop the anchor by dropping your butt a bit – but don’t get in the habit of doing this.
Start working on a full-christie / parallel / hockey stop. Begin on a wide slope. Turn toward the middle of the slope and keep turning until you come to a stop as you start turning up hill. Practice this.
Keep doing this, but then before you come to a stop, push your heels down the hill slightly to skid the tails of your skis. Practice this.
Accentuate the skidding action. Before you know it, you will be skidding to a stop with ease as you get more sensitive to moving onto your edges and pivoting your skis at the same time: a hockey stop.
The skies aren’t really straight. The edges are curved. That means that when you put the weight on the correct edge, the ski turns your leg. You don’t use your leg to turn the ski.
Since weighting-unweighting is what is required, you practice that by balancing on an edge of one foot.
If you lacked muscle tone, you could also do strength excercies. Since you don’t, just do the balance-on-one-foot and balance-on-each-edge-of-each-foot.
You want to learn to be able to keep your weight in one place without thinking about it, so the longer you spend doing this the better you get. (The excercise is less boring on skis on a slope…).
As mentioned above, if you already have good balance and control, you have to do that exercise on skis, so you can learn what the ski does when you change your balance.
The first time I ever skiid the best piece of advice for me was the idea that the snowplough turn was all about weight shift rather than “forcing” the skis into a turn using legs and hips. It is just as Quicksilver said. It made sense to me so my first tentative runs saw me with the snowplough shape but really exaggerating the weight shift over each downhill ski in turn and so the turn followed naturally from that. If you exaggerate enough you’ll find that the uphill ski naturally becomes completely unweighted and can be brought parallel to the downhill ski.
From that position the world is your oyster as it is far easier and far less effort to control speed and direction than sticking in the snowplough stance and you’ll find that you only use the v-shape when preparing for the next turn or very low speed manoeuvring at the lift gates etc.
Now all the above depends very much on you feeling confident enough to make those exaggerated weight shifts and that comes naturally to some and not so much to others which is where good coaching comes in.
And I’ll echo what others have said, repetition and time. Find a hill that you feel comfortable on, that you know and trust. Get to it early when the snow is smooth and the slope uncrowded. Do it as many times as possible and you’ll very quickly stop thinking about the slope itself (because it now holds no terrors or surprises) and you can think much more about specific technical elements.
This is a common thing for beginners. You can make do with poor technique on shallower slopes, but get to a steeper section and suddenly speed builds and the wedge turns into a plow because you’ve distributed your weight 50-50 over both skis and you’re simply fighting gravity to survive.
It’s counter intuitive but the steeper the slope the easier it is to execute a turn with the technique I described earlier. Learn to trust the technique and the ski will carve the turn much more efficiently than any snow plow you think you can grind out before you run out of room. Also, if you find your weight back on your heels, and on the back of your skis, you’ve essentially lost control. It may be a little scary at first because you’ll accelerate briefly, but transfer your weight forward and back on the balls of your feet. You will not be able to carve a turn from the back of your skis.
Good luck next time out and remember that what I’ve described is not just something to do when everything else isn’t working. It’s the correct way to ski from now on. There’s more advanced stuff to know once you master this new (to you) technique, but everything else builds on this.
[del]Brake a leg![/del] Have fun!
Core.
Core.
Quads.
Core.
Core.
Gluts.