Skier Balance posts

WHY TRYING TO COPY HIRSCHER AND SHIFFRIN’S MOVES DOESN’T WORK – PART 2

In previous posts I discussed the two studies (1, 2) done by the University of Ottawa in 1998 that analyzed pressure under the feet of elite alpine ski instructors

The pressure data from the study that used 6 elite alpine ski instructors found maximal (peak) force ranged from a high of 1454 Newtons to a low of 522 Newtons. The graph below compares the peak force seen in pressure data captured from the 4 competitive skaters in their own skates from my last post to the highest and lowest peak force seen in pressure data captured from the 6 elite alpine ski instructors used in the 1998 University of Ottawa study.

In consideration of the fact that the researchers commented that force-time histories revealed that forces of up to 3 times body weight can be attained during high performance recreational skiing it is interesting that the peak force of one of the 6 elite alpine ski instructors in the study was less than the lowest peak force of one of the 4 competitive skaters in the 2012 University of Ottawa study while the highest peak force of one of the 6 elite alpine ski instructors in the 1998 study was almost twice the highest peak force of one of the 4 competitive skaters in the 2012 University of Ottawa study.

A significant challenge in attempting to conduct foot pressure studies with alpine skiers is the variability of the slope and environmental and piste conditions. Test conditions and variables, especially ice, can be tightly controlled in the conditioned environment of an indoor skating rink.

Although the studies did not provide pressure data that compared peak and average pressures for different ski instructors, the peak forces from one study reached up to 30 newtons per square centimetre.

In the spring of 2012 I was asked to modify a number of pairs of the same brand and model of a hockey skate for use in a study that would compare metrics derived from pressure data captured from a competitive skater’s own skates to the same metrics from data acquired from skates I had modified. I saw this as an opportunity to document the effect of modifications made to hockey skates based on the principles of neurobiomechanics described in my patents and this blog. When I speculated that the metrics derived from the pressure data might show improvements as high as 10% (i.e. 110%) I was told that the study was unlikely to result in more than a single digit improvement of approximately 2% or 3%.

I modified the pairs of skates in the shop in the garage of my home near Vancouver. The modifications were general in nature and made without the benefit of data on the feet of the test subjects. No modifications were made after I shipped the hockey skates to the University of Ottawa. I was not involved in the design of the study protocol or the actual study. I was hopeful that the study would produce meaningful results because it would have implications that could be extrapolated to alpine skiing.

The graph below shows the highest peak force in Newtons recorded for each of the 4 competitive skaters in their own hockey skates (blue = OS) and in the hockey skates that I modified (red = NS). The improvement was immediate with little or no run in period in which to adapt. The percentage improvement for each skater is shown at the top of each bar.

The mean (i.e. average) improvement was approximately 190%. The only factor that improvements of this magnitude could be attributed to is improved dynamic stability resulting from an improved functional environment in the skate for the foot and leg of the user.

……. to be continued in Part 3.

ANALYSIS OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF PRESSURES UNDER THE FEET OF ELITE ALPINE SKI INSTRUCTORS – Dany Lafontaine, M.Sc.1,2,3, Mario Lamontagne, Ph.D., Daniel Dupuis, M.Sc.1,2, Binta Diallo, B.Sc.: Faculty of Health Sciences1, School of Human Kinetics, Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Anatomy program, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
ANALYSIS OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF PRESSURE UNDER THE FEET OF ELITE ALPINE SKI INSTRUCTORS – Dany Lafontaine, Mario Lamontagne, Daniel Dupuis, Binta Diallo, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

IS SHIFFRIN ON THE LEVEL?

By on the level, I am suggesting that Shiffrin may have a much lower zeppa-delta ramp angle than her competition.

Here are some screen shots from the March 18, 2018 Are Slalom where Shiffrin won by 1.58 seconds. She is on and off her edges in milliseconds as she just seems to pop from turn to turn – Total Domination From Shiffrin (1.)

Compare the angles of Shiffrin’s ankle, knee and hip in the photo below to those of her competition in the second and third photos below.

Notice how extended Shiffrin’s lower body is as she exits the rise line and enters the bottom of the turn in the photo below from a training session earlier in the year.

Extended in the Are Slalom.

Out of the start her knees and ankles are almost straight!

In my next post I will explain what I think is happening and why.

https://youtu.be/gQu-LkyfsRQ?list=PLo6mlcgIm9mzWPBpeXnH2CpFOXrWhBiEB

ZEPPA-DELTA ANGLE EXTENDER

The problem associated with measuring boot board (zeppa) and/or binding (delta) ramp angle as individual components is that the resulting angle may not accurately reflect the actual angle between the plane of the base of the upper surface of the boot board and the base of the ski in the boot/binding/ski system. Boot boards of the same zeppa angle may not necessarily have the same zeppa angle with the base of the boot shell due to design and/or manufacturing variances.

A level inserted into a ski boot shell with the boot board in place can be difficult to read. With the liner in place, this is not a viable option. A better option is to extend the angle of the boot board up above the top of the shaft of the boot so it can be accurately and easily read.

A simple device for this purpose can be made for about $25 with basic hand tools and a few screws using 2 – 8 in (20 cm) x 12 in (30 cm) x 1/8 in (3 mm) thick steel carpenter’s squares.

Place the long arms of the squares over each other as shown in the photo below and clamp them securely together. Two-sided tape can be used to help secure the alignment. Then drill a hole at one point on the vertical leg and screw the 2 squares together.

Check the parallelness of the 2 opposite arms on a level surface with a digital level. If good, secure the 2 levels together with a second screw. Then affix a section of 3/4 in (2 cm) x 3/4 in (2 cm) square or L-bar bar on the top of the extender to rest the level on.

To use the extender, place a boot shell on a hard, flat, level surface. If the surface is not level it should be leveled before the extender is used.

The photo below shows the extender being used to measure the zeppa angle of an old Salomon SX-90 shell. I didn’t have the electronic level for the photo. So I used a small torpedo level.

Insert the lower arm of the device into the shell as shown in the right hand image and place the lower arm firmly on the boot board. Place the level on the top arm and read the angle.

The photo below shows the same process as above. But in this example, the liner is in place. If an insole is in the liner, it should be flat with no arch form. I highlighted the square bar with pink to make it easily visible.

A check of the zeppa-delta angle of the boot-binding-ski system can be done by mounting the boot in the binding of the ski that is part of the system and clamping the ski to a flat surface with sufficient force to ensure the camber is removed and the running surface of the base is in full contact with the supporting surface. A strap wrapped over the front of the boot shell and under and around the supporting surface then tensioned will help ensure that the toe plate of the binding is loaded.

The Zeppa-Delta Angle Extender provides the user with a fast accurate way to know their total number. What’s yours?

WHY STANCE TRAINING IS ESSENTIAL

When readers click on my blog address at skimoves.me, analytics give me a hierarchy of the countries with the most views and the most popular posts in ascending order. This helps me identify which content resonates most strongly with viewers and which content draws a blank.

As I write this post, the top five countries are the US followed by Croatia, the United Kingdom, Slovakia and France.

The most viewed post today is THE SHOCKING TRUTH ABOUT POWER STRAPS; far and away the most popular post I have published to date. But the most important posts by far that I have ever written, A DEVICE TO DETERMINE OPTIMAL PERSONAL RAMP ANGLE and STANCE MUSCLE TENSIONING SEQUENCE EXERCISE barely sputtered in comparison. This strongly suggests that far from just some small gaps in the knowledge base skiing is founded on, massive craters exist.

Arguably the most important aspect of skiing is a strong stance. Any variance in the fore-aft angle of the plane of support under the feet and the plane of the base of the ski has significant impact on stance. Yet these subjects are barely blips on the Doppler Radar of the ski industry.

Since I started the dynamic ramp angle assessment project a few weeks ago I have found that when asked to do so, it is rare for a skier of any ability to be able to assume a strong ski stance in an off the ski hill environment. Even when a skier skis with a relatively strong stance, they seem to lack a sense of what a strong stance feels like. Because of this, they lack the ability to consciously replicate a strong stance. If asked to do so, they would be unable to coach a skier in the sequence of events that I described in my last post

In the dynamic ramp angle assessment project, I have also observed that skiers with with a boot/binding ramp angle greater than 2.8 degrees appear to have become accustomed to the associated unstable, dysfunctional feeling and identify with it as ‘normal’. Before I can test them, I have to spend time coaching them into the correct stance because it feels unnatural to them.

When I go back and forth between a strong functional stance on a flat, hard level surface to a stance on the dynamic ramp angle device set to an angle of 4 degrees, I can get close to the same angles of ankle, knee and hip. But when I do, I feel strong tension, stiffness and even pain in my mid to lower back which is common in some skiers and even racers.

Based on results to date with the dynamic ramp angle device, it appears as if strong skiers ski best with ramp angles close to zero. But depending on their sense of balance and athletic ability, they may have a wide range in which they sense little difference on the effect of ramp angle until they approach the upper limit of stability. While they may be able to ski well with a ramp angle close to the maximum limit of stability, ramp angles much above 1.2 to 1.5 degrees may not offer any benefits. This can only be tested on skis where balance is tested by dynamic forces which cannot be replicated in a static setting.

Issues affecting skier stance were discussed in detail in my post, THE SHOCKING TRUTH ABOUT POWER STRAPS. Here are the excerpts I posted from the chapter on The Ski Boot in the book, The Shoe in Sport (1989), published in German in 1987 as Der Schuh Im Sport– ISNB 0-8151-7814-X

“If flexion resistance stays the same over the entire range of flexion of the ski boot, the resulting flexion on the tibia will be decreased. With respect to the safety of the knee, however, this is a very poor solution. The increasing stiffness of the flexion joint of the boot decreases the ability of the ankle to compensate for the load and places the entire load on the knee”. – Biomechanical Considerations of the Ski Boot (Alpine) – Dr. E. Stussi, Member of GOTS – Chief of Biomechanical Laboratory ETH, Zurich, Switzerland

“The shaft of the boot should provide the leg with good support, but not with great resistance for about two thirds of the possible arc, i.e., (14 degrees) 20 to 22 degrees. Up to that point, the normal, physiologic function of the ankle should not be impeded”.

“Previous misconceptions concerning its role in absorbing energy must be replaced by the realization that shaft pressure generates impulses affecting the motion patterns of the upper body, which in turn profoundly affect acceleration and balance.

“When the lateral stability of the shaft (the leg) is properly maintained, the forces acting in the sagittal direction should not be merely passive but should be the result of active muscle participation and tonic muscular tension. If muscular function is inhibited in the ankle area, greater loads will be placed on the knee”. – Kinematics of the Foot in the Ski Boot – Professor Dr. M. Pfeiffer – Institute for the Athletic Science, University of Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria

It has been over 40 years since international authorities on sports science and safety raised red flags concerning the adverse effects of ski boots design and construction on skier stance, balance and the potential to cause or contribute to injury. It is time that their concerns were taken seriously and acted on. Research on stance and the effect of such things as zeppa and delta ramp angles is urgently needed.

STANCE MUSCLE TENSIONING SEQUENCE EXERCISE

Tensegrity

Tens(ion) + (Int)egrity

The optimal ramp angle, as determined by the dynamic ramp device, is based on a stance predicated on the principles of tensegrity.

Fascial continuity suggests that the myofascia acts like an adjustable tensegrity around the skeleton – a continuous inward pulling tensional network like the elastics, with the bones acting like the struts in the tensegrity model, pushing out against the restricting ‘rubber bands: Tom Myers, Anatomy Trains (1.)

A ski stance based on the principles of tensegrity must be learned and rehearsed in a step-by-step process. It is neither natural or intuitive although elite skiers and racers such as Shiffrin and Hirscher appear to have acquired the elements of tensegrity. Assuming a group of racers of equal athletic ability, the odds will favour those whose stance is based on tensegrity.

In a ski stance base on tensegrity, tension in the arches of the feet will extend to the palms of the hands holding the poles.

Start by standing barefoot on a hard flat floor or surface in a controlled environment such as your home. Where possible, use the same surface and place to rehearse the stance. If you have constructed a dynamic ramp assessment device, use this with the top plate set to level.
Stand upright at attention. You should feel most of the weight under your heels and less weight across the balls of your feet. This is normal. The fore-aft weight distribution is actually 50-50 heel to forefoot. But because the weight of the body is spread across the balls of the feet and along the outer aspect behind the small toes, more weight is sensed under the heels. Stand so your weight is distributed equally between both feet.
Relax your hamstrings (in your thighs) and let your torso drop towards the floor. Your knees move forward as they flex and your ankles will dorsiflex. Your ankles should stop dorsiflexing on their own when the front of your knee caps are aligned approximately over the balls of your feet. This is the point where the tension in your soleus (calf muscle) peaks with the tension in your arches. You should feel about the same pressure under the balls of your feet as you feel under your heels. But it should feel as if the circle of pressure under your heels has gotten bigger and your feet should feel more connected or integrated with the floor. I call this ‘rooted’ because it should feel as if your feet have sunk into the floor.
While keeping your upper body erect, move slightly forward in the hips. You will quickly reach a point where you start to become unstable and feel as if you would fall forward onto your face if you move farther forward in the hips. When you get to this point your big toes should press down on the floor on their own to try stabilize you. This is the forward limit of stability.
Now move rearward in the hips until you start to feel the same instability. This is the rearmost limit of stability.
Now bend forward from the waist. Do not curl your back. Bend from the hip sockets for the thigh. The movement is actually thigh flexion. Lift your thigh to get the right feeling. As you bend forward from the waist, let your buttocks move rearward. Your ankles and knees straighten. Allow your buttocks to drop towards the floor until you feel your body settling onto your feet. As this happens, reach forward with your arms as if you were going to hug a large barrel in front of you. Make sure the palms of your hands are facing each other with fingers curled and pointing towards each other. Find the place where your arms and head feel neutral to your spine. As your arms come into position you should feel your abdominal core and muscles in your back acquire tension.
Experiment by increasing the amount of flexion at the waist while keeping solid pressure under your heels and balls of your feet as you straighten your knees slightly. As you increase the forward bend at the waist, pressure should increase under the balls of your feet. But you should not feel unstable. If anything, you should feel stronger and more stable. Make sure to keep solid pressure under your heels as you increase the pressure under the balls of your feet. You should feel as if the weight of your head and shoulders is pressing your feet down into the floor.
Increase the bend at your waist while keeping the pressure on the balls of your feet and heels until the top of your head is down by your knees. You should still feel very strong and stable in the feet. The is the lowermost limit of waist flexion.

Once you have acquired a kinesthetic sense of the integrity of foot to hand tension, a sense of stability while pulsing the torso vertically up and down over the feet confirms a state of tensegrity.

The photo below is of simple model I designed and constructed in 1993 to illustrate the basic concept of bottom up tensegrity and how the degree of tension in the arches of the feet and the vertical biokinetic chain is driven by the weight of COM stacked over the foot.

The graphic below shows the continuum of tension from the balls of the feet to the opposite shoulders through the mechanism of the transverse posterior sling.

In my next post I will discuss what I term the NABOSO Effect.

https://www.anatomytrains.com/fascia/tensegrity/

A DEVICE TO DETERMINE OPTIMAL PERSONAL RAMP ANGLE

This post contains the most important information I have ever written on skiing. It concerns the most important discovery I have made since I began to cast a critical eye on the positions of the various experts about 45 years ago; a method to determine the optimal personal ramp angle of a skier/racer.

By 1978, subjective experiments had taught me that a total ramp angle between the sole of the foot and the base of a ski of more than 3 degrees could have significant adverse effects on skier stability, balance and the ability to control the direction and especially the edge angle, of a ski. Wherever possible, I tried to limit total ramp angle (boot boards + bindings) to below or close to 3 degrees. But ski boot and binding construction often limited my ability to reach this objective. It was limitations in the construction of my current Head World Cup boot that presented challenges in getting the boot board ramp angle below 3 degrees. Through a concerted effort I had managed to reduce ramp angle to 3.3 degrees (bindings are zero) with a noticeable improvement in balance, ski and edge control. But the results of my recent NABOSO insole test suggested that the boot board ramp angle needed to be a lot lower.

The Dynamic Ski Stance Theory

A standard test of the human balance system is to subject a subject to dynamic changes in the platform under their feet. Over the past few years, I made numerous attempts to find the optimal ramp angle for skiing. One method involved assuming my strongest stance on a hard, flat level surface then stepping onto a plate shimmed to a fixed angle then repeating the process with the plate shimmed to a different angle. The results were inconclusive. Every time I went back to the hard, flat level starting surface my balance system seemed to reset. I had to get the angle of the tilted plate well over 3 degrees before I began to sense obvious instability. This led to my positing of a theory that the angle of a plate that a skier is standing on needs to be changed as the skier goes through a stance protocol designed to test stability and what I call a rooted or grounded connection where the skier feels as if their feet are literally rooted in the snow.

Research is Urgently Needed

Before I go any further I want to stress that I believe that an idea, no matter how compelling, is nothing more than a theory until it has been thoroughly tested and has withstood rigorous scrutiny. Even then, no theory should be immune to challenges. Research on this subject is urgently needed and long overdue. With this in mind, I designed the dynamic stance assessment device so it can be easily made with reasonable skills and readily available, inexpensive materials. I have recently completed a 4th generation prototype to serve this end. But a much more sophisticated device can and should be made and used by academic researchers. A servo motor driven ramp with a data acquisition package is the preferred option.

Stance Training is Essential

In order to obtain accurate results with the dynamic stance assessment ramp it is essential that the subject being tested undergo kinesthetic stance training and follow a protocol during testing that is designed to help the subject assess the effect of changes in ramp angle. It is disturbing that few of the skiers tested so far have a kinesthetic sense of the elements of a strong stance. Most have never sensed a strong stance. Worse, no ski pro or coach has ever discussed this crucial aspect of skiing with them. It appears as if it is simply assumed that a skier will automatically find their optimal stance. I can unequivocally state that this is not the case.

Dynamic Stance Ramp Test Results

The majority of skiers tested so far were most stable at ramp angles between 2.0 and 2.5 degrees.
A number of skiers, myself included, were most stable at close to or under 1.2 degrees.
One skier was most stable at 1.6 degrees.
One skier appeared to be relatively insensitive to ramp angle until it was above 2.8 degrees.
After training, most skiers were sensitive to changes of 0.1 degrees.
No skier tested so far was stable over 2.8 degrees.
Adding NABOSO insoles further reduced the ramp angle.

I tested most stable at 1.2 degrees; 2.1 degrees less than my existing boot board ramp angle. In order to reduce the boot board ramp angle to 1.2 degrees, I had to raise the toe end of my boot board 9 mm and lower the heel 2 mm for a total reduction of 11 mm.

First On Snow Impressions

Walking in my ski boots with the corrected boot board ramp angle immediately felt different. But the huge impact didn’t come until I started moving over the surface of the snow on my skis. Then the whole world seemed to change. I had a huge deja-vu moment; one that took me back to the solid, stable feeling I had under my feet in my first low-cut leather plastic soled ski boots. It was then that I realized that it was the jacked up heels of my first all plastic, rigid shell ski boots 45 years ago that had destroyed my balance and confidence on skis. This is a big miss for the ski industry, one that should have been caught by those who promote themselves as the experts in skiing, but wasn’t. This miss has huge implications for skiers at every level and ability all the way up to the World Cup. A skier, but especially a racer with a sub-optimal ramp angle will revert to an unstable weight on the heels, back seat Defensive Stance in which the skier is incapable of recruiting the enormous power of the glutes and optimal sensorimotor processes.

First generation device in action. Ratchet socket wrenches raise the ramp by turning bolts set into T-Nuts on each end.

Digital SmartTool electronic level accurate to 2 decimal places

Fourth Generation Stance Ramp assessment prototype. Two x two wood stiffening elements added to the platform.

The skiing of those whose ramp angle has been optimized is elevated to a whole new level provoking immediate comments like the difference is ‘night and day‘. After my transformation, I now believe that until ramp angle is optimized, everything else is irrelevant and that no amount of footbeds, orthotics, cants, alignment or custom fitting can overcome the adverse affect of sub-optimal ramp.

NABOSO: FIRST SKI TEST RESULTS

I finally got a chance to test Dr. Emily Splichal’s surface science small nerve stimulating NABOSO insoles (1.)

Naboso (meaning “barefoot” in Czech) is the first-ever small nerve proprioceptive material commercially available in the health and fitness industry. The skin on the bottom of the foot contains thousands of (small nerve) proprioceptors, which are sensitive to different stimuli including texture, vibration, skin stretch, deep …

As I typically do, I used a one on one test protocol with a NABOSO 1.5 insole in my left ski boot and my normal insole in my right boot. The results were nothing short of amazing. There was almost no difference in the feeling under the sole of my left (NABOSO) foot compared to the sole of my right (normal insole) foot. The NABOSO Effect (as I call it) in my left ski boot was nothing like the effect I experience in similar tests in my Xero Prios or Lems Primal 2 minimal shoes. You’re probably wondering why I was amazed if NABOSO was no better than my normal insoles. The fact that I felt little difference told me that something was seriously wrong with my ski boots.

The first thing I suspected was that there was too much ramp angle (aka zeppa) in the boot boards in my Head 335 World Cup boots. I can’t recall what the factory ramp angle. But I lowered the heel a lot and the reduced ramp angle seemed to work well compared to the original ramp angle. As a reference, the boot board zeppa angle in the Head RD boot is 4.0 according to Head literature. The zeppa in recreational ski boots can be as much as 7 degrees. Since 1978, I have known that too much boot board ramp angle can cause significant balance and ski control issues for skiers. But I had no way of accurately determining what the optimal zeppa angle should be. What appears to work well for one skier does not necessarily work for another skier. Zeppa is a crap shoot, a good guess, a lottery. A few skiers win the zeppa lottery. But most skiers lose. I decided that I had to find an accurate way to determine the optimal personal zeppa angle for skiers and especially racers.

Necessity is the mother of invention.

I had a need to know situation. In my next post I will describe the Dynamic Ramp Angle assessment device that I designed and fabricated and the incredible results that happen when zeppa angle is in the optimal range and the NABOSO Effect kicks in. Prepare to be shocked by the results. I was. I am still in shock. If the results hold up, optimal boot board ramp angle will be a big miss for the ski industry.

http://nabosotechnology.com

The Skier's Manifesto