How Do I Turn?

[lowangle al]

Are you on Nansens?

[mca80]

Are you on Nansens?

If not on tracks. When going for tracks Finnmark.

[Lo-Fi]

Here's the gif of the exercise @lowangle al was referring to from the older thread:

(The Telemark Movie)

It is everything you need to perfect a telemark turn, (except the turning effort):

Proper tele position
weighting & unweighting
rhythm
fore & aft balance
side to side balance
hand position (you can add pole plants into this too)
...

Even after years of skiing, I still use this regularly to warm up at the start of a ski session to get my mind and body into the right groove.

[JohnSKepler]

How do I turn my skis without my heel locked down?

I was asking this question around the same time. I'm turning now.

[tkarhu]

I am wondering one thing related to Stephen’s following comment.

My experience trying to turn narrow, cambered skis is that:
- In soft snow, the skis will bend more easily into an arc for the turn, and that it’s also possible to steer a flatter ski by skidding the tail by pushing hard on the heel;

More specifically, my wondering is related to what @riel wrote in another thread:

There is a trick to making stiff cross country skis turn.
Not only do you want most of your weight on the outside ski, you want most of your weight on your heel on that outside ski.
That way the tail of the outside ski will skid toward the new direction you want to glide in. Once your outside ski is pointing where you want to go, move your inside ski alongside it, and weigh both skis evenly again.

I also weight the inner rear edge of my front ski in deepish (10-40 cm) snow, too, with my Gammes. I am just wondering, what is the mechanics why and how that works? I can repeat the trick, but understanding the mechanics could let me use my skis in more creative ways.

I have a few initial assumptions, what could be the reason.

1) Could the trick work because that weighting helps carving? I think pressuring is not that important in deep snow because skis really do not carve there I guess. So if that would be a hard surface trick, it would sound more like a carving thing I guess. Well Gamme nordic rocker for sure might do something there, but is that enough to carve?

2) Could it work through weight placement against an external force? Many sea kayaking techniques use such tricks. For example, you lean your body weight towards the front of a kayak, if you want to turn your kayak towards a wave. Similarly, when you put weight on the back of your ski, the rear part of your ski starts to press towards the external force (ie. downhill snow), and its front end will move away from the force. You could think of this also as two rows of men pushing against each other, like in some sports. At places of the row where your own team pushes hard, it will move towards or through the opposing team’s row. At places where you push less, the opposing team will push through your team’s row. Likewise, the less weighted end of a kayak will move away from a wave, and the less weighted end of a ski will move uphill, away from the friction that you are facing. (This idea feels somewhat counter intuitive to me, but it really works at least for the sea kayaking part of it because I use it in practice.)

3) Could it work through some other mechanics?

I tried to google this, but did not find anything specific to telemark turns. Most was about alpine skiing, where weight placement can be somewhat different I guess.

One more idea. @Stephen in citation below, does your idea of front rudder come from kayaking maybe, or ship engineering? In sea kayaking, you have a turn called front rudder. You place your paddle in water at the front of your kayak, and lean forwards. Both friction from the paddle and body forward position put weight to the front part of a kayak. However, the kayaking technique might be opposite to how Stephen describes front rudder. I mean in the kayaking front rudder you put weight in the front, but in the telemark turn Stephen describes, you put weight more at the back because rear foot weighting is emphasized. So would telemark turn be more like a traditional rear rudder then? In both of the latter two mentioned, there is more weight at the rear.

there was a day last winter where the snow seemed a little challenging, a little heavy and harder to turn in. I was on the 205 Ingstad.
Randomly, I put more weight on my back foot in the turn, maybe 60%.
This allowed the front ski to be freer, and easier to rotate into the turn.
I have never felt like my skis are like a rudder, since they are generally under my body, but with the front ski less weighted, and out in front, it felt like a front rudder.

[Stephen]

@tkarhu, that is a lot to respond to, #1, and #2, I'm such a work in progress that anything more than 10 minutes old might be outdated!

Anyway, there are many here who can answer with much more experience and each persons take on how all this works (and what works for them) can vary.

Personally, I think with the stiffer, double camber skis, a carved turn is going to have a looong arc.
To make a tighter turn, the ski has to skid.

So, pushing on the heel helps the back of the ski skid.
The other thing is edge angle.
In a carved turn, edging is important to roll the ski on edge and allow the middle of the ski to be less supported and therefore press away from the skier, while the tip and tail are more supported, thereby causing the ski to bend into an arc, and to "carve."

So, in a skidded turn, you don't want the tail of the ski to cut into the snow, you want it to slide across the snow.
The trick is to master the correct angle to allow the ski to slide the amount you want it to slide, but a flatter ski is needed than in carving a turn. This also takes mental and physical commitment. One needs to gradually discover the magic that makes it all happen as one hopes it will!

As for rudder, most boats don't have a front rudder, but in canoeing or kayaking, and especially in tandem canoe whitewater, front "rudder" can be used.
Anyway, there are links here somewhere of Asnes promo videos, where it looks to me that the skiers are mostly back ski weighted (and not in the same way as, for example, and NTN skier on piste has more or less even weight on the skis).
To me the result seems at least two fold:
1. It's a safety mechanism to help keep them from getting "thrown over the handlebars" as snow conditions change, and;
2. The front ski is doing what skis always do, but the visual for me reminds me of a rudder. Maybe it's more like a "trim-tab." I don't know -- it just looks a little different than "normal."
I'm trying to figure this out as I go here...
The fact that the snow is loose, like water, and the front ski is sort of skimming over the surface, but still engaged with the snow, but not locked in, and able to more subtly change the direction of the turn.
And, yes, this has worked for me.

Edit: The sensation was that the front ski was not doing all the turning, just proving additional input for the turn -- maybe 30%, with a lighter, somewhat skimming contact with the snow.

Best I can do -- hope that helps!

[lowangle al]

Weighting your heel on the lead ski definately helps in carving, not sure why though. One reason may be that when you put weight on your heel you may also be flexing your ankle forward which would give you better edge control.

[Stephen]

@tkarhu, here's something to check out (not the attire, the skill and technique, attire is optional!):

[JohnSKepler]

@tkarhu , I don't know how it works either. I've been thinking about the dynamics for a year or so now and have been asking people this question and scouring the internet for a while now. I found a few papers you might find helpful.

https://scholarworks.montana.edu/xmlui/ ... sequence=1
https://www.nzsia.org/wp-content/upload ... -June-.pdf

The first one is from Montana St. Any chance you know the guy who wrote this @Montana St Alum ?

Aside from the papers, I've been doing a ton of lunges in the gym. Telemark lunges, to be exact, where you lower straight down, not step forward over the front foot. I've gotten comfortable with the Telemark stance, which I first saw in the Telemark movie, like in the clip above. Between that, pointing my toes, and putting torsional pressure on my skis, I'm linking Telemark turns. They aren't pretty, but I'm doing it. The thing that has helped me the MOST has been getting comfortable in the Telemark stance and this is what the Telemark movie says you must do first.

Strangely, I find it isn't making me tired. I don't know if it's the soccer or the lunges or both but it just feels much more natural than a parallel alpine turn ever did.

Currently I'm trying to tighten up my form as my skis keep wandering apart both side to side and front to back. Not sure how to fix that...

[Stephen]

@JohnSKepler, lots of words and pictures too!

Should be great.