How Do I Turn?

[lowangle al]

I agree with the beginner approach of starting on a smooth bunny hill and alternating leading feet without turning at first. if you can't balance going straight, you cannot balance in turns.

If I could go back to the mid 80s when I first tried this drill I would have spent 10 hours on it instead of the maybe 10 minutes I put into it at the time. I think it could have shaved 10 years off of my learning curve.

[lowangle al]

Lofi, It's nice to do jump turns when you want to as opposed to needing to do them to ensure your skis come around on every turn like on the old gear.


Bouerb, try what I said about weighting your skis before you start turning. It should be easy as you don't have to rush the turn and you are separating the turning and weighting functions. Basically you unweight during the transition only and your turn doesn't start until you weight and edge the skis. Your turns in your videos appear to combine the transition and turning while your skis are unweighted. While great in some situations you don't get smoothness from it.

In Tom's video, I think it's Stephen, he is doing a great job considering he hasn't been at it that long. You can see there is instability in his technique evidenced by his poling. I'm not sure of the reason but my guess is that he is not perfectly centered as this is something that he said he is working on in another post.

[Lo-Fi]

I agree with the beginner approach of starting on a smooth bunny hill and alternating leading feet without turning at first. if you can't balance going straight, you cannot balance in turns.

If I could go back to the mid 80s when I first tried this drill I would have spent 10 hours on it instead of the maybe 10 minutes I put into it at the time. I think it could have shaved 10 years off of my learning curve.

Yes indeed! x10

(The Telemark Movie)

Proper tele position + weighting & unweighting + rhythm + fore/aft balance + side to side balance + hand position…

100% indispensable beginner learning exercise and practice drill(throughout your tele career!).

Pro Tip: In high resistance snow situations, start your descent by straight line running directly down the fall line like this, to gather momentum and rhythm, then add turning effort as required.

[joeatomictoad]

Resort skiing for me, first run or two of the day... I like to warm up with traversing lead changes (or straight line, if not too steep) and monomarking drills.

Sometimes I get into a funk later in the day and reverting back to these basic drills is helpful to pull my head back into the sunshine.

[bauerb]

I'm wondering if some of the struggles that beginners have with Tele turns is due to "tele fitness". fitness is probably less of a factor for an expert alpine skier with many days under their belt, but for an "off the couch" tele beginner, I suspect that tele turns may feel exceptionally demanding. try doing a set of 50 double leg squats(alpine) then a set of 50 single leg lunges( tele ).

[zonca]

Two thumbs up for the lead change traverse drill. An advanced version can be done on a steep mogul run where you can get a natural walking feeling by extending into the troughs and sort of stepping over the peaks. Just make sure you take a glance uphill as you cross the run.

[lowangle al]

Fitness is part of it for sure since the more stamina you have the more practice you can get in. Strength is also an issue and more so for a beginner that hasn't yet found their center. If you are not centered you will have more weight on one ski than the other. It's having too much weight on one leg that burns them out. If you can keep your skis fairly equally weighted and maintain it throughout the day you will get a lot more mileage out of your legs and strength and fitness is less of an issue.

[Stephen]

Conditioning…

I thought I was in reasonably fit condition after a summer on hard landscape work.

Knowing that I will be getting into more demanding equipment (V6 / TX Pro / active NTN), I started doing an exercise that mimics Telemark stance.

One foot in front of the other, maintain posture, sit down with weight on back foot.
Not a lunge onto the front foot. Maybe a squat onto the back foot?
Anyway, I could do 20 and my thighs ached for two weeks as I worked my way up to 50.
I can now do more than 50, but the point is: that movement uses muscles in a way that is not typical.
I was pretty surprised.
Without the conditioning, I think one would favor the stronger stance onto the front foot.

I then did this with the TX Pro boots on.
Wow, unlike a leather boot, they sure add a lot of exo support.

[Montana St Alum]

Conditioning is key. Youth is even better! For me, mountain biking is my summer conditioner. My goal this summer was 150,000 feet of climbing. I got 151,463'. Now, I'd say that's pretty low for road biking, but for mountain biking it's pretty good. Almost all of it was between 7000' and 10000'. The cardio and leg/lower back strength is there, but I'm now 69, so there are all sorts of small muscle, tendon and ligament groups that are so specific to the telemark turn that the only way to work those is to telemark ski. I found that out the hard way last year. This year, I'm starting slower. Today was day 14, but I'm definitely taking it easy, taking a day off if there's pain, and only getting in a few runs a day.

There's only so much you can do, and unfortunately turning back the clock isn't one of them.

I think I posted this before, but it's worth repeating. It works amazingly well for relieving the kind of lower back pain I get early season skiing and biking:

[Telerock]

I see a lot of bouncing up and down in that video. It is less work to change leads while maintaining a constant upper body “ height above snow”. Just slide your feet forward and back, while maintaining the upper body down-slope orientation.
Even so, my quads will feel the burn from staying in the tele stance for long periods. I find I need more rest stops on the way down than the fixed heel ski-top-to-bottom I did in my younger days.