Skiing is a very interesting sport. While people ski, they utilize a variety of different forces to their own advantage in order to control their motions and maneuvers on the slopes. There are a few basic forces which can affect you as you move around on your skis.
These forces are: gravity, momentum, resistance from your skis, friction between your skis and the slope, and wind resistance. All of these different forces contribute to alter the way your skis move in accordance to your own actions. However, in order to understand how to effectively control your skis, it is not very necessary to include friction and wind resistance in your analysis since they do not directly contribute to this particular aspect of your performance. Only some of the effects which come from these forces really affect the amount of control that you have over your skis. The most important thing to understand and take into account is the concept of the three axis which exist in our three dimensional world along which only three different actions can occur; acceleration, deceleration or maintenance of a constant speed. cat skiing Canada
In order to show how resistance is used, we can refer to this example of how we use resistance to ski down a slope and make a turn. We are assuming that the slope is perfectly flat and has a constant gradient, so we can simplify things slightly by looking at things as if they only happen along 2 axis, down the slope and across the slope. With the resultant force from gravity acting down the slope.
Getting Started
We are going to start with our skis pointing straight down the slope, so that we travel straight down the fall line, and are accelerating down the slope as we are not creating any resistance against gravity. We then want to start a turn, and create a sideways force that will push us across the slope. To create this force though we need to bring the skis so they are at an angle across the slope (as in resistance effects). Then the skis will have a component of their resistance acting across the slope, and can produce a force that makes us accelerate across the slope.
Cat skiing BC
Initiating the Turn
How do we start to turn the skis though, when there are no sideways forces and we have no rotating momentum. One thing we should not do is swing our body to try and move the skis. Although this can turn the skis, it always puts the body out of position so that it is hard to recover, and is a common mistake made by beginners. There are two different ways to do this correctly, we can put more weight on one ski than the other, making the ski with the most weight on it fall ahead of the other ski, and the skis start to turn across the slope (lateral weight distribution). Or as we do with carving, we can lean the skis over so that the curved edges cut into the snow and steer us out of the fall line, this method is covered further at the bottom of the page, as we are going to use the lateral weight method here where the skis are always able to slide sideways and the edges are not dug in as much.
