Using resistance while skiing: finishing turns, stopping and carving

As long as you keep an adequate amount of weight on your outermost ski, you can continue to turn your skis even towards the end of your turns. As you do this, you cause your skis to point across the slope. This allows the skis to counteract gravity in a way. From this particular position, you can also keep going across the slope until you figure out which position you want to traverse the slope in.

 

Once you find the right position, you can relax your stance a bit and maintain the motion or you can exit the turn and begin a new one. You could also simply stop yourself from continuing to move. cat skiing

 

 

Stopping

 

We now want to stop. To do this we need to oppose gravity and our velocity, but they are not acting in the same direction. Stopping is also a dynamic maneuver in that your position constantly changes, as when you start to slow down gravity will still remain the same, but your velocity will decrease so that it doesn't need to be reacted against so much. To start stopping, we turn the skis up the slope a bit by leaning slightly backwards, then the reaction force will oppose both our velocity and gravity. catskiing

 

Once we start to lose speed, we let our momentum go on its own a bit more since we do not need to try to counteract it so much anymore. We also start to allow our skis to flatten off more. We can do this by leaning forward a little bit. We then come to a complete halt with our skis angled completely sideways. This angle makes the skis oppose gravity and not slide anywhere. 

 

 

Carving

 

Carving uses resistance differently as the edges do not slide. When we carve, we use our resistance in a slightly different way as we are using the shape of the skis to change our direction, and are not sliding the skis around. Although it is not shown in most of the diagrams, when we lean our skis onto the edges, the skis bend so that the edge sits along a curved track into the snow. It is this curve that carving uses to turn, and control the direction you are going in. When carving, normally we are always turning, we basically push the edges on one side of the skis into the snow so that they turn us one way, and once we have turned enough in that direction, we change the edges on the skis, so that the other edges dig in and make us turn in the other direction and then keep repeating this.

 

Carving is the most energy efficient way to ski as the skis always move forwards along their length, which gives them the least possible resistance (direction of least resistance), and because of this, it is the technique that ski racers use. With carving as it is the edges that give us all the control over our direction, the weight shifts do not work in quite the same way either, as we do not use them in the same way to make us change direction. 

 

When racers ski they want to go as fast as possible and do not want to use any resistance in the direction of the slope as that would slow them down. They only want to create resistance sideways so that they can go across the slope and through the gates. Because of this they use techniques so that they always push sideways as much as possible, by shifting their weight along the ski as they turn, always keeping the weight on the part of the ski that is most sideways to the slope.