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Old December 16th 03, 03:36 PM
Ken Roberts
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Default key flaws of the New Skate

Glad to hear the magic of pushing out to the side is now there in the live
coaching and a video. I'd still love to see it in print. I haven't found
it yet in any of my readings of the new writing-team-partner Borowski,
either.

Philip Nelson wrote
. . . the ski progressions makes it extremely clear that
the movement is a lateral push to the side. This point is
emphasized in the skating dryland techniques and roller skiing drills.


Once the skaters of America see that pushing out toward the side is the key
to forward propulsion in skating, then we're ready for the next step:

Why not find ways to use upper body muscles to _help_ with that sideways
push?

Which then gets to the Aha! so that's why Carl Swenson and the World Cup
winners refuse to give up their side-to-side shoulder swing in their V1
offset. And that's why the winning rollerski racers are the ones with most
shoulder swing.

Then there's the New Skate claim that the World Cup winners would climb
faster if they just learned about Quiet Upper Body -- see under Principle 3
in Vordenberg's "The Better Way to Skate" article in Master Skier Mid-Season
2001/2002:
http://masterskier.com/archive/0102m...rwayskate.html
That's just wrong from the perspective of physics -- because
properly-synchronized sideways "reactive" force (or "inertial force") in the
upper body can increase the force of the sideways skate-push through the
ski -- it's just Newton's Third Law again. And physics says that through
the magic of the "inclined plane", most of the power of the sideways push
can be converted into forward motion power.

I think it's good for the U.S. national team to take the Risk of looking for
techniques to do _better_ than the current World Cup winners. They just had
bad luck to chose the wrong point to try it on. Time for them to move on
and try something else.

But why did the coaching of all the local and regional racers in American
had to get dragged along with this risky bet of the U.S. national team?

Seems to me Vordenberg in his writing made no effort to hide the fact the
quiet upper body was a new attempt at evolution, and never claimed that its
benefit could be proven from physics or biomechanics. Nobody offered any
controlled measured experiments to show that Quiet Upper Body was faster for
uphill V1.

Yet many American coaches have turned Pete's bold evolutionary experiment
into a fixed religious doctrine for all skating techniques. I guess the
Attractions of the new skate must be pretty strong.

But now we can see in the World Cup videos of V1 climbing, after more than
three years have gone by, that the Quiet Upper Body experiment plainly did
not work. Time for the rest of us American skaters to move on, too.

Ken


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