I agree with Dell about your willingness to post and ask for help, and
your improvement.

There's a basic misunderstanding here. In three of the sequences you
are trying to get weight shift, i.e., get from skate to skate from your
upper body, esp. your shoulders. They are rocking, bobbing, weaving,
etc. Instead, skating needs to come from your core/pelvic area and
legs, with the upper body moving naturally along without tilting. The
phrase often used is to have a quiet upper body. In the other sequence
(side, legs), you are virtually running on skis rather than skating
(perhaps the mental image is stepping, but you are actually moving too
fast to step). For all of this...

Exercise 1: Skate keeping your nongliding ski very close to the snow,
literally lifting it just enough to clear and no higher. This exercise
will force you to use your legs, as well as ankles, edges and such,
while helping you get the feel of staying on the ski longer.

Exercise 2: V1 Skate with a stiff (but not rigid) upper body, using mild
terrain. This is an exaggerated position that will help make clear what
a quiet upper body is. Do V2 this way also.

Exercise 3 (no pole and pole): After you get comfortable with the first
two exercises, i.e., you are actually using your legs and are skating
ski to ski and you have quieted your torso, then try driving each skate
with your upper thigh (some people use the knee, but I like to emphasize
the top of the leg because it's easier to keep your hip over the ski
from there). This will help you get up over the ski more and stay there
longer. It's a different and great feeling.

Poling: Isolating it from all the shoulder and head movement, your V1
poling actually looks pretty good. If you quiet the upper body, it will
get a lot easier and more effective. I would suggest bringing the
off-side hand across in front more, but no farther than halfway across
your torso. Swimmers and big-shouldered folks tend to keep the off-side
hand wider, while the rest of us are stronger closer, more like double
pole hand distance apart.

Poling Exercise: Do V1 with one pole, poling from both the strong side
and then the off-side pole. This will also help you use your legs.

Gene



Ken Roberts wrote:

I put some video clips of my own skating up on the web at
http://roberts-1.com/t/xc045/a/p1/index.htm
I'd be glad if you'd take a look at it and tell me what I should work on
next with my technique.

Last time I posted some of my videos here more than a year ago, the
critiques and suggestions I saw from many of you on this newsgroup were the
best ski lesson I ever got. Thanks to all of you who took the trouble to
analyze and write your comments and put them out in public on the newsgroup.

Those older videos of me skating are still up on the web at
http://roberts-1.com/t/xc034/a/p1
I think I see some changes in my technique since then -- already some sort
of "make-over" (? but is it good or bad ?). Now I'd like to keep on
developing, into another make-over. Playing with my own technique is
fascinating and fun.

My great thanks to JanneG for offering all those elite racer videos for me
to learn from and compare to. Thanks to Zach Caldwell for posting the
toughest and deepest critique of all. Above all to Sharon for enduring the
hassle of all those times standing in the cold taking one more (and then one
more) video shot of me trying to ski different.

Ken

P.S. Why so long since my last post of my videos?

Because changing my technique style was really hard. I was surprised. Of
course I knew that just using the right mental images and concepts would not
work, but I thought that with frequent video analysis, change would be
straightforward -- like substantial change in a month, or certainly after
two months.

Instead what happened with each video session is that I would quickly see
what was wrong in the analysis afterward, and know why it was wrong in the
physics -- and resolve to change it, and practice a new pattern -- but then
in the video Sharon took three weeks later the same flaw would mostly still
be there. Or I'd focus on fixing two subtle but critical problems for
several months, and then notice three other visually-obvious flaws that
"should" have been settled long ago. So my progress felt embarrassing.