What is it that keeps some skiers off steep slopes while others can’t get enough steep black skiing? Short turns--not just short, but smoothly, crisply linked short turns right down the fall line, tick-tock, side-to-side, as inevitable and rhythmic as a pendulum. Short swing, as it’s often called, is the key that unlocks steep, narrow, and challenging terrain. (Medium and long turns build up too much speed too fast.) And as usual, there’s a trick to it. I call this trick, or technique, dynamic anticipation. This is how it works.
Suppose, before turning your skis down the hill, your whole upper body--hips, shoulders, head, and arms--was already turned and aimed downhill. Then your skis would turn faster and easier, pivoting rapidly around to line up beneath your body, which was already in the fall line. Less mass to turn means less effort needed, which in turn means faster, snappier results--the very essence of short-linked turns. In skiing this pretwisting of the upper body in the direction of the coming turn has always been called anticipation. But we can do better.
Our goal is not to turn the body first and then let the skis catch up, but instead to let our bodies move straight down the slope while legs and skis pivot back and forth beneath us. That’s where the action is, down below the stable quiet mass of the upper body. And it’s this back-and-forth, wind-up and release, preturn-and-return sort of action that I call dynamic anticipation. Everyone has seen and admired this type of skiing, but how do you learn it?
It isn’t so very easy. Dynamic anticipation is the watershed skill that divides average good skiers from extremely good skiers. But here’s a simple game plan.
First, be sure you’re skiing in a loose upright stance with a very relaxed lower back. This is the region that acts as a pivot point, or hinge, letting your legs and skis turn beneath you without the body itself turning. If you’re bent forward with a hollow, tight lower back, nothing will work.
Next, try a few hockey stops. Slide straight down the hill and twist your legs and skis sideways to a stop beneath you. They turn, you don’t. After you get the hang of it, smooth out your hockey stops into round uphill curves that work the same way: skis turning up the hill but body floating along motionless above them, still facing down the fall line. We call these uphill curves with anticipation (that uninvolved, motionless upper body) preturns.
Then use your preturns to launch new turns down the hill. Just add a pole plant while shifting your weight to the top ski and, wham, the skis will (or should) turn back downhill almost on their own. That’s the reaction from the action of the preturn. And, of course, you’ll want to capture this feeling and prolong it in a continuous series of turns--the end of each turn becoming the preturn--or wind up for the next turn.
What I’ve just given you is only the bare outline of a game plan to develop dynamic anticipation (for the details, see Chapter 4 of my book Breakthrough on Skis from Random House or my videotape of the same title) but it should give you a sense of what’s involved in developing short turns. The more natural your anticipation becomes--that is, the more your upper body relaxes and floats instead of actively turning from side to side with your skis--the easier it will be for you to link short turns.
One last tip. The trigger, the signal that launches one turn right after another down the fall line, is always a pole plant. By reaching straight down the hill with your pole, rather than letting it swing around and across the hill with your skis, you will help to keep your body lined up in that going-down-the-mountain direction. Short turns in a nutshell: you keep going down the mountain while your skis twist back and forth beneath you.