First off, I couldn’t be more excited about writing for Alpine Ontario once again. Helping athletes, parents and coaches prevent injuries and improve performance at the same time is fantastic. Hopefully the articles will provide insights into how we are developing our Alpine Athletes – from grassroots athletes to recreational skiers to our elites on the Ontario Ski Team and the Canadian Alpine Ski Team.

 

In case you missed it, during the Olympics the New York Times released an unbelievable video article where Ted Ligety talks us through how he skis. Literally the entire video was laced with pearls of wisdom. It is one of the best produced videos clearly describing every aspect of what Ted is explaining. Without question it helped me understand skiing at another level. More importantly, it sparked a ton of thoughts of what we need TO SKI LIKE TED – in a future article I’ll break down the athletic qualities, such as strength, core, reactive abilities, and conditioning required to SKI LIKE TED. So if you want to improve how you ski and more applicably how you or your kids race, this article is for you!

Key features:

 

Here are the key features that I took away from the video. You literally have the blueprint TO SKI LIKE TED. We’ll address what you need to ski like Ted in the next article. Note the images were screen shot captures of the video (photo credit from the New York Times). I included them to help you see the key frames of key features he is addressing.

 

  1. “starting the turn early and finishing later that most other guys“
  2. Big edge angle: Body near horizontal to hill
    1. “lay-over the furthest“
    2. “Pull a tighter radius”
    3. “Cleaner through the turns”
  3. Avoid horizontal sliding (Snow-Ski Interface)
  4. Fast transition from downhill ski to uphill ski: utilizing the energy stored in the downhill ski to initiate (sling shot) an early transition (roll from uphill edge to down-hill edge) on uphill ski
    1. Able to start pushing on uphill ski really early
      1. “Almost like your pushing yourself down the hill”
    2. Stores energy in the ski by bending the ski
  5. Get the POP out of the ski
  6. “It`s basically like running a 400m. You are going as fast as you can as hard as you can in every turn

Big Edge Angle. Notice horizontal Ted is able to get. He is able to apply tremendous force (FGRF = Ground Reaction Force) into his ski to arc / carve the team.

Notice the amount of snow spray and where the spray is coming from. This picture is intended to show the difference in snow-ski interaction, where Ted displays less snow spray. Less snow spray = less loss of energy = faster race performance.

Fast transitions and early turns are the key ingredients to SKI LIKE TED. Utilizing energy stored in the downhill ski to initiate (sling shot) an early transition (roll form uphill edge to downhill edge) to the uphill ski is displayed in this photo.  Ted describes this idea as, “Almost like pushing yourself down the hill”

 

Dr. Thomas Lam has been Alpine Ontario’s Fitness Director since 2008, developing and executing the dryland programs for the Ontario Ski Team, which encompass injury prevention strategies, athletic development, sport science testing, nutrition and injury management. Based on his work athletes have become World Champions (2), Olympians (15), Professional Athletes (76), gained NCAA scholarship (over 100), and resolved injuries and return to competition after severe injuries. Dr. Lam’s research interest is to understand the relationship between movement with injury prevention, injury management and performance. For more information about injury prevention, athletic development and sport science for alpine athletes please visit www.fitstoronto.com/alpine