Great post Doby, but do you really count skidding as a fundamental movement?
Skidding is a failure to carve.
Good question Jamt. Typically tipping and skidding are covered by one fundamental referred to as edging. Edging deserves a spot in the list of core fundamentals because it represents the footwork that needs to be facilitated to control the edges. If you think about it, it is impossible to manage skis without both tipping and skidding. While a skier may be able to ski an easy run with 100% edge locked turns, that would not be true on the majority of terrain and not at all in any race course short of an easy Nastar course. However, I now prefer to define edging in two categories because tipping has somewhat separated itself from skidding with modern shaped skis. I am a tipping centric skier who only skids to create friction for speed control and for no other reason. Whether my edging is controlled by tipping, skidding or a blend, they are movements executed by the feet and ankles. All the other fundamentals are focussed on movements of the body and we need at least one (two for me) that include the feet. Technically, we could include skidding, a rotary motion, in the rotary category and tipping, a lateral motion, in the angulation category but, again, especially today, using our feet to ski is a fundamental that cannot be ignored. Also, these two edging fundamentals bring the ski into our anatomical fundamental movements as they should because the ski is a critical extension of our anatomy and the only one where the rubber meets the road and where the forces we seek are exchanged between the ground and skier.
Now, as a tipping centric skier, my personal list of core fundamentals do not even include the body, They are what we do with the ski as if it is our foot. I refer to them as “clean skis fundamentals”:
1. Tipping - always tipped equal and tipped at a constant rate
2. Left/right pressure control - always outside dominant but always shared for equal bending
3. Fore/aft pressure control - always migrating from tip to tail
4. Relative ski position - always parallel and no or little tip lead
In order to obey these fundamentals, whatever my body does to achieve these results correctly, for the most part, is going to be correct by default. It gives the body freedom to find its own, somewhat skeletally kinetic predetermined path of movement, without cognitive intervention. I believe that many adult advanced intermediate skiers plateau because all the complex anatomical directives become too complicated. I can read it in their words and see it in their movements. As they continue receiving complex anatomical directives from instruction, (many of which never lead to fruition or are sustained in fruition and yet continue to pile up in the back of their minds), that plateau digs itself in for the long haul. We can observe a skier and determine which movements are compensatory and how much DIRT is applied to them to determine how plateaued a skier actually is. The more stubborn the plateau, the more we have to disrupt that person’s frame of reference on technique to make real and lasting corrections. Before that can be done, usually some type of critical change in the thinking of the skier will need to occur. Humans are creatures of habit which does not bode well in the long journey of ski development. If you have been stuck in the advanced intermediate rut, are frustrated with pretzeling your body in every which way and are willing to do whatever you can to get past it, try turning everything upside down and look to the ski. Primates are better tool users than they are performance artists.