> At first I thought you were saying to pull the heels back going up the bump, but hearing you talk more, your emphasis is much more on pulling up to your butt which I'm in complete agreement with.
Ya, I don't say anything. I just try to pass on what the coaches told us, in my own limited words. We are trying to describe one of humanity's most complicated, difficult and by far the funnest sport in the world, in text words. That's very hard to do. Mogul skiing is generally considered to be the world's fastest action sport. I am not a source for this stuff, and I don't ski very well. The reel peeps do.
Emerson Smith (US Olympic Mogul Team 2018, PSI camp coach summer 2019) said, "the instant the tips touch the mogul face, pull your calves straight up to your butt, really fast & hard". That's the motion. It is almost purely vertical. There is a small aft-pulling component cause the heels happen to go that direction a bit. But the intentional motion that they are coaching is trying wicked hard to be straight vertical. That's part of why the reverse bicycle is in some ways not the ideal visualization for coaching how to execute the newschool mogul absorption technique. <in my view>
> I had some more thoughts about targets after I noticed that many of your targets were at the end of the troughs. If all the skiers are good and hitting the same target, then it will always be at the end of the trough, because the trough represents the averaging of the traveled paths of all the skiers that have gone before. That's what forms the troughs. Also, with good skiers, the troughs are pointing down the hill more, so it would be rare for a beginner skier to want to ski more direct than that, and it's usually tricky to ski less direct than the trough, because the back of the trough can be shear. So, in a good line you're telling the skiers to ski in the troughs, which may be self explanatory, and the troughs have a way of aiming the skis whether we like it or not. Targets might be much more useful in poorly developed, erratic lines.
It's interesting that you noticed this. For good skiers, in good-quality moguls, Chuck says to put the targets pretty much dead center in the face of the bump (vertically, i.e. along-track), and about 1/3 of the way inward from the corners. That's actually the correct placement of the targets. What you get from those correctly placed targets is a really monster Hit when the tips/boots hit. It's sooooper fun when your level is ready for that, and it gives sweet speed control. But our peeps weren't ready for that. They are still mostly on Turns and only just starting Absorption so they couldn't have handled the deeper placement -- but they will next year.
In our particular case, that day we had relative beginners and the moguls were all kinds of wacky shapes. I moved the targets farther down-track than you would normally place them. Also, the other thing I was trying to get our peeps starting to feel was the time-interval between when their boot-toes reach the target, and when their boots reach the crest, by which time they had darnwell better be weightshifted onto the new ski. We actually really want them (esp newer rec skiers) to be shifted fully quite a long way ahead of the crest - really like 2' or 1.5'. So I estimated that on those wacky bump shapes, with our peeps' time-interval from start of shift to completion of weightshift, and their speed, about 2.5-3 feet down from the shoulder was gonna be a good placement. It worked like a charm and everybody had breakthroughs which was really fun.