Moguls - benefits of Early turns

[recbumper]

Thought it could be fun to do a thread on the benefits of Early turns in mogul skiing

- Early turns are about 80% of Flats technique (15% - everything else like body position, kneeroll, pull, poleplants, etc.; 5% high-end Flats polishing)
- Flats skiing and Flats turn quality is about 70% of mogul technique (Source: to ski moguls well, spend 70% of your time on the flats)

So Early Turns alone create/account for about 56% of the quality of a skier's mogul skiing capability (80% * 70% =56%). Thus Early turns are the most Key Foundation

<This is just an approx integrated view from our rec group. Please disregard if silly>

Pics on Early turns below, using the neato-cool Step Up Bumps vid as material

 

[recbumper]

Early Turns - View 1

< by the way, this pic ^^ shows a beginner wedge, and in this frame the skier is already Late (errr, "almost Early...but not quite, actually startin' to be Late"). Should have had the weightshift completed within the time of Frame 1, i.e. much farther before fall line, still at the bigger angle to fall line. But this was the best I could do with the graphic. The lady in the first pic below is way better & Earlier >

 

[recbumper]

Early Turns - View 2

 

[recbumper]

Early Turns -- After Early, be Patient

 

[recbumper]

Early in rollers and Early In Moguls

<add constant upward/back Pull, intensified upward when tips touch face of roller>
< add absorption to maximum depth at crest >
< hold absorption as you roll thru crest and 1/4-1/3 down backside >
< add gentle extension for rest of backside >

< add tips-to-target >

This is the point of skiing these things (Early Turns In Moguls) -- ahhh, feellllls sooo niiiice

 

[recbumper]

Corollary - Don't be Late In Moguls

Consequences:
...
< Noooooo I can't look >

 

[D. Trenker]

Try that with Venn diagrams and see what the range of {Early} ∩ {Bumps} can be.

 

[recbumper]

At minimum {Early} ∩ {Bumps} Contains {Kingsbury, Bilodeau, Cavet, Martin, Kearney, Dufour-Lapointe (x3), Laffont, Soar, Owens...}

{Early} ∩ {Carving} Contains {Ligety, Shiffrin, ...}

 

[tromano]

Interesting thread. I think it sounds like a good drill. And it should be obvious that you have to start some where.

I will just say that timing and rhythm though related are not the same thing and that the drills discussed here seem focused on timing.

Ultimately the joy of moguls skiing is about more than aligning your movements to the moguls, it's about making the turns you want to make using the bumps if possible and maintaining rhythm while working against the grain when necessary. Just imo.

 

[Scruffy]

Nice, @recbumer. Thanks for the work your're putting into the mogul threads this spring.

Whenever I'm not nailing the bumps ( to my standards, which are recreational after all ) I talk to myself while skiing them ( Ok, maybe yell a little ) to turn earlier, turn earlier, turn earlier until I get my flow going--it works.
The other thing that helps is looking further down the slope. They say look 2-3 moguls ahead. I find it helpful to look 3-5 or even 6 sometimes, depending on the frequency of the bumps.

To @tromano point, doesn't rhythm come with good timing?

 

[recbumper]

> Nice, @recbumer. Thanks for the work your're putting into the mogul threads this spring.

Ya, sure. This is such a fun sport and when everything melts out then the Jones hits and you can either like think about the sport or listen to Duane Allman or go howl at the Moon eh? hahaha One's lost & gone, one's too far to fly to <although they did get to Mars in Feb, how cool is that! > and the other one is all that's left

There are also all these new & really cool resources gradually showing up on the web like the cool Step Up vids and things, plus pulling in Chuck Martin's awesome stuff, plus the high def comp videos, and there's like a lot more to work with than there was even just a couple of years ago.

We finally figured out how to generate sweet bump lines from groomed flat within 1-4 hours so we have better terrain and can go from flat groom to good bumps in a morning and ski em all afternoon and do it again even if they get groomed down overnight. It's a Mighty Dread that has added a lot of mogul skiing time & opportunity to progress

It's also fun to see peeps from kids to older folks getting interested and glomming on to the posse and then starting to hear about & work on Chuck's concepts like Early and drills like Wedge and Knee Roll, start to Get Their Hands Up and Get Hips Forward, then you show them the tips-to-targets and boom, within a couple of weeks you've got a bunch of new mogul skiers. It's just really cool to see how much fun the peeps have as they start to progress -- and how quickly they do it when there's starting to be a coherent progression path for them to follow

Rock On All
< Our stairway lies on the whisperin' wind >

 

[Ogg]

Nice, @recbumer. Thanks for the work your're putting into the mogul threads this spring.

Whenever I'm not nailing the bumps ( to my standards, which are recreational after all ) I talk to myself while skiing them ( Ok, maybe yell a little ) to turn earlier, turn earlier, turn earlier until I get my flow going--it works.
The other thing that helps is looking further down the slope. They say look 2-3 moguls ahead. I find it helpful to look 3-5 or even 6 sometimes, depending on the frequency of the bumps.

To @tromano point, doesn't rhythm come with good timing?

I sing this song to myself when my bump skiing is off to remind myself to stand as tall as possible. It's also got a good rhythm for the bumps. It usually helps.

 

[jack97]

The timing and moment when you want to be early, aligns to what Mosely has said in his old vids. Basically , you want to be ahead of the apex of the area you want to turn. If you start the turn at that apex, you will catch unintended air...... well that's has been my experience.

 

[d rag on]

Fun thread and flat skiing techniques are so important to mogul skiing! To initiate an "early turn" it's best to have a balanced body position, so good absorption is needed on the front side of the mogul in order to be in a balanced position to start the turn on the backside.

Jonny Moseley says at 0:37 in the following video (posted multiple times in this forum), "The importance of getting to your new downhill ski very early, as quickly as possible, and in moguls that is times 10."
At 1:25 in this video, "You want to jump. You want to get a lot of power off the (downhill) leg and get you whole upper body, everything over the new downhill ski as quickly as possible ..."

Here's another Moseley video (also posted in this forum many times) describing the same thing. At 0:35 he adds, "It actually starts before that (early turn) ... this is where I'm talking about the jump and suck your feet up under (absorption) ... so you're getting your feet on the snow right there (as soon as possible) on the backside.

Strive for good absorption on the frontside of the bump in order to be in a balanced positioned ready to make the "early turn" as soon as possible on the backside.

Just listening to Little Martha and trying to imagine the passing of his dream to his soul, but out here in dreamland our spring skiing is still awesome.

 

[recbumper]

sooper fun emojis < Last Sunday morning the sunshine felt like rain >

> The timing and moment when you want to be early, aligns to what Mosely has said in his old vids. Basically , you want to be ahead of the apex of the area you want to turn.

Ya mon. And it's so important to start peeps coming from regular recreational backgrounds who want to start learning moguls with this Early concept. This is the part that often blows people away. Basically the initiation points for so many folks' turns are kindof at random, often people don't even know where on the C-curve of the turn they are initiating. A lot of folks when we tell them about Early are like "Are you even allowed to ski that way?" haha Then they start trying it and it makes a big difference for them


> whole upper body, everything over the new downhill ski as quickly as possible .. jump and suck your feet up under (absorption) ... so you're getting your feet on the snow right there (as soon as possible) on the backside.

Ya mon. This is one of the things I like about all the new resources - Moseley explains it & shows it for when you're in big bumps. Peeps have to be fairly well along in their progression to be able to apply that
Now we also have the Step Up vids and they can be used to give peeps the Foundation that they need to work up from zero to be able to learn it consistently on the Flats and then apply it in small bumps where you can still survive without absorption and get the turns consistent [see tips-to-target vids & thread] and then on into bigger & bigger moguls. It's like now the community can finally pull together parts from all these places into a coherent progression

Those Step Up vids are awesome. I figured it might be helpful to throw in some still-photo text notes on top of them, mostly just to share the framework & wording that we have used with peeps that seemed to work & help beginners learn. The full vids are where it's at, I just added silly words on top just to highlight Early as the core Concept cause it's sooo crucial as the cornerstone for everything else < our gang's view fwiw >

 

[Michael Blythe]

@recbumper - all this mogul discussion made me think of a diagram put out by Surf Simply - https://surfsimply.com/tree-of-knowledge/. When I looked at this a few years back it was a lot... simpler , but I think this is a cool idea for moguls regarding the various skills that define different levels and without which you can't advance.

 

[Tony S]

Ultimately the joy of moguls skiing is about more than aligning your movements to the moguls, it's about making the turns you want to make using the bumps if possible and maintaining rhythm while working against the grain when necessary. Just imo.

This. Which is why all the focus on zipper line always seems so misplaced to me. When do I make those turns except when in easy bumps? Maybe meadow skipping in modest powder?

 

[Sanity]

The point of being early is to control speed by scraping with the edges down the backside of the bump. If the edges aren't scraping in some form such as skidding, scarving, or scraping the shovel then it's not better to be early. A clean carve down the backside will not control speed, because the backside is the steepest part of the slope, and putting pressure on the steepest part speeds up the skier unless the edges can scrape. Laffont, in that video posted by Geepers, is early applies forward pressure for a scarve, and then finishes up with a lateral skid until she hits the bump.

Being late with the turn is better whenever it's not best to scrape with the edges. For example, when the backside is a smooth sheet of ice, trying to edge early could be a disaster. Recbumper says they don't ski when it's icy, but there's a condition where the tops can be soft, and it's still very skiable and fun, but you can't be early with the weight shift, because you have to float past the backside, and you don't apply pressure until you crank a turn on the soft top.

Just to be clear, weight is pressure, so a weight shift is a change of pressure from one ski to another. When you float, there is no pressure, so no weight shift can be defined until you land. So any time you fly over the backside of the bump, it's not an early weight shift, since there isn't a meaningful change in pressure until the last phase of the turn. The first phase is more or less in the air.

Other examples of when it's better to be late: In some soft conditions with a narrow ski it's not possible to skid, so rather than carve down the steepest part it's better just to fly over it. Also, sometimes it's just more fun to old school it and catch a little more air. Often the bumps are so irregular that there isn't a clear backside to be able to scrape down. Finally, when it's steep, a skier might want to take a slower carved line, and again delaying pressure keeps from applying too much pressure while in the fall line.

Recbumper's reported recipe can be essential for holding the line in certain conditions, but for the irregular world of bumps, I think it's better to master that recipe as one tool in the toolbox to be used when needed rather than the go to move for every turn. I don't believe that there is any simple recipe for many types of irregular bumps which you'll find exclusively at many resorts.

I realize my words don't mean much without an example of my skiing, so here's some POV from Winter Park last week. There are irregular bumps, very steep, steep, not steep, slushy, crusty, flat light, big, small, many mistakes, and bad choices....

 

[recbumper]

> The point of being early is to control speed by scraping with the edges down the backside

To clarify and be slightly more accurate, the purpose of being Early is (1) control speed by getting Edgebite on the Top Half of the Turn, (2) Maintain excellent balance and body position, which sets you up for anything you want to do on the Bottom Half of the turn, (3) Usually what you want to do is take a long scrapey slide down the backside, which gives lots of additional speed control. But the backside part is tertiary to Top Half Edge and Balance. Be Early
<Not trying to nitpick words there, just the Top Half Edge and Balance are crucial-crucial so worth that clarification >


> ...Perrine... finishes up with a lateral skid until she hits the bump

We would say <more fully/prob slightly more accurately> Perrine... finishes up with a lateral skid *until she pulls her feet back just before she hits the bump, rolls knees over and rolls through, hitting the bump with the ski tips, not her feet* <per Glenn Eddy>
< not trying to nitpick, just zooming in to that splitsecond timeslice just before & during contact, cause the whole point of how she skis is to lead with the tips, not hit with the feet >


> So any time you fly over the backside of the bump, it's not an early weight shift, since there isn't a meaningful change in pressure until the last phase of the turn. The first phase is more or less in the air.

Ya, if you fly over most of the backside and only get contact down near the bottom of the backside, we would call that Late


!!Nice Run!!


Peace All & Be Early

 

[tball]

Ultimately the joy of moguls skiing is about more than aligning your movements to the moguls, it's about making the turns you want to make using the bumps if possible and maintaining rhythm while working against the grain when necessary. Just imo.

Yes!

This. Which is why all the focus on zipper line always seems so misplaced to me. When do I make those turns except when in easy bumps? Maybe meadow skipping in modest powder?

No! The Zipper line is never misplaced!

See @Sanity's video posted above. Lots of great zipper line influenced skiing at Mary Jane in irregular bumps. I'll post it again. Nice skiing!



Zipper line technique works in all sorts of bumps, not just perfect zipper lines. There are unfortunately few perfect zipper lines, even at Mary Jane.

Personally, I think making it look like a zipper line exists where it doesn't is one of the most challenging and most rewarding things to do in skiing.