HOW TO INCREASE EDGE ANGLE | 3 tips with Olympic Skier Graham Bell

Hi I'm Graham Bell, former Olympic skier, presenter of Ski Sunday and independent instructor out in France. In this video we're going to look at increasing edge angles. This is for advanced recreational skiers who are already carving their turns. Now there's a lot of chat on the internet about edge angles but what are they and what's the benefit? Well simply put, the more you can tilt your skis onto an edge, the tighter the radius of the turn will be. Now the benefits, well short of racing down a giant slalom course, the benefits are the more and tighter you can make the turn, the more acceleration you get out of the turn and more pop and that feeling of lightness in between the turns. It's a lot of fun and it also looks good from the lift as well. So we're going to concentrate on a couple of points. The first is building a stable platform. Then we're going to look at the joints that you use to create those edge angles. We've got a couple of flexibility checks to see if you can physically actually get into those positions and then finally a couple of drills in order to put it into practice. So the first thing we're going to look at is creating a stable platform. Just like you can't lean a bike over on an icy road, you can't get edge angles without a stable platform to stand on. The first thing you think about when you go through transition is to build pressure on the outside ski. You can then topple, lean or dive your center of mass to the inside of the turn. If you don't have that stable platform and pressure on the outside ski, all that will happen is you'll stand on the inside ski, your skis will skid and you won't be able to carve through the turn. Once you've created the stable platform over the outside ski, you can lean your body weight into the turn. Now you don't actually need to separate at all and you'll see downhillers sometimes in this position. It's very very strong but it's dangerous. If you stand with your weight on the inside ski, you'll slip away and you'll go straight down. A much safer way to do this is create separation at the pelvis so the upper body remains upright and the legs create the angle. It's a really strong joint here as well so you can really drop that hip into the turn. The second way of creating edge angle is using your hip joint, rolling your knees into the turn. It's a rotational movement of your femur in your hip joint and it'll look something like this. Your upper body, you can create hip angles but you can also roll your knees in as well. And then finally you've got your ankle joint. Although it's locked into the ski boots, even subtle movements of the muscles down the outside of your calves will create a little bit of edge angle and that's like your fine tuning for when you're making turns, particularly on ice. So here are a couple of flexibility tricks that you can do. First is the hip drop. You can put your hand on the bed or on the floor and with one leg out straight and the other leg crossed over in front, you're going to drop your hip down to create that lateral separation between your upper body and your leg and you should be able to feel some movement there at all. You can feel it stretch down the outside of your leg and your lower back. The other flexibility trick to do is called 90-90s and it's checking the flexibility in your hip joint. So roll your feet across like this and you can feel the stretch in here and here and then roll back the other way. You'll always find that one side is a little bit tighter than the other. So finally here are a couple of drills to help you increase those edge angles. Firstly, ditch your poles and ski with your hands on your hips. You'll be able to feel exactly what your hips are doing, whether there's any rotational separation but also how much angular separation you can get and you should feel a pinch on the outside hand just where your obliques are, the top of your hip bone. So get your hands on your hips, feel what your hips are doing. The second drill that you're going to do is going to lock in your upper body a lot more. It's called the Robocop. Put one pole behind your back and another pole pulled in to your hip joint and held tight in. This will block any movement that you've got in your upper body and you can then concentrate on creating those edge angles with your legs. Well I hope you've enjoyed this lesson to increase edge angles and if you want to progress your skiing more you can book me, Graham Bell, on Maison Sport and we can do a lesson in person.