Tempo variations in Free Skate in Cross Country Skiing

 By Keith and Heather Nicol
We may want to vary the tempo of many cross country skiing techniques depending on our objective and this blog post looks at free skate. If we want to go fast in the free skate we will want to have a high turnover and keep our torso directed straight down the track as you can see in photo 1. You still want to land on a flat ski and you want to swing your arms directly down the trail. Alternatively if you want to conserve energy you might want to glide further with each skate and in this case you want to land on a flat ski but then balance on that ski longer to take advantage of the glide. This requires that you move your head over the ski to help you stay balanced as seen in photo 2.  Another way to feel this `head over ski`feeling is to do the speed skater drill as you can see in photo 3.. In this case I put my hands behind my back and really try to get a long glide like long track speed skaters do. Notice how my head is directly over the glide ski to help me stay balanced.  See this video for more information-https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtoLtWkw46o

Help – I can’t stop on my cross country skis

 by Keith and Heather Nicol

I often get letters from viewers of my you tube channel and here is one I got earlier this year from Lee. “I really struggle with the snow plow.  My snow plow doesn’t seem to slow me down enough. I struggle to get enough of a “V” - the back of my skis are not very far apart. I exercise/train regularly but can’t figure out how on earth to get the strength to push out the back of the ski to snow plow to slow down. If I could slow down on a downhill, it would open up a number of new areas but I’m stuck on beginner sections for now. “

Thanks for the note Lee and I know those trails at Cypress—they can be steep and when they get icy it can be a problem to slow down. Since I don’t have a video of your skiing I can only guess at what might be problem but here are some of my suggestions.. you likely need to widen your snowplow by pushing out with your heels. Remember you need to widen the plow to slow down. You say you don’t have the strength to do this which suggests that you are trying to snowplow with knock knees (see photo below) . I have difficulty pushing my skis out to slow down if they are too much on edge which is what adopting a knock kneed stance with do. Instead try to adopt a stance where the legs are angled naturally – see photo below . This will produce a small amount of edge which will make it easy to widen your plow to slow down. Try to imagine that you are scrapping dirt or gum off the heel of your ski boot to widen the plow.  If we adopt a stance that is too bull legged this will flatten the ski and the result will be little edging and you will not slow down very much (see photo below). Also remember that when the trail gets steep and icy that the snowplow will only slow you down..it may take a long time to actually come to a stop.  Check out this video which illustrates these concepts.- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eFLIPNXDI4&feature=youtu.be