Here are some facts why everyone should seriously consider getting their equipment balanced and tuned for skiing.

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What is skier balance and alignment?

At Alpine McCannix and BioMcCannix when we perform a fitting, we provide the ideal relationship between body and equipment based on the science of efficient biomechanics. This will provide ideal balance, the most important factor of most sports.

Balance

The skiers legs, feet, boots and bindings are considered to be an integrated “suspension system”. After this system is perfectly aligned, skiers are in a state of ideal balance and physically stronger. If any part of this system is mis-aligned, balance is lost, performance is greatly diminished and the person becomes physiologically weak. Muscle testing using Kinesiology will confirm this.

Unfortunately, all skiers are out of balance before they even start moving on their skis…. Just by wearing their ski boots. The boots position them out of balance, impairing performance before skiing actually begins!

Can you imagine the affect of having new tyres fitted to your car, without having the wheels balanced? Or the tracking/steering alignment being slightly out? This is what all skiers are doing until their equipment is accurately ‘tuned’ to the individual.

Being out of balance can hurt!

In gymnastics, on the balance beam, if you lose your balance just a little, you fall the same distance as when you lose it a lot. In skiing, if you are off balance just a little, your equipment will prevent you from falling and ‘hold you up’. But your skiing will suffer a lot. There are no short cuts. Success requires precision.

How does this affect your skiing?

Ski boots provide a high level of support, but their rigid mass produced shell induce strain on our individually unique skeleton, putting our bodies out of balance and affecting your skiing in the following ways. Here are just a few examples!

1. You are already out of balance just standing still, so there is no point hoping things will improve once you get going down the mountain.
2. The soles of your ski boots are not naturally resting flat on the ground. Edging skills and lateral movement are seriously degraded as a result.
3. Your body is being imposed to undesirable tensions, conditioning faulty behaviour, impairing progress, placing you in effect on a performance plateau that no amount of training or instruction will ever put right.
4. Making you more prone to injury.

Is balance & alignment necessary with custom foamed boots?

Even if your boots are very comfortable, seem to fit properly or are custom foamed, alignment still needs to be corrected.

Boot fitting, alignment and balancing are three different things. Actually custom foaming ski boots may result in a greater error in alignment because of the very nature of the foaming process. Pulling on bars with your arms in order to increase the pressure under your feet results in applying strain down the spine. This spinal strain may in turn displace the hipbone and forcing the leg bone (femur) to mis-align itself in relation to the lower leg (tibia). This leaves us with as much need to correct the alignment as with any other boot.

What affects are there with current oversized/carving skis?

Due to the extra width of today’s skis, it’s even more important to be accurately ‘set up’. The extra width exerts far more lateral and torsional stress on the knee and hip joints. I have heard that some people don’t like the modern shape of skis and find them clumsy or awkward to use. If this is the case, the alignment problem has always been there with the old skis. With the new skis the problem has just been amplified from a small one to a large detectable level. Skis are now generally a lot wider than the sole of the boots, this causes very different lateral leverage forces on our bodies.

A professional point of view.

For all ski school students and ski instructors alike, alignment and balance problems should be addressed first. Only after this process has been carried out can more effective teaching and skiing begin. Therefore conventional ski schools and instructors without many years of boot fitting, alignment and balance fitting skills are missing at least 50% of what is available. The paying client isn’t getting any value. The balance and alignment first, teaching second principal should apply to all levels of skiers and ski instruction.