Poles

Poles are sticks. Use them accordingly.

Poles are perhaps the least considered piece of equipment in the skier’s arsenal, but, oh how we skiers depend on them.

While skiing, your sticks take on a few important attributes:

  1. Propulsion Device

  2. Rotation Aid

  3. Balance Aid

Pole Propulsion.png

Propulsion Device

With your pole tip planted in the snow’s surface, your pole and arm can then act as a jointed lever and used to propel your body past them. There is a sweet spot for both the height of pole and the stiffness of flexion where the most force can be generated and thus propel you faster or more efficiently. However, if your poles are too tall/short or too stiff/soft, and your advantage is greatly reduced. The use of poles for propulsion is often used while traveling uphill, across the hill, and starting downhill.

Pole Plant Rotation.png

Rotation Aid

If you have ever “pole-planted” while skiing downhill, then intended or not, you have used your pole as a rotation aid. Generating enough energy to rotate your skis can be difficult to muster, this makes the pole-plant of service. Remember that your body is a ball. If you rotate any part of the ball, the rest will follow. If a skier wishes to rotate the direction of their skis, they can do so by rotating an arm and the movement will translate through their whole body to their feet. This movement must be drastic, as the movements at the outer rim of a sphere are longer than the same degree of movement at the center. By planting a pole, a skier adds a point of resistance from which to move from, thus initiating the rotational force needed to re-direct their skis.

It matters where in relation to your turn, body and skis you plant your pole, as this action sets off a chain of reactions and will dictate each movement that follows. Planted early in the turn, late, far down the hill, far up, by your boots or by your ski tips will each leave you with much different results.

Pole-planting is not necessary to turn your skis, but it can be a helpful, efficient, and rhythmic movement to employ when used correctly.

Pole Balance.png

Balance Aid

Visualize yourself as a tight-rope walker, very high up, and untethered. Do you also see the long stick in your hands to aid in your balance? Your balance as a sphere is ultimately an expression of where your center is weighted. If your center rocks to the left, you fall to the left until caught. Roll your center to the right, fall to the right. Snow conditions and terrain are often rough, bumpy, fast and surprising, producing unwanted movements in a skier. By holding a long pole, you lengthen fidgety and large movements in your arms to smaller movements at the tip of the pole. In this way, you keep your center movements small by extending your sphere’s outer rim. Ski poles can act in this way.

poles propel.png

Now, say you are walking a tight-rope with an extended pole alongside a mountain, and tip of that pole touches the side of the hill. You gain another point of contact in addition to your feet. Natural tendency is to use that second contact point to stabilize yourself. In doing this, you reduce the amount of weight in your feet by transferring it to your pole tip.

Pole Hill.png

With standard sized ski poles on almost all slopes but the flattest of flat, we skiers drag our poles. As the pitch becomes steeper, the consequence of this action is less weighted pressure on our edges, and less flexion in the ski resulting in a lesser quality carve but more importantly the potential to fall to the inside and ultimately crashing.

Ski More Good Fundamental Movements are practiced without poles because while poles can be used as balance aids, they are often doing the opposite. Similarly, the use of a pole plant as a rotation aid is normal, however rotating from your center is more efficient and less practiced.