UPPER BODY MOVEMENT

Which picture best exemplifies the way you bring your hand/pole forward when skiing?

In blog post #1, I described lifting the leg without any forward motion of the body's mass is a waste of time and energy, so to is the arm lift (the male lifting the dumbbell).  If you are experiencing shoulder pain then you are lifting from the shoulder rather than pressing forward by driving from the hips (like the female with the resistance band).

When the pole(s) hit the snow we want to have our body weight on top of them so that we can maximize downward pressure.  Effective and efficient poling is based on the principle of leverage.

The further you can get your body's mass forward of your feet, the more force you can apply downward on the poles.  The beauty of leveraging your body's mass is that it means you don't need to have massive shoulder muscles to double pole up a hill.

One of the best ways to learn how to get your body weight forward (i.e., bring your hips forward) is by doing kettle bell swings.

The kettle bell is brought forward to shoulder height by the hip swinging forward, not by the lifting the arms.  In double poling you would snap your hips forward of the feet and fall onto the poles.

Leveraging should only be done in the forward direction (body ahead of the toes).  There is an old school version of offset that says to lean onto the uphill pole (shoulder goes way outside of the ankles).

I call this the "wobbling top".  The upper body mass is being thrown all over the place like a spinning top that is ready to topple.

Your spine should stay vertical.  The shoulder blades should never extend laterally past the hips.   Look again at picture of the girls offset-ing and you will see that one pole is not contributing to the forward propulsion of the skier.  Compare the girls to the skier below where both poles are coming forward so that both poles will be used in forward propulsion.  The modern offset poling resembles the double pole technique.

If you are experiencing elbow pain the most likely culprit is you aren't locking your elbows and initiating with an ab crunch.  Like the gym exercise on the ab rocker, you want to let the abs initiate the downward push onto the poles

and then finish off with pushing with the arms.

If you are not using your abs during poling (double poling or single poling), then you are pushing  solely with your arms and you will experience tennis elbow (inflammation of the tendons of the elbow caused by overuse of the muscles in the forearm).