Good Morning Everyone-

For those that did the race yesterday—I see some good results—and some problems that you will need to work on during the upcoming off season. Keep in mind for the older crew, US Nationals will be held in Jericho VT March 23rd- March 29th. Hope you can attend!!

If you have a club rifle, and are not going to Nationals, you should now work on returning it to:
Lou Chouinard in the Cities
Bill in Nisswa
Vlad in Grand Rapids
Jeff in Alexandria.

The rifles should be cleaned thoroughly, and enclose a note indicating any problems you have had with it. We will be reissuing rifles [maybe the same one, maybe another one] at the May camp. New leases will need to be signed at the time of reissue.

As I watched the skiing yesterday, from the youngest to the oldest, I saw a common problem that everyone needs to work on. The course was good, but hard underneath and if your skis were a bit on the soft side [great for softer snow and warm conditions] you probably felt a bit unstable. With the instability comes a natural desire to ‘edge the ski’ by turning the knee inboard as soon as you reach the glide position…or before you reach it. This in turn leads to a weak push. Better is to compress the knee/ankle in line with the ski, and then extend it completely as you move to the new side with your entire body.

Others will do the above inboard knee with every push regardless of the snow conditions. And others will overlean to the outside or not get over the ski in the first place and inhibit their glide followed by incomplete compression and weak or no extension.

Much of the above to help hold a solid glide position while compressing with the poling can be corrected by building up the hip and core strength along with tightening up the knee stability. Side leg lifts, working both the outside flexors, and then lifting the lower leg up to the top leg to work the inside flexors will both strengthen the weak hip muscles and also help with the knee stability. Work with body weight at first..then slowly add light amounts of weight to the ankle area—or do the above with shoes then boots on. A little weight will go a long way.

Push ups, sit ups, side planks, hypers and back lifts, side curls etc will all add to the above with more core stability.

As much as we depend on the hips in normal life and more so in skiing, they are really weak.

Bill Meyer