Sweet Spot Part 2 - Good Vibrations

Circular Strength Training presents a whole family of vibration drills which have an incredible breadth and depth of application. They can be used for recovery from exercise, as a means of calming the over-stimulated athlete, as a way to reduce superfluous muscle tension and in preparing the body for movement. But at its most basic level, the vibration drill can be an excellent drill for discovering the use of efficient structure.

If we seek to perfect or copy a stance instead of searching for the proprioceptive awareness of good balance and structure, we will never discover a true state of Zero Position (Sonnon, Body-Flow p54). One of my favorite tools for helping my skiers to develop a sense of their own structure and to detect areas of excess and inefficient tension in their bodies is to shake things up a little. The exercise focuses on being able to "shake your hands with your legs." It is essentially an on-snow version of a CST vibration drill. The idea is to send a wave through your body to shake your hand by dropping your mass down towards the ground and then absorbing it through mid-foot into the ground. If the skier is relaxed, this wave will travel up through the body and into the shoulders, arms and finally the hands, causing them to "shake." If the skier is holding unnecessary tension, this wave will be impeded somewhere along the line and the hands will remain stiff.

SkiFlow(tm) On-Snow Vibration Drill

[Video has been moved to the SkiFlow Inner Circle member's area on SkiFlow.com]

Through experimentation, the skier can usually discover where the wave is being blocked. The natural inclination is to think that the problem is in the hand, arm or shoulder, but more often than not it originates in the trunk or lower body and irradiates from there. By having the skier experiment statically (standing still), they will discover how changing their structure affects the tension. By working with the alignment of the body segments (equal flexion) and with the fore/aft and side-to-side planes, they will discover how movement affects structure and how structure affects the tension in their bodies. In essence they are discovering true balance, where all forces pulling on the body are zeroed out so that muscular recruitment is only used to hold their structure in place, instead of to hold them upright. Structure holds them upright instead.

Once they get the feel for this statically, we can move it back into a dynamic sphere on easy terrain in a shallow arc, and then gradually increase the difficulty of the terrain, turn shape and speed. Once skiers start to integrate the concept of looking for a state of natural structural alignment instead of looking to reproduce a "stance," they are ready to start exploring the lateral balancing that will lead to the astounding and gravity-defying feats mentioned in Part 1 of this article.