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“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays
young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.”

“Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”

“Whether you think you can or think you can’t-you are right.”

“Lane, …. I  have been stuck on my back to fronts (on the 5 foot). I am making the rotation around
(sliding, not hopping or throwing it) but can't seem to keep my arms in close enough to my body, and
end up losing the handle before I can make the handle pass. HELP, I am not looking forward to
another season of this!!”

Mark Howell

Davenport IA

I am really looking forward to completing my first installment of my Digital Ski School which will cover
this along with the front to back in a full one hour lesson. I am hoping to have this available before
the end of the month.

The first thing to do here is your homework! It starts with making sure your Posture and Glide and
Power Band are awesome. Next, you will need to review the concepts of “The Quite Upper Body.”
You can see these by going to http://www.thefootersedge.com/traumacenter/index.htm
and looking at NFTE #15, #6.

I am quite sure this will need much work, but for the purpose of answering your question, I will
assume that you have mastered the above concepts (this is a big assumption!)

If you are experiencing the same problem as Mark has described, I will offer three solutions.

#1 Much dry-land practice followed by at least 200 Puppy Paw (shoe-skis) turns done with exacting
form.

#2 Correct Handle Position

#3 Learn my Clock Approach to surface turns!

The first idea is as easy as it sounds and I do not care if you are on trick skis or shoe skis but I want
hundreds of perfectly performed turns so that your muscle memory is solid. A big mistake is to try
this turn on your feet so many times incorrectly that you get in a rut. I like to follow the simple
guideline of NEVER REPEAT THE SAME MISTAKE # TIMES IN A ROW!!!

This means you must change it up in whatever way you can to keep from practicing the incorrect
form until you perfect the incorrect form. This is a HUGE lesson for barefooters of all levels. Do not
allow yourself to get in a rut…why? Because I believe that “if you are going to be stupid, then you
better be tough.” The problem is that being tough  can lead to permanent problems with lots of
incorrect muscle memory.

The second tip is to adjust from a normal back skiing handle position to the surface turn handle
position. Whenever doing any surface turn, keep the handle closer to your body. Most people try to
do this with arm strength only, but to do this properly you must keep your shoulders rolled back into
perfect POSTURE!

The surface turn handle position for this turn is to have the handle touching the bottom of where your
belt would be if you were wearing one. This will make you look a little chicken winged, but it is the
only way I know to keep good upper body form during the turn.

Realize this, that the worse your starting position is, the more difficult it is to maintain this position
throughout the turn. If your current position requires a lot of strength or excursion, then your chances
of success are not good. Further more, you could get an ouwy or a boo-boo!

This leads me to my favorite example for surface turns…  The Clock Approach. You deserve to have
this unfair advantage in your skiing!

I actually found that I have covered this in NFTE #21, but I will repeat it here again so that you do not
have to go get it.

Lane “Dawg” Bowers’ Clock Approach:

Pretend that while in the backwards position, you are standing on the face of a clock with your feet at
the center and your chin directly over the 12! While performing the back to front, the most common
mistake is to let your head circle around the clock from 12 to 1 to 2 to 3 or in the other direction in the
same manner. Contrarily, turn so that your head never leaves the 12 position throughout the entire
turn so that as you get to the front, the back of your head is over the twelve position. If you can
accomplish this you will have turned with your hips and kept your upper body quiet! Does that make
sense?

I want to ad just one more piece of advice. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO SIT LOWER AS YOU COME TO
THE FRONT! I find that many people try to protect themselves from “going out the front” bay sitting
down. This is a FEAR mechanism. You brain is unbelievably smart and it is telling you to do this
because it knows something I feels wrong. Most brains do this because of poor training habits as I
explained in the first part of the article.

If you allow yourself to take enough falls, your mind will try to talk you out of this repeated beating by
going on defense. You can get your brain to reset its thinking by treating your body to some SMART
SKIING where you experience the fun of not falling!

Falling is bad! But if you do fall, use it as a learning tool. I love what Henry Ford had to say about this,
“Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”

I would like to ad my own quote!

“You can control the quality of your skiing by controlling the quality of the thoughts that occupy your
mind while skiing.”

-Lane Dawgumus Maximus

Don’t have enough time to get down here to paradise? Bring Lane Dawg Bowers to your turf for a
private clinic with you and your buddies! http://www.thefootersedge.com/skischool

Last chance for a FREE WEEK of Skiing in paradise
http://www.thefootersedge.com/marchmadness.htm

Get an unfair advantage by signing-up for some lessons  with Lane Dawg Bowers
http://http://www.thefootersedge.com/skischool

Order the best instructional video on the planet http://www.thefootersedge.com/zvideos.htm

Email the Dawg with your questions lane@lanedawg.com  

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