Skiing motor behavior is the connection between our brain and our moving body while skiing, allowing to develop body perception while learning, controlling, and modifying our motoric habits. It also covers the notion of movement coordination, posture correction, muscle effort reduction, and the idea of movement repetition.
An appropriate skiing motor behavior consists of achieving an efficient postural control as well as emotional control.
It also includes paying attention to the following:
- Fore-aft and lateral balance.
- Feet, upper body-legs, upper body-arms dissociation and coordination.
- Rhythm control.
- Precision of feet support.
- Poles coordination.
- Speed changes and obstacles adjustment.
- Vision-action dissociation and coordination in distance appreciation.
- Trajectory and speed.
- Breathing and free movements due to energy flow.
- Perception of emotional conflicts.
To achieve a skiing conscious behavior, we must perceive what we are accomplishing by looking for the moment’s immediate conscience. When we were beginners, after establishing our goal, we performed various movements until we discovered the appropriate one for the needed action, generating the sensation that was the reference of the suitable movement for that goal in particular. At that level, movement execution was usually directed towards the result and not much to sensory references, as in more advanced levels. Then, the intended goal activates motor representations that will be transferred to sensations.
Skiing is not reaching a determined motor structure but acquiring consciousness of corporal movements flow by doing and by giving up the doing; it is about coordinating all needed movements in a single action.
While being skiing conscious leads us to paying attention to different movement references, worrying about each motor detail restricts our action flow, so skiing is expressed more like a mechanical form than sensorial and perceptual aptitudes. Sometimes we tend to be mechanical, repeating the same movements and the same mistakes. Mechanization and the repeatability without consciousness impede our evolution, maintain a practice in a vicious circle, and consume unnecessary efforts.
In skiing motor execution, we are usually worried about performing our movements (the visible technique), when it would be more appropriate knowing how we transmit our skills (energy, sensitivity) during movements (the non-visible technique), or put in another way; our external appearance is the visible motor behavior and our internal aspect is the carrier of an invisible meaning.
Skiing motor behavior can be also classified in adaptive behavior, in which we adapt to the new environment through our movements and actions; and exploratory behavior, which connects us with the surroundings by knowing and learning its characteristics.
Motor execution depends on our motor cortex functioning. It is a map that includes our body parts, where the areas of finer sensitive movements have a greater surface (hands, tongue, and lips) compared to other parts such as our feet, which explains why it takes us longer to use them correctly when learning to ski. This cerebral area originates the motor plan that we will execute. A part of that plan goes down our spinal cord and another part goes to our somatosensory cortex to make a prediction or have an indication of how our movements should sense if we perform them properly.
