I'm a Pro?

I have a lot of critiques of the PSIA and AASI concepts on training, teaching, and advancement. I'll probably post a few over the next days, especially after the events this weekend. There are some parts of the organizations though that make huge amounts of sense. I'm also one to always look for new ways to describe concepts. As such I was really interested to discover our training director (TD) was having an early morning clinic being run by members of the Harb skiing method.

In my last encounter with the Harb methods, I found some of their teaching tools facilitated some absolutely amazing changes in my own skiing. Because I had a 10 am class, I knew I'd only have about 2 hours in the clinic and was pretty eager to get into the movements. Half an hour later, we're still in the lodge listening to the clinician discussing some points that have long since been forgotten. I apologize to the others in the clinic for this question. He mentioned the Harb system prefers not to have a leading foot, something I believe the PSIA is moving towards as well, while mentioning a counter rotation and an angulation he called counter. So to describe the stance best, stand with your feet shoulder width or closer and try to bend your knees and ankles while tipping on the sides of your feet a bit. Now with your upper body, rotate it (think shoulders) counter to the angle your ankles are tipping (that's counter rotation) and extend the obliques (side muscles on your stomach) to reach more towards your knees (that's counter). Naturally your body wants to spread those feet for balance, hence my question of where should the force of retraction be? In the ankles, knees, or... ? Half an hour later I still didn't know the answer to my question.

Finally on the snow, we get a chance to show some technique and see what this guy is describing. We reach the bottom of the hill and begin some of his exercises. 40 minutes later we're still at the bottom of the hill and have had the chance to traverse the hillside twice, testing out the new techniques. 10 minutes later we're on the lift again back to the top, where another long description of the mechanics is taking place. I finally leave the clinic in an effort to check out the snow coverage and quality before I have any classes to lead down.

The point of this is, the class never got anywhere. One of my favorite points of PSIA and AASI is the liberal use of the keep it simple rule. You typically have 5 minutes to keep a classes attention, after that they start tuning you out and doing everything else. Right now my opinion of the Harb system is it's probably very good if you can stomach the exceedingly long and drawn out explanations of every little detail. Is it right for me? No, obviously not. In my opinion this system would never work on a younger person. The attention span is just not there.