The Lab

The ski is treated as a bending beam lying on snow that pushes back like a bed of springs. Each ski has its own stiffness curve (softer at the tips), camber and rocker shape, and width. Each snow type has its own spring stiffness and edge friction. Your weight, multiplied by the extra load of the turn (1 ÷ cos of how far your body leans into the turn), is pressed through the boot at a point set by your fore/aft stance. The solver bends the ski until it balances.

Boots add play and a delay. The foot moves inside the shell before the shell moves the ski, so part of each move is lost and the rest arrives late.

Edge angle and body lean are not the same thing. Angulating at the hips lets you hold a higher edge angle with less body lean, so the ski bends to a tighter carve while the load and the sideways demand on the edge stay lower.

Muscle load comes from the skier’s posture. The force from the snow runs from the pressure point under the foot up through the centre of mass. Its distance from each joint sets how hard that joint has to work. Percentages are rough shares of what an average fit adult can sustain, not medical figures. Joint pain or sharp pain is a question for a physio, not this model.

Real skis use published dimensions, radius and profile. Flex, camber and rocker heights aren’t published, so those are estimates from the construction and reviews, and are marked as such.

Version one leaves out torsion, vibration, speed-dependent snow, edge bevels, and two-footed weighting (it puts everything on the outside ski). It is built to make cause and effect visible, not to give lab numbers.