Fig. 1. Fairly tall, feet just starting to travel up over the bump.
Anyone who can ride his or her bicycle backwards can also learn to be a great mogul skier. On second thought, skiing moguls is already easier than riding a bike backwards, but fortunately what I meant to say was pedaling a bike backwards. We all know that one of the main challenges of skiing bumps is to maintain decent fore/aft balance over all the bumpiness, but by mimicking the motion of freewheeling your pedals backwards you can improve your ability to stay centered.
Let's start from what we'll call a "normal" stance, fairly tall and upright, evenly flexed through the ankles, knees, hips and spine (Fig.1). As you ski into a bump you increase flex mostly at the knees in order to absorb it. The angle at your hips will also close, but make sure this happens by your legs moving upward and not your chest collapsing downward. Unless the bump is particularly small, your flexion will increase as your feet move forward and up to a point where your hips are behind your feet, and perhaps equal to or even lower than the level of your knees (Fig. 2).
Fig. 2 Fully compressed, pulling feet back.
If you remain here for long, obviously your weight will go to the tails of your skis and all the negative affects of that stance will begin wearing you down. To prevent this from happening, pull your feet back as you pass the top of the mogul, just like you would pull your foot back at the top of a pedal stroke when spinning backwards on a bicycle. This will begin the process of realigning your hips over your feet, plus it helps to keep the skis on the snow by pushing the tips down the backside of the mogul. As you pass the top of the bump, extend your legs from the hips so that you keep contact with the ground. Again make certain that your legs are extending away from a stable upper body (Fig. 3); don't let your chest move back and away from the legs. As you reach the bottom of the trough you'll be back to our "normal" stance, your feet having made a full revolution of the backwards pedal stroke and ready to start the cycle again by moving up to start absorbing the next bump.
Fig. 3 Legs extending down as hips move forward to re-center.
Most of us are pretty good at flexing to absorb terrain, so the new thing to focus on here is pulling your feet back just as you max out the flex and begin to extend. Many of us are less adept at fully extending, we gradually get shorter and shorter the farther we go, and this prevents us from getting the hips far enough forward to completely re-center. By combining the movements of pedaling the feet backwards and extending hips forward we can keep the skis on the snow and stay within an acceptable range of fore/aft balance no matter how rough and brutal the terrain may be.
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