queequeg Posted February 21, 2008 Report Share Posted February 21, 2008 So, this past weekend I widened my stance to a more normal 19" and although it was a bit more akward, I definitely was appreciating the added stability that I got out of it, as well as the ability to ride faster without de-cambering the board excessively in turns (due to the greater weight distribution, I would imagine). I only had one problem: ride with a pretty aggressively compressed stance at times, and a few times I could feel my rear ankle flexing to the point that I thought I might damage it, particularly in quick transitions on faster runs. I assume this is due to the wider stance increasing ankle flexion while I am compressed as compared with a narrower stance. I appreciate the increased stability but I am afraid of damaging my rear ankle. I know one way to help this out is add a bit of heel lift (and maybe lower angles). In my experience though, any amount of heel lift that will make a difference will offload significant weight from the rear foot, and I like a lot of power there. Will the gas-pedal setup help with this, or should I consider narrowing up a bit? I'm at 19.5 wide at about 64 deg (front and back) and I am 5'9". Would switching my BTS from blue to red make a difference do you think? In other news: my carving seems to be back on track!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack M Posted February 21, 2008 Report Share Posted February 21, 2008 heel lift on the back foot, balanced by toe lift on the front foot to prevent the offloading. 19.5" sounds reasonable for 5'9". I'm 5'11" and I'm at 19.75" with ~3 degrees of lift on each. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
queequeg Posted February 21, 2008 Author Report Share Posted February 21, 2008 That seems to make sense, I guess it makes sense that if you offload equal amounts of weight from both you end up back where you started. I'll give that a shot Jack - thannks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jack M Posted February 21, 2008 Report Share Posted February 21, 2008 post an update and let us know how it goes. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
queequeg Posted February 22, 2008 Author Report Share Posted February 22, 2008 Will do. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
queequeg Posted February 27, 2008 Author Report Share Posted February 27, 2008 post an update and let us know how it goes. Yep. That definitely helped. Carved hard all saturday and sunday and did not experience the rear-ankle-crunch sensation I had been getting on hard toeside transitions. I had some problems with skidding out my toesides on saturday morning (I took one particularly bad run on upper standard where I must have skidded out 5 times ... embarrassing) but I think that was technique related. By saturday evening it was all pretty smoothed out. matching the toe to the heel increase seemed to have a positive effect, in terms of preventing significant weight offload from one foot to the other. Not sure how much lift I added but it seemed pretty significant (my guess is 5-7 deg total on the rear and maybe 3-5 on the front. Thank you! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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