14348439:DesertStix said:
Hmm been skating longer than skiing and having a hard time imagining what you mean. In that last little back truck revert on a half cab I feel like it’s my legs doing all the work and my shoulders just naturally come around
Ok here goes....
Butters are a lot more than just tossing your weight around. They are a series of controlled movements that work best when you bring momentum and a decent amount of speed into the equation. One of the things I never hear people talk about when trying to describe how to do Butters, is the fact that you need to have speed when you're coming into the trick to help initialize the skis flexing.
The initiation of the butter is the most important part of the entire trick. Every butter no matter how big of a spin, happens at 180. Your goal is to smoothly load up the tips of your skis as you press forward and rotate into 180 to get to the point where you snap at 180 and initiate the rest of the spin. Your pop point is always at 180 so hitting that is critical to being successful for the rest of the trick. That being said, 540s definitely work better than 360s in my experience if you are doing the snap correctly. To initiate the butter, I would recommend making a large s carve into the roller (which is the easiest feature to do it on), where the s-curve ends in the direction that you would like to butter. One of the trickiest parts of buttering (at least how I do them, which I think is relatively the proper way to do it), is to keep your inside edges in the snow and your outer edges out so that they don't hang up when you initiate onto the noses and start to spin around, and I do that by bending both knees to one side while keeping your feet under you and your feet relatively together as seen in the video embedded here.
Keeping both feet together the entire time during the trick is one of the most important things for maintaining stability and also creating pop at the correct time during the execution of the trick. Keeping your feet together during the whole trick will allow you to get the most energy out of the ski, and really push into it to get the flex and pop you're looking for. Loading up the tips of your skis doesn't have to happen instantly either, focus on being smooth and transferring your weight forward strongly and confidently during the last part of the S carve so that you swing around on the balance point of the tips of your skis.
The balance point is another very important part of buttering, the balance point of every ski is different both in where it is from tip to the middle of the ski as well as how wide it is and how forward it back you can lean and press the ski without going too far and slipping out, or staying on the ground entirely. You can feel this out on your skis by just standing on the flat ground and leaning forward to feel where you're balanced while still pressing so the back of your skis is off the snow and in the air a decent amount.
After you've done the S carve, leaned in, initiated, gone 180, and popped the trick, you want to focus on spotting your landing and leading the rest of the spin with your upper body. Like I said before, 540 works better if done properly.
Let me know if you have any questions, and analyze the video carefully.
[video]https://youtu.be/hVR-8CT6qrQ[/video]
**This post was edited on Nov 18th 2021 at 4:46:52pm
