For both forward lean and heel lift issues, there are a few simple diagnostic exercises that can help you fix these issues.
First, standing in both boots with feet a little less than shoulder width apart, straighten your legs so that your knees are locked without lifting the heel of the boot off of the ground. Now, notice what happens. If you fall on your face, your boots have too much forward lean. Weight should be on balls of feet, heel should be unweighted but touching, or just hovering over the footbed. You should feel balanced, springy and solid. Now relax, bend your knees. Weight should now feel evenly distributed across the foot, with most concentrated under the mid-foot. Does your heel immediately bear weight, or drop some distance before it hits the footbed? If it drops, you need one of two things (or both). If your weight with knees locked was on your toes, or you fell on your face, you need less forward lean. If your weight w/ knees locked was on the balls of your feet and you felt relatively balanced, you need to put a heel lift in the boot to bring the footbed up to meet your heel.
Have a friend hold a plumb-bob next to you, against your shoulder (roughly in the middle of your body from front to back). With knees slightly flexed, shins touching the front of the boot, center mass should be over the mid-foot. With legs straight, knees locked, center mass should be over the ball of the foot.
Next, find something about 1 foot or so high to jump off of. Standing on top, jump off and land centered over and evenly on both feet, flat on the boot sole. Did your toe go BANG? If so, double check the shell fit...probably too long.
Lastly, standing on one foot, jump up and down landing and taking off as flat on the sole as possible. Do this 6-7 times rapidly on each foot. Pay attention to your foot inside the boot. Does it move a lot? Is it coming off of the footbed and falling back down a lot, or just weighting and unweighting? Do you fall over? If so, which way?
Use these simple exercises to get your boots set up so that you can do these exercises without feeling off balance or tentative. Not all boots can be easily adjusted for forward lean (kudos to dalbello for building so much adjustment into the kryps), so you may have to get creative. You can use the "canting" (actually cuff alignment, not true canting) bolts on some boots to actually straighten the cuff.
For example, I have stupid fat calves, so I had to bend back the rear of the upper cuff on my Dobies to get my fore-aft position right. Think about it, the thicker the calf, the more acute the delta between tib/fib and foot.
Get this right and you will have more energy, less fatigue on the hill, and feel more hero-like than a six pack of red bull can ever accomplish. Provided, of course, the buckles are on the outside......
Hope this helps.
Last edited by weasel1; 03-19-2010 at 09:22 PM.
Reason: correction
"I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."- Alan Greenspan
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