Ski Binding Safety Part III

Posted by John Sedgewick - 03/09/10 at 08:09 pm

The bones of the leg can take high levels of force without breaking as long as those force levels are applied over a very short period of time. The longer the leg is exposed to an injurious level of force, the more likely it is to break.

During a downhill ski run, the legs encounter high levels of bending and twisting forces as the skis hit ruts, bumps, ice and other features of the terrain. Because those forces are most often encountered as brief spikes of force, it is not desirable to have the skier released from the bindings every time the level of force gets in the dangerous zone. Properly designed alpine ski bindings are elastic, or capable of absorbing the brief spikes of force, without releasing.  The elasticity in the binding protects the skier from unnecessary, and potentially disastrous, early releases of the bindings.

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