One of the best ways to improve your skiing and increase your enjoyment in the mountains, is to invest in your feet. A pair of professionally fitted ski boots is vital to giving you the best foundation for your skiing comfort, and progression.
Here at aussieskier, we approach boot fitting with a 3-step process to give you confidence in your boot selection.
STEP 1 - ANALYSIS
We start our boot fitting process by having an open and honest conversation about your skiing and ski boot experience. It is useful to have a think about the following questions before coming in to get fitted.
- Where do you ski? Australia? Overseas?
- How much do you ski? Think days per year.
- What terrain do you enjoy skiing the most?
- How would you like to progress your skiing?
- Do you have any injuries or medical conditions that may affect your feet?
- Have you had previous discomfort in ski boots?
Once we’ve had a quick chat, we get to analysing your biomechanics. This involves a quick visual check of your ankle flexibility, arch height, and general foot behaviour when standing and flexing forward.
After that, we get to the numbers. We take a precise measurement of both feet when sitting, standing, and flexing forward in a ski stance. We take all of these measurements into consideration when making a selection for your boots.
STEP 2 - SELECTION
Our boot fitters will use the information from Step 1 to select two or three boots for you to try. Before you try on a boot properly, the liner will be pulled out and we will perform a shell check to confirm sizing. This is a crucial step in the process, allowing for our boot fitters to confirm that the shell is a good match to your foot. It also removes the liner from the equation, as the shell is the real indicator of the size of the boot. Liners will mold and compress over time, but the shell will stay the same.
If the shell check looks good, it’s time to move on! Now you get to compare the selection of boots that our boot fitters have chosen. We usually do this comparison by putting a different boot on each foot. Our boot fitters will ask a series of questions, and get you to do some particular movements in the boots to gather feedback. Based on your feedback, you will typically put the “winning” boot on both feet, or compare a third option. Trying on more than three pairs of boots is likely to cause confusion, and will unnecessarily lengthen the fitting process.
It should now be clear which pair is the best solution. We now discuss potential modifications to improve the fit, and customisation options to personalise your new boots.
STEP 3 - MODIFICATION & CUSTOMISATION
Now that we’ve made an appropriate selection for your biomechanics, foot shape, and skiing type, it’s time to dial in the fit! There are 3 main areas we will look at to increase your comfort and performance.
Footbeds
The inside of every boot is essentially flat underneath your foot, but your foot is not. When we ski, we are placing all of our weight on our feet, and this can cause a lot of stress and strain to run through our arches and ankles. Without proper support, we are unnecessarily wasting energy and disrupting our stance.
Using a footbed or insoles to support the foot, we can reduce the stress your feet produce when skiing, improve your skiing precision, and make your boots more comfortable. Our boot fitters will get you to test this by placing a pre-made footbed into your boots, so that you can feel the difference.
You can select from two types of footbed to be paired with your boots. Choose from a selection of pre-made footbeds from Sidas, or get a pair of custom footbeds made by our boot fitters using our Sidas Custom Fit Station. A pre-made footbed is recommended as a minimum must-have by our boot fitters, and will work for the vast majority of skiers and their feet. The custom made footbeds offer the ultimate in, well, customisation. Our boot fitters will ensure that your custom footbeds match each of your feet, and can change the stiffness of the footbeds to improve comfort and performance.
The impact that footbeds will have on the performance of your skiing, and your all-day comfort, can not be emphasized enough.
Once you have made a selection, we will move on to the next stage of modification.
Liner
Your footbeds are dialled in, now it’s time to do the same to your liners. This process involves heating up, or as we like to call it “baking”, your liners.
Heating up the liners in our boot ovens allows for the foam materials to become soft and malleable. Once the liners are “baked”, we place them back in the shells and get you to put the boots back on. After a short period of standing or moving in the boots, the liners will have adapted their interior shape to match your feet, ankles, and lower leg. This creates a truly “custom” fit for the liner, which helps to improve the breaking in process during those first few days of skiing.
Shell
Now that the inside of the boot is customised to your foot with an appropriate footbed and a baked liner, we can look at making any necessary modifications to the shell.
Modern ski boot plastics are quite responsive to heat, and allow our boot fitters to make permanent adjustments to the shape of the shell in any necessary spots. Your foot may require more space in particular areas due to any bunions, bone growths, foot deformities, or to just create a little bit more wiggle room. We will keep an eye on any potential hot-spot or problem areas during the fitting process, so that we are aware of what may need to be done at this stage.
Shell modifications are permanent, and can take us some time to complete. We typically need to hold your boots in the workshop for a couple of days to complete the modifications, and may need to repeat the process a number of times before nailing it. We will make an extra appointment (or appointments) for you to come back another day and finish your fitting.