As you dust off your skis from last year, do you wonder if you should have relaxed the binding springs before taking out the golf clubs last spring? Will the binding still function reliably? We found an engineer’s perspective to settle the question once and for all.

1. You could leave your bindings set for 30 years and not affect performance one way or the other, at least in regards to the springs.

2. You could also adjust them back to zero after every ski day and not affect performance one way or the other, again only in regards to the springs.

The concept, however, of prolonging the life of a compression spring by lowering the tension periodically is based on sound engineering but it may be overkill for ski bindings. Springs are not the issue. If the right spring is chosen, the skis will wear out long before the bindings. And within the binding design and component quality, several other components or functions will usually fail, or at least become unreliable first.

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