ISO 11088, and the number nobody should guess

What this document settles

It fixes a procedure, not a number. ISO 11088 describes how an alpine ski, a binding and a boot are assembled as one system, how the release setting is arrived at, and how the finished assembly is inspected before it leaves the shop.

The setting itself comes out of a table. The inputs are the skier’s weight, the skier’s height, the skier’s age and the boot sole length in millimetres — the figure stamped on the heel of every alpine boot. Those four produce a skier code, and a self-declared skier type moves that code up or down. The result is the value the technician sets, and the bench test that follows checks that the binding actually releases near it.

Two of those four are physical measurements of the person. One is a measurement of the boot. None of them is how fast somebody thinks they ski.

What it does not promise

It does not promise a release. A binding set correctly can fail to release in a slow twisting fall, and can release on a landing it should have held. The document describes a system that behaves within a tolerance under test conditions, and a fall is not a test condition.

It does not cover touring bindings. Those have their own document, and the pin bindings used in ski touring are not all built to release in the way an alpine binding is.

It does not travel with the skier. A setting is calculated for one boot; a new pair of boots with a different sole length is a new calculation, even at the same weight.

And it is not something a listing can give you. A binding’s published range — Z 3–10, Z 4–13 — says what the binding can be set to, and that is what this site prints. Whether your value falls inside that range is the whole of the buying decision; what the value is belongs to the bench.

What it is read alongside

The binding’s own requirements are in a separate standard, and so are the boot sole dimensions the binding grips. Touring bindings have a third. Between them, those documents decide whether a boot and a binding can even be assembled, before this one decides how the assembly is set.

Where it turns up on this site

The binding shelf first, where the published range is the figure that matters. Then boots, because the sole length stamped on the heel is one of the four inputs, and a boot bought without noting it leaves the calculation incomplete. Then the skis themselves, since a ski sold with a binding arrives as a system this document expects to be set up as one.

This site handles it in one way, consistently. Every binding page prints the manufacturer’s stated range and names it as a range. No page here suggests a setting, converts a range into one, or describes a binding as safe at any value — and where a listing prints a single number where a range belongs, the page says the listing is wrong rather than repeating it.