I’ve dropped the ski, now what do I do?

This is a guide for when you are getting up on a single ski and want some hints and tips to getting better.

Tip 1. – Arms Straight, Hips Up, Strong Back Leg, Relax Against The Rope

Remember from my earlier posts that you want your arms straight, hips up towards the handle, keeping your back leg strong can help lift up the hips, find your resting balance spot against the rope.

Tip 2. – More Advanced Skis Want To Be On Edge

When in the slalom course, the ski will always be on edge or rolling to an edge, this is what advanced skis are made to do. If the ski is twitching or trying to role more than you can easily control, then the ski may be a bit beyond your ability yet.

Tip 3. – Control Comes From The Hips

With your hips up and connected to the handle, you can control all your movements and directional moves quite easily. When you are connected well, Wherever you point or move your hips will take you there.

If you attach a ski handle to a point, lean against the rope with your feet much closer to the anchor point than the handle. Try swinging your hips around, You will feel your body stay in the nice strong position, but thinking of moving your hips around causes a sway to happen, where the momentum is centred around your hips and the handle.

Tip 4. – Control Your Pull

When you are connected, start experimenting with pulling and leaning away from the boat through the rope. Keep the hips up, arms straight and pointed directly down the rope. Play with leaning hard and soft, in different directions, how fast can you go, what happens when you start hard what happens, what’s different when you start easy and finish strong??

Tip 5. – Gripping The Handle

Left foot forward should have your right hand on top.

A thought, to improve grip. See what happens if you let your index finger relax off the handle, and focus more grip through the pinky, ring, and middle fingers.

These 3 fingers create a better muscle chain reaction to your core, anti shrugging and pushing the elbows down while staying tall will increase that connection drastically.

Tip 6. – Anti-Shrug Your Shoulders

Just like you bring your shoulders up when you shrug, move your shoulders down, and feel your lats activate down the sides of your back. You need to keep your spine tall and strong as you do the anti shrug.

The lats connect to your core, which allows your entire body to access more strength. It will also make sure that your back muscles are supporting your position from their strongest position.

If you bend forwards and allow the boat to ‘break’ you over the front of the ski, then you will have a tough time skiing and likely be very sore the next day.

Tip 7. – Elbows In And Down

The shape of the shoulder joints shows us that we get more strength from our shoulders and arms when we keep our arms close in to the body. What I mean is that we are more fish winged, and not so much chicken winged.

A chicken wing goes out the side, for people though, this position is fragile. When we keep our elbows facing forwards or down, we activate a chain of muscles connecting to our core.

To put this in practice, when you are leaning, keep your elbows touching your life jackets, and push your elbows down while keeping your spin strong. If your elbows are up away from your hips on double skis, then think of aiming your elbows down, not out to the sides.

Carving And Skiing Through The Wakes

Tip 8. – Cut, Glide, Drift In, Increase The Angle, Set, Hold

This is the break down of the processes that go into one nice flowing, continuous turn.

Tip 9. – Cut Out

Cut from the wake out to the side of the boat. Start at the wake, begin your lean with your hips, and progressively edge and lean harder and harder until you release the lean, to swing up parallel to the boat.

Tip 10. – Glide

All the speed and momentum from the cut will send you up into a glide, where you match the speed of the boat and are free from the rope.

Stand tall with even weight on your ski.

Have a fraction of direction headed away from the boat, this should be minimal, and will help keep the rope tight into the turn.

Tip 11. – Drift In

As you lose speed, the boat will accelerate passed you, and you will begin to drift back towards the wakes. Let yourself start the drift in; we want the initiation of the turn to begin as gradually as possible. The further into the turn you get, the quicker you increase the intensity. To finish strong, you need to start as lightly as you can manage. The best way to do this is to use the drift back to be the initiation of the turn.

Tip 12. – Increase Angle

Imagine bouncing a basketball. As the ball leaves the ground, it comes up towards your hand. Think of it coming up to the top of its bounce where it pauses, hovering a hair from your hand. A fraction after the ball starts to fall, you move your hand onto the ball and start to push the ball down to the ground, finishing by pushing the ball as hard as you can, to get the ball to go as high as possible on the bounce.

This is essentially the same thing with turning our single ski. As you drift in, you begin to lose speed, and the tip of your ski starts to angle back to the boat. Like waiting a moment for gravity to make the initial move on the basketball.

Once gravity has initiated your turn, you want to take that momentum and increase it. If you try to rush the ski around, the tip will get lots of angle for a moment, then bounce back with much less than desired angle. If you continually try to increase the angle with a growing amount of effort, then the angle you get the ski to in the end will be much greater.

Tip 13. – Set Your Position

Once you have bought the ski around the turn, and have your desired angle, you need to set your position. The pull is about to come back on, because you have lost speed in the turn, there may be a tug. The easier you start though, the lighter the pull comes back on.

Your goal is to make sure that your position is ready and strong so you can take the ‘hook up’ from the boat as the load comes back on the line.

Tip 14. – Hold on

Holding is making sure that you maintain that position, not letting anything give, as you accelerate to and through the wake. You want your upper body to be super stable, absorb the coming wake with ankles and knees.

Tip 15. – Initiate Linked Turn

As you come off the second wake, you want to stop pulling on the rope and increasing your speed. You want the ski and your body to continue with the same angle, this will make sure you get lots of width. By not gaining any more speed, you will be able to time your turn to avoid getting any slack rope.

I will explain more of why in a later article going over some of the slalom fundamentals you want to know before getting too far through the slalom course.

Tip 16. – Try Using A Double Boot

Not everyone likes the kicker on the back. For myself, I could never get my foot to stay in there. I went with the double boot early, and couldn’t even think of going back. Not everyone is the same, though, and I have a number of friends who couldn’t ski in a double boot to save their life.

Tip 17. – Put A Strap On The Kickier To Keep Your Foot In

A pretty easy thing to attach yourself. Try using some rubber from the inner tube of a bike tire. Get some zip ties and zip in on, go ski and figure out how to make it work best for you.

Tip 18. – Learn About Body Stacking

Body stacking is a way of positioning the parts of your body so that your weight is stacked efficiently on the bones and muscles. This way, you will be at your strongest and most physically efficient. Here are a couple of resources for you to use.

Detailed explanation

Exercise for feeling the stack

Tip 19. – Ankles And Knees Are Your Suspension

Try to hold your upper body nice and stable by absorbing the wake with ankles and knees before the hips. If we take too much of the wakes through the hips flexing then we will break out chain of strength.

Tip 20. – Start Slow And Increase Progressively

This is really important for many movements in skiing. Control is the real name of the game. By starting moves, leans, and turns slowly, you will make sure that you are always in control, because if you are always increasing lean or angle, you can back off if you feel you need to.

Water will take your ski the moment you change its direction. Quick moves often mean a quick reaction from the water.

Tip 21. – Always Be Patient

In all things, with initiating turns, getting up, with your rate of progression. Don’t forget to play.

Tip 22. – Find Your Personal Rhythm

Finding your rhythm is way better than trying to time yourself to someone else’s metronome. Go and start crossing the wakes in your own time, turn when you are comfortable, lean as much as you want to, and see what your natural rhythm is. Once you know what it is, you can make adjustments to timing from there.

Tip 23. – Keep The Rope Tight

Keeping the rope tight means you always have a connection that you can use to get your balance and move around. If you break the connection to the boat, as happens when you get slack line, then reconnecting to the boat is usually pretty abrupt. To avoid these jolts from the boat, keep the rope tight, helps everything you will try to do going forwards.

Tip 24. – Shoulders Facing Down The Line

When you have the handle, and your arms are straight, let your arms face right down the rope to the ski pole. By having an even lean with your shoulders, it gives your upper body a platform. It means that every time you do pull, you are pulling in balance with your upper body. Both arms are extended, and shoulders are even against the rope.

Tip 25. – Maintain Angle After The Wakes

Keep your direction and aim to continue your swing to take you as wide on the boat as you can; this will prepare you well to turn back in.

Think to keep your hips facing out as long as you can.

Tip 26. – Point The Ski

With the tip of the ski out in front of you, think of pointing with the tip, keeping it pointed out and away from the wakes.

Tip 27. – Let The Ski Naturally Swing Out

If you can stop pulling on the rope after the second wake, you will notice that the ski actually switches edges to the inside, even though you are still headed out wide of the wakes. As the speed takes your ski, you will feel the swing, one of the best slalom feelings you can have.

Tip 28. – The Turn Starts At The Second Wake

The move of stopping the lean after the second wake is because your whole turn starts as you come off the wake and swing-out wide of the boat as you approach the buoy. Getting the release of the wake right will put you in a position to control your speed and turn directly off the back of the buoy.

Tip 29. – Learn The Skis Prefered Line

Every ski has a different set of dimensions, which means that it will have a slightly different line that it will naturally want to take. Try moving your body around without trying to force the ski around too much. If you can do this while turning, then you will get a sense for what your ski wants to do.

Tip 30. – Try New Skis

Test out new ski before buying. Find a friend or a shop that will rent you out a few skis to see which ones work better. Like above with trying to find the skis preferred line, you want to find a ski whose line matches your natural tendencies. Everyone will have a different opinion of the same ski, go find what works best for you.

Tip 31. – Give Yourself And Kids Challenges

Try to make games up to challenge yourselves. How many times can you cross the wakes in 30 seconds? Who can do the biggest spray? Any silly thing you can do that pushes your ability is worth making a game out of.

Tip 32. – Relax

When you are tense, all your body tenses up, and when your body is tense, you lose control and balance. When you relax, you leave your muscles free to fire when your body needs them. Practice being in your strong position, then let your stomach relax, find your center of balance with your stomach as relaxed as posible. You will find a place where your body is balanced and capable of making micro adjustments necessary.

Disclaimer

The tips here are a collection of the tools I use while coaching. Not all these tips will work together, and some may even be contradictory to some degree. A lot may be missing as coaches tailor advice to the individual and their previous experiences.

Without being there to see you ski, I don’t know which of these tools to give you to maximize your learning curve. Every person is different and reacts differently to the same advice. I put so much in here to accommodate as many different learning styles as possible.

Not all the tips here will work for you. The idea here is to get you thinking along the right lines about the fundamentals. Use whatever tips make sense to you, and use the rest as inspiration to experiment on the water. Find out exactly what makes you feel the most comfortable, and use it, because comfort is the main goal. If you’re comfortable, fun and progression come easily.