matthewbrown

@jdk99 having your hips forward and to the handle at the finish of the turn is good, but what you do after the pull of the boat comes is most important. @horton will probably kill me but i will go down this rabbit hole for a minute. ideally, you will seek out a great coach you can work with in real time or at least give you advice after each set. the money spent would be well worth it. i beleive the hardest concept in skiing to explain and apply is moving your COM to the first wake as quickly as possible without being too stiff and without losing your stack and sitting back. i just had this discussion with @twhisper , (I'm sure you could send him a message) we send some video back and forth to coach one another and one of the things he pointed out about my skiing was that my stack was great at the finish of both turns but it was stiff and static. in other words the picture didn't change until the edgechange which was slightly more abrupt then it should have been, because of my stack. Yes keeping your legs as straight as possible and your hips up to the handle during the cut is fine but not ideal, you will ultimately pay the price on the otherside by being faster and later. it is a bandaid for the most efficient thing you can do which is drive your hips and knees toward the first wake with less upper body lean while simultaneously keeping your hips high, and not giving up any of your handle/hip distance. this is much easier to do on the onside for most skiers. even if you were only able to master this on your onside, and just kept a static stack on your offside, you'd be 50% better off.

@liquid d we were mid 39 back in 96', what happened to us?

I agree with @Horton you've got to get more width, and to get width you will need to get the hips involved in order to get the ski on edge and accelerate without shoulder load. Right now, all your work is being done by upper body.

How does anyone just get 4?

Hilarious

9 times out of 10 it's not the skis fault, so I would not focus on the 10% chance that it is. Post video=problem solved

Not bad for a desert rat

I agree with @horton, when you are finishing your one ball turn the line becomes tight before your hip has skied all the way around to the handle. Your upper body is bent forward so that it is actually closer to the boat than your ski/feet/hips. Stand taller, maybe even scrap the gates for a couple passes and just pull out for one ball and try to perfect the turn from there. Sometimes you gotta be willing to go back, before you go forward.

pull out for the gates when you feel like it, turn in for the gates when you feel like it, have fun.

@Horton that's great now where is my BOS paraphernalia?

@skidawg that's a deal

i don't have any tourney scores, can i just show up and ski anyway?

@LeonL Terry now virtually gets to 3@41 in every record tournament and has recently made his way to 4 ball. I watched him run back to back 41's in practice recently with slight boat movement, certainly not 6 inches. You give him 6 inches, and those 3 @41's turn into 6 @41.

@wish your comments should of ended with a mic drop, and a close out of this thread, spot on.

Yes I think if you added 5 to 6 inches to Terry's handle to even out Nate's height advantage, their scores would be very similar. @MS surely you are joking about Regina, while simultaneously proclaiming what a bad ass she is for even being in the conversation. If she added 5 inches to her handle to match Terry's height, what would she run at 36, 3@39? That would still put her a pass and a half behind Terry.

@Horton Larson? Look how on top of the ski he is in this pic, really hard to get this on top of the ski when your shoulders are rotated. Same thing Nate is doing, and many other skiers. Your shoulders are slightly more rotated and as a result, you are considerably further on the back of of the ski which will hinder you from keeping your speed into the next buoy. Unless of course this is a picture of a 28 off and you are already beginning your edge change.

this is the way it should look ideally

@Horton you are nearly perfectly open, the right shoulder lower than the left gives the illusion that you are twisting away more than you really are. nothing wrong with this picture, why are you not running 39?

When there is load on the line(right behind the boat/2nd wake), shoulders square to that load is the most efficient way to resist as well as keep proper balance. If under load my shoulders are twisted slightly, I still believe one can hold all the load you need, but ones shoulder width has now narrowed in relation to the direction of the load, which means that the load is not evenly distributed throughout ones body. Therefore I am more likely to lose balance and have the ski fall behind me in the edge change, or worse yet shoot out from underneath me forcing my path straighter to the buoy. If you watch Nate out of his good side cut, he is completely open and never twists away until after he lets go of the handle, however, he is slightly twisted with his shoulders on his offside cuts. Not a big deal for him because his balance is so great, he is perfectly stacked, and his load is always in the right spot. Not to mention it is biomechanically much more difficult to do this on the offside cut. It's all about finding that balance in the edgechange, and it is much easier if there is less load, if you are stacked, and if you are as open as can be without giving up your direction. *I think I need to do a better job of clarifying something else. Yes, shoulders square to the load when you are right behind the boat, but still keeping that downcourse position through the transition and edge change, or in other words shoulders would be facing downcourse through the edge change. I think this is where everyone fails with the whole open bit, it's not open to the pylon through the edge change, and it's not twisting away to the shore, it's shoulders facing downcourse so that you can maintain your direction*

@ski6jones Yes, the more square my shoulders are to the load the more balance I have. If I decrease my shoulder width by twisting slightly, I have taken away from my ability to be completely balanced. Again, we are not talking about the amount of lean I have away from the boat or the amount of pressure I have in my lead arm, only that my shoulders should ideally remain tangent to the load. How much of a difference does it really make? I think like anything else, the better you can become at the fundamentals, the better you will ski.

The more tangent my shoulders are to the load from the boat, the more connected to the handle and balanced my body will be through the edgechange. The more I try to twist my shoulders away from the load through the edgechange, the more disconnected and narrower my balance point becomes. I believe this is what @Razorskier1 is eluding to. It's only physics. Doesn't mean you can't get away with twisting away, it's just not ideal. What it all boils down to, I believe, is having open shoulders through the edgechange while maintaining your lean away and direction out. The problem comes when skiers try to stay open during the edgechange and simultaneously give up their lean, hands are then thrown up in the air exclaiming that this open shit doesn't work, so tail between the legs we go back to the band aid move of pulling hard and long through both wakes with a late exaggerated edge change causing an off balance inconsistent turn. This concept requires a lot of coaching, but once it's established, it's an entirely new ballgame.

this is stacked

@Horton let me see if i can confuse things....

Best advice, ski more. You look very athletic, and often times the body position with guys like you will work itself out as the speed and line length change. @Horton loving your comments

@scotchipman 66