Deep11

Looks like info might have been rushed? Freddie just posted he got second = 1.nate 2. Freddie 3. Sledge.

Goode power vest

@triplett I agree "back hip forward" is a good way of moving COM over front foot. For others it's - "straighten back leg" or " counter rotate" or "push the handle down the bouy line with your inside hip". My point was about where, once you are on the front foot do you want the pressure to be. ? Logic and basic athleticism says it should be in the pad just behind your big toe and 1st toe. I would also suggest that it should stay there right through the tune until the hook up at which point the pressure will drop back a bit to be shared between front and back foot for max load. As soon as you exit second wake you should be searching for the same pressure point in the front foot. @skjay talks about "feeling" where the water is breaking and the balance point in the approach to the bouy - not sure that's possible with flat feet?

When teaching / coaching slalom there is, understandably, a universal problem of weight too far back - to some degree its a "right of passage ". There are many many threads on here about how to transition out of this, yet for many it remains the basic problem. Having taken some snowboard coaching recently I was struck by some similarities (in balance) the focus of this particular coach was "feeling" where the pressure is in your feet. Once established you can then move the pressure around to effect the changes you want. There is a lot less going on with snowboarding but there is a good point here. Slalom is a very athletic excercise yet most amateur skiers ski with flat feet - driving from the heals (and yet trying to get weight forward) . In any board / athletic sport the "ready position " is on the balls of the feet - shouldnt our advice on body position be aimed at achieving the correct foot pressure. Ideally when a skier is trying different "key thoughts" a very quick mental check would be to see if the movement they are doing results in the required foot pressure. After all any movement is only relevant in the effect it has on the ski? I don't think this has any relevance with RTP heel lifting / double boots etc as it's very easy to stand with flat feet yet move the pressure around. I know there is a GUT of slalom appearing - is this a part of it? Just a thought

Is CP on one of these bad boys?

Weird that this has been our discussion (locally) over the last week. Our conclusions (for what it's worth): 1. You can't get too high on the boat 2. BUT at long lines you don't actually NEED to get that high on the boat 3. As the line shortens - the right process achieves the greater height necessary 3. The really important bit is getting "free" of the boat- from an early acceleration - at every line length (whole different discussion that probably deserves its own thread) 4. You have to time it to be able to turn in on the front of the ski and "meet" the boat about 1-2m before the white water with max speed and angle - "balanced" on the ski.

Hi @Chris Rossi in terms of feedback the vice is great - love em and wouldn't go back to a normal glove for any money. The next improvement would be (in my opinion) to have a Kevlar Palm - I wear through the damn things in a dozen sets and have to stitch em up :(

Yup

Totally agree @horton. Aaron Davies is definitely worth a shout out. He only just made the finals with a score of 1.5@11 and then 4@11 in the tie break. He has only run 11.25m once before and 3rd or 4th off the dock in finals of the worlds ran it again - his score of 2@10.75 equals his PB and it actually looked like he had 3! What a time to peak ! I know he's really happy to have come second to Rob but he must have been a mental / physical wreck for the run off having watched all the skiers try to beat his score and fail to do it - what a day for him - a lot of new experiences to process.

@skijay just a quick public announcement to say how much I've enjoyed reading your book (which I received for Christmas from my wife, who intercepted my order a few weeks ago and hid it!). Very well written and a quality production. I particularly like that it is so much more than a book for "fin fiddling" and addresses technique as well. I'm probably paraphrasing excessively but the idea that : " you set the fin for the offside turn and tweak technique for the onside turn" is exactly what I have found. Only it's taken me a full season and 3 top end skis to work it out! Could have saved a lot of £££ if I'd read this last year. Happy new year and Thanks for the read. Kevin

Gosh I reckoned this had run its course - thanks for taking the time guys (esp. Looking up old vids - depressing how we think we improve yet the basic issues remain the same !) Totally agree with gate at glide and turn in - damn have I been working hard on that all season - seeing that little bow in the line on each pass kills me. Trying really hard for an unloaded pull out coming up slow and tall onto front foot and keeping tension in the rope - I feel it but dont see it on the video. I do think it's better than at the beginning of the season but .....thanks for the reminder. Re: one and two handed gates - my stats are the same for both, I'll be sticking with one-handed for the simple reason that my "sometimes" coach will be impossible if I go to two handed. Any way looks like my "todo" list is getting longer - cue brain melt and nothing changing :) Thanks again,

Hi @rozorross3 - that is a really good point - the first building block in this was to try and "feel" the for/aft position on the ski and the only way to do this has been to keep the handle tight off the second wake and use the connection to position myself on the ski - I have a way to go - as @gregy pointed out - I am letting the handle get away from my core more that it should and end up pulling it back in as I land to keep the connection. The fun bit in this is I am actually feeling these things as conscious connected efforts which is a first. The challenge having picked the point to turn is now to break down the actual turn. Thanks for making the point.

@gregy @razorross3 @wish @razorskier1 Thank you so much for taking the time to watch the video and offer some insight. Interesting - normally as the line gets shorter all my bad habits get worse and are easy to see, you guys have picked them all up at the easy pass! I totally agree with the points made about handle control, getting high at the gate shot and getting earlier and wider into the bouy. These are things I have worked on at various times (and clearly need to keep working on) but to be clear however this is an easy pass for me, but even so I have never "really" felt I knew what was making the difference in the turn itself. I am sure it will resonant with some that there are times when you approach the bouy wide and early and seem to have too much time to screw it up. I'm trying to isolate that point. What I want to learn is how to use that space to make the most of the turn. I have historically always worked on @gregy point of a good approach letting the turn "take care of itself" - sometimes to good effect and sometimes not. The idea here is not to let it take care of itself but use the off season to learn what it is that makes the difference in the turn - rather than just cold water exercise. I know it's an attempt in trying to drill down into the minutiae which may not be possible. It has been really hard to be able to focus just on one aspect which is why I dropped the speed - without much effort I can get in a reasonable position to try out my onside 3/3 every pass (and not cloud my mind with anything else) - I think I'm learning about body position (although it may not be visible on the video ), it will be interesting to see if I can apply it as the speed increases and the line shortens. @Chris Rossi - ha ha - the fact I am also learning on a new "pro build" was not wasted on you! As you once pointed out a few years ago on "pro ski coach" "you will always be working on the gate". That comment has eased my gate frustrations on many occasions. Thank you so much for the added insight. (Fin settings are "your" recommended standard for 67ski, boots are a little forward at 30 with the max separation on the sequence plate I mentioned before). Once again many thanks - when I run out of enthusiasm for this particular "minutiae of technique" I now have a few more things to work on. (Right now I need a technique to help block out all these good ideas and stick to the plan when I'm back on the water!) @wish - tried the washer on my Mapple and the actual screw on the Denali ( when I had it) - I couldn't feel the difference and still managed to mess up:) to reiterate from above "it IS me, not the ski " ( and this latest project proves it for me) Perhaps once I have a solid body position I will be able to feel the difference - not going to try it yet though :)

Good shout - sounds like old school stones. Recent No1 blues album in the UK - BLUES by Alabama 3 - a modern take on the blues. Seeing them live this weekend for the 10th time. (They are not from Alabama and there are 12 of them - enjoy)

i thought given the recent threads - "tipping in the turn" and 'binding rotation" that my winter "project" may be of interest: So having had a mixed season trying a number of different skies it is clear that the greatest hindrance to progression is me not the ski (sadly). There are plenty of problems with my skiing, but my most common "fail" is my onside (2,4) turn. The number of times I've wasted perfectly good passes at 2,4 is really frustrating and the boat driver joking about it just confirms things (you know who you are "taxi at 2 ball"). So this off-season I will be mostly working on rebuilding my onside / heal side / 2,4 turn. I had a think about the best way of achieving this and decided that removing as many variables as possible is important so that I can get as many "controlled" approaches into 2,4 as possible. This sport doesn't really allow isolation of key areas (which I guess is what makes it so hard to learn / and fun) so to limit things I decided to drop the speed to 32mph and sit at 14m (28off). I don't think that with any longer line lengths the swing of the boat is really there and also at longer lengths the temptation is to get much wider than the bouy line before coming back in, which again is not really the type of turn I want to work on. Anyway 32/14 seems to be a pretty good compromise as I can quite easily make all the passes (if I do end up in the water guess what - it's at 2,4 - but as I'm working on that its to be expected.). With all sports/dynamic moves I like to try and build a progression, but how to do it for a slalom turn? I decided on: 1. Simple passes trying to really feel my position on the ski - forward / back - the place where this is achievable (and most relevant) is in the approach to the turn. This involved a couple of sets where I was really concentrating on feeling my weight on the balls of my feet. I moved the boots around a bit and settled in separating as far as the radar sequence plate would allow - about an inch - which made feeling my position easier (compensated with a forward movement of the front binding). 2. Having established the forward / backward "feel" I then spent a couple of sets working in the left/ right feel - this was interesting as I found that without my middle (knees to hips) being "tight" it was relatively easy to think I was balanced on top of the ski in the turn but actually falling to the inside more than the speed or centrifugal force would allow = either just fall off the side of the ski or hips drag at end of turn / ski snags and another swim. Eventually managed to "feel" that bringing the inside (right for me) hip forward in the approach allowed a general tightening of knees to hips in conjunction with maintenance of the forward / back balance point. This allowed for a controlled stable turn. (Don't think this is counter rotation as I'm not too focused on the upper body.) 3. The next step after a number of easy sets with balanced carved turns was to work out how to influence the radius of the turn. (My preferred technique is high on the boat and early for the bouys, dropping in to each turn. Not a series of linked turns, so the tighter a radius I can make the better). Ice stopped play as our lake froze over for week or so - melted last week and great conditions so got out yesterday. air = damn cold, water = colder (approx 41 and 37 F i think) The video below is my next progression to work on the radius of the turn. Here I am consciously trying to push the ski out at the apex of the turn whilst staying as upright and on top of it as possible (level head shoulders etc). I am driving through the front leg and really try to feel my inside hip staying up. To reduce the radius of the turn I am trying to force my left hip back with the pressure of this pushing down my right leg. In effect the result is trying to sit on the bouy but with my left cheek. Where it goes wrong is when my right hip starts to drop back on the end of the turn - it's as though my subconscious is trying to finish the turn that little bit more quickly by rotating in. What happens is overturn of the ski / break at the wait / slack / hit etc. etc it's really good to feel this, in effectively slow motion, and to know what is happening as this is what has been bugging me all season. On the video it is really hard to see that I am pushing that right hip forward - I guess that shows room for improvement but importantly I am finishing the turn with my body facing down course (open) and without breaking at the waist., which for me is a big improvement esp. If it becomes predictable. Anyway whilst looking at this video there are clearly many things to work on, the only one I'm going to keep working on for now (and it's hard not to bring other factors in) is the 2,4 in the hope that I can develop a little muscle memory to take up the line. Thats it so far, as along as the ice holds off ill keep at it as long as can. I am more then welcome for any advice / criticism to help me get a predictable onside turn.

That is it - my key for a good turn too. I was thinking about "why" and perhaps it's because it centres you on the ski (in all directions) and (if you keep everything "tight" limits your ability to "wobble" off the side of the ski or fall back. Easy to confuse with counter rotation - which its not.

Hi @craigginshred - good stuff above, I had a look at your wakey video from before to see what the issue might be. Looks to me like a combination of what @toddl said. Your "default" way of turning is to start from the "top down" i.e. You lean with your head and shoulders and the rest follows. You can see this clearly from the turn in and 1 bouy. Once you start "falling" there is not a lot you can do to change it. This then challenges acceleration Etc Etc further on in the pass you are then fast at the bouy and having to force the lean just like @toddl said. Not sure how easy it will be to change but to achieve what you want you need be turning "from the ski up." I.e. "The ski goes then you go."

Buy a horse Cam - it may be your superpower?

Think I floated this idea a while back - to manage the "it will take forever" concerns and the "comps are boring" my suggestion was that in addition competitors would start at whatever the "cut" was for the finals. So in most pro comps now they would start at 10.75! Hell they could have two falls - would be great fun to watch :)

Get off "it" by the first white water so that I can glide effortlessly through the wakes and out to the bouy line.

thanks guys like I said this season has been a learning experience. really appreciate @skijay chiming in on this. i have tried a lot of settings (and logged them) like he says nothing is has made it feel any faster. time to move on. on the "half full" side of things - i have a new ski to buy :) @Jordan always a nervous moment sticking video up, but here is a 13m and 12m on the Mapple. I think it might show what I am used to. Kevin Link to Video

@booze thanks for the comments - re: the back arm pressure, believe it or not that pass was all about back arm pressure off the second wake. That's the only way I've found to get the ski to swing out, so it's interesting that that is your advice for it (albeit more than I am doing). The thing is that I am used to having sufficient speed off the second to not have to keep loading the back arm. It does seem to be a quirk with this ski. As others have said before (think I've got the message ) if it's not feeling right after a barrel full of sets (and settings) it's time to move on. I did think however that the fact the performance is so different with a more powerful boat was interesting - and that the rev6 is narrower than all the other high end skis out there (which must have a performance effect.) Thanks for the critique though - spot on!

Hi @scoke - take your point, very difficult to comment without context. I don't really miss 14s. The video below is probably one of the better 13s, far from being what ii want but I Don't think I'm a real "tail rider". Fwiw the reason I've stuck with it so long was to see if I could evolve my technique to work with it. Thanks for the comments. Link

Thanks guys - I do of course agree with you. Unfortunately a new ski will need to wait until I can find someone interested in buying this one. Until then it becomes a garage ornament which is why I was wondering if there was anything I could do to "big it up". Interestingly I have just looked at the Goode web site and they have released a rev6+ for those bigger skiers struggling with cross course performance - I swear I had not read that before posting! Perhaps I can swap the fin clamp out on mine but suspect for the additional time and cost it may be too marginal a change - "when in a hole stop digging". Thanks anyway and I hope the information is useful for others looking to "buy before they try".