The active Twist is at the waist.  When the turn starts the lower body must twist relative to the upper body if the upper body is not going to move (i.e upper body remains facing down course) while the lower body and ski gain angle on the course.  Just Twist and Shout!

Hi Guys,

Last Saturday I tried what Mark is talking about and oh boy, I ended up passing 2ball by miles!
When I read Chris article I understood the same way Mark is explaining.
Do we have it backwards?

Snow

HO 410 wrote:

the misunderstanding is revolving around "outside hip." I think mark is defining "outside" as away from the boat: this would be his left hip. While there is no standard book of slalom jargon, outside is usually understood to mean toward the turn buoys and inside is toward the boat bath: which would mean that the left hip is "inside"

Ditto! That's exactly what I was thinking he probably meant. And I agree on the whole inside / outside thing. I literally have to think for a second about which is the in or out every time I read or write something!

Hi Mark,

That's how I understood your first thread.
I did this last Saturday, I had so much angle and speed that I knew what to do with at 15'off. Like I said before, I past 2ball by miles.........lol......
Next time, I've to keep it under control. But, this works for me.

Snow

I think I get it, and  I don’t believe this idea conflicts with counter-rotation theory at all.

I would just suggest that what you are actually doing when you're "twisting [your] lower body counterclockwise" (after the apex of the 1-ball turn) is you're allowing your hips to roll back in line with the direction of the ski while your shoulders remain counter-rotated.  As I see it, your described action and the purist vision of counter-rotation are not in opposition with each other at all.

The reason your ski turns left when you [counter] rotate your hips and shoulders to the right is because you must have something to turn against in order for that rotating to begin with.  Under ordinary circumstances we can rotate our hips and shoulders (while standing on solid ground) without our feet twisting the other way because of the friction between the ground and our feet.  If you stand on a ball-bearing turntable (such as a kitchen "lazy susan") and try to twist your hips and shoulders to the right, your feet will be forced to turn to the left to counteract the rotation of your upper body.  In the same way, our ski turns left when we crank our hips and shoulders to the right.

But there's a limit to how far our ski can turn before the counter-rotating force of the hips and shoulders has done all it can do.  Counter-rotation, after all, is really meant to be a method of initiating a turn.  What the original poster is describing is a way of allowing the ski to continue its turn by letting the hips roll back around in line with the feet.  And in order for the hips to reverse direction and rotate back toward the left they must have something to rotate against.  That “something” is the shoulders, and this becomes - in essence - a continuation of the original counter-rotated turn.  The ski is already turning left, and has momentum that is not easily or quickly reversed.  Meanwhile, if your shoulders can separate from your hips then your hips can follow your knees around the corner while your shoulders remain facing downcourse (counter-rotated).  Invariably, to actively twist your hips to the left your shoulders must turn to the right.

Try this:  grab your ski handle and let hang it down in front of you while you pinch the rope at about mid-length.  Twist the rope in your fingers so that the handle rotates one direction.  Now suddenly stop your twisting motion and reverse it.  Do this a few times and notice the effect as the handle grinds to a stop and then begins rotate back around the other direction.  Here’s what actually happens:

1)    you begin twisting the rope at your fingertips and the upper portion of the rope follows,
2)    the middle portion of the rope begins to follow the twisting motion,
3)    the “V” splice begins twisting around,
4)    finally the handle follows this rotation around;
Now, when you stop and twist the rope the other way,
5)    the rope near your fingertips rotates first,
6)    then the middle portion of the rope begins to follow the twisting motion,
7)    then the “V” splice begins twisting around,
8)    finally the handle rotates around the other way.

In other words, before the handle can stop and start rotating the other direction, everything above it has to reverse direction first.  In the same way, your ski is going rotate to the left (after the apex of the 1-ball) and eventually your shoulders will need to follow that leftward rotation – hopefully not until after the next edge change, of course.  But your shoulders can’t really follow your ski around until everything below them (ankles, knees, hips) has done so first.

Marcus Brown has famously said, “counter-rotation begins at the ankles” (obviously followed by the knees, then the hips and finally the shoulders).  Canadian pro skier Thomas Moore offers one of the purest displays of this concept I’ve ever seen, and if you watch him closely as he approaches the 1-ball you’ll see that his knees twist noticeably outward (to the right), followed by his hips and finally his shoulders.  So it makes perfect sense that rotating back toward the next turn must also begin at the ankles, followed by the knees, then the hips and then the shoulders.  I think the idea that markskarpo is expressing here may be exactly what is happening about halfway through a smoothly executed counter-rotated turn.

Makes perfect sense to me.  Where the hell were you with this stuff last spring, when I really could have used it?

TW

This is a cool discussion - I like what TW wrote. I've talked about the action-reaction from counter rotation with several people and about what would happen on a lazy suzan. Here you just have inertia to move against which would keep any net rotation to zero - so if your shoulders go 10deg clockwise, your feet would go 10deg counter clockwise. So it seems that the inertia effect of countering while skiing definitely will rotate your ski in the opposite direction that your shoulders, hips, etc... go. 

Take this a step further and consider the axis of rotation which is close to a line from your neck to you feet. Depending on your lean angle, countering may not be related so much to the turning path through the course as it is to tip-up or tip-down. If you increase counter rotation once you are leaned over, you are forcing the tip down.

I am certain this works the opposite way from watching some of my video and trying to figure out why I was over turning. I was thinking my ski was setup wrong, like fin or bindings too far forward, but at the same time it really didn’t feel like my ski turned that well (stock settings) – so I was pretty confused. From the video I could see my ski stop turning or at least stopped turning as fast when I reached for the handle w/ my off hand (un-countered) too early. When this happened, it looked like my tip rose, my ski went straight down course for a few feet, I got more lean than intended, then the tip came back down and hooked back up, and then I pulled the pylon out of the boat .  Countering and staying countered fixed this right away.

As posted above, your ankles, knees, hips, torso, & shoulders all add up to your total range of rotation. One thing I noticed was that my bindings had a big impact on how much I could counter w/ my lower body. I went to hard-shells this spring, and figured out that if I tighten the buckles down too tight, among other bad things, it really reduces my ability to counter rotate with my legs. I also moved my bindings closer together and this made it way easier to rotate. I had stiff ribs for a month or so and certainly lost range of rotation w/ torso. And the taller I stand and closer my knees are together in the pre-turn, the easier it is to rotate… I ski my best when I’m most flexible in rotation, my bindings are on the loser side and close together, and I stand up tall as I reach.

So several questions come to mind - you only have so much rotation to use, so should you go all the way really early in the pre-turn, or should you save some for the apex when you really want to come off the buoy, and when should you start rotating back the other way? If you think about all of the flex points that allow rotation (ankles, knees, hips, torso), then what should be rotated when? It’s like you have a “rotation budget” at very point in the course – so what is optimal for a smooth, fast, low-load pass?

As for Mark’s comment on un-countering at the finish w/ hips or whatever, it seems like it would bring the tip up if you are still leaned a lot – but this could be a good way to limit your initial angle off the ball and not overload which gets you more angle later. If you don’t get too much angle early and don’t overload, the acceleration is greater and you have more angle through the rest of the pull from additional speed. Also, if a pulling position is best when your shoulders are facing the pylon, you would have to rotate towards the boat more (un-counter) to accomplish this at shorter line lengths, than at longer lines. For longer lines, down course is closer to aligned with pylon…

That’s a lot and disjointed, but whatever… I’m posting it.

Ed, if I were skiing into and through 39 like you, I don't think I'd change a thing.

hey men i can't find the power triangle article.where is it please

TW,
     The Link you posted was for the "Balanced Approach," not The Power Triangle.

MOOMBA1,   
      The article, "The Power Triangle," was published in the Sep. edition of the Water Skier on page 42 &43. One of the most factual articles ever written.

GOODE LUCK, ED

Ed Johnson wrote:

TW,
     The Link you posted was for the "Balanced Approach," not The Power Triangle.
[...]

Ooops.  Hope I don't get scolded for accidentally posting "off-topic".

The link I meant to post is here:

http://www.proskicoach.com/slalom_artic … r_triangle

TW

Ed Johnson wrote:

Thanks TW, good job, hopefully more people will get to read this excellent article and apply it to their skiing......ED

I archive personal copies of all articles that I consider well-written and valuable to understanding current slalom theory.  Needless to say, Chris Rossi's writing is well represented in that group.

The reason I keep stand-alone copies (rather than web links) is because website contents have a way of changing from time to time, and you may very well find yourself searching for an article that no longer "exists".  The downside to this approach is that it takes a little backtracking to find an active link when someone else wants to access the article.  In this case the USAwaterski connection was contained within the archived pdf, so once I noticed that I knew where to find a link.

TW

The way this is worded could be better but the concept is sound. Assuming your shoulders are square to the boat/course, your lead shoulder would be the left shoulder as you travel from 1-2 and it would be your right shoulder going 2-3. Now that we have this visual it will be easier to think about back arm pressure. Going from 1-2 some skiers (including myself) like to think of "back arm pressure" or feeling more of the pull through the right arm and shoulder. This will lead to having more freedom for my ski to swing under the rope through the wakes and cast me out wide for the next turn. As the above quote states, if I am to loaded onto my lead arm my ski will take excessive angle out of the turn that I will not be able to maintain through the wakes causing a premature edge change. The thought of back arm pressure is a good thought if you have a strong tendency to drop your inside shoulder out of the turns and overload your front arm going into the wakes. It will help to even out the pull through your arms as you go side to side by flattening out your shoulders in turn freeing up your hips and ski to carry strong angle through the wakes and cast out to the buoy line with ease. Hope this helps!