The Key - 8/23/2008
What I'm about to tell you is what I feel is the absolute key to slalom skiing. I only need two words to describe it: "tight" and "line". This is not some revolutionary advice that I came up with on my own. In fact, just about every pro skier that has seen me ski has mentioned it, and after a quick search on our forum I found dozens of references to this concept. Here are just a sampling of the posts I found after a search for "Tight Line":
Maintaining a tight line CONTROLS your speed and makes you FEEL slow. Stability on a slalom ski comes from controlled speed. It's not just keeping yours elbows tight, it's also feeding/feeling the line as you reach. If you reach fast the line goes dead/loose and speed bleeds rapidly. How many on here think everything is going well, your body position seems fine and then you get pulled out of position heading to the wake? Thats often line control issues.
-Blackdog
Back arm pressure, when coming into the ball, means keeping the outside elbow close to the vest. So, if you're heading to 1, 3, or 5, keep your right arm tight to the body all the way out to the buoy line. This helps you to keep outbound direction. As soon as you release your outside arm, your body starts rolling in for the turn and you start to go narrow.
If you watch pros, no matter what style they ski, they all keep their outside arm close all the way out to the buoy line.
-kpickett
If I understand Greg and blackdog correctly...they are saying that you control your speed AND direction better by maintaining a tight line...and you maintain a tight line by keeping the elbows close to the vest. No one doubts that getting your hips up (in a traditional form) is essential and foundamental...but it's incomplete w/o other fundamentals to complement it.
-ScarletArrow
I have been blessed with a lot of ski progress but I agree here, I wish I would have had someone skiing with me or these internet forums to read to pin my focus on keeping my elbows tight from the start. That alone would have put me years ahead of where I'm at now and saved thousands of dollars in gas.
-skisix38off
Not only not reaching so early, but reaching SLOWLY. I don't even think you need more speed thru the gate, you just need to maintain it longer off the second wake. Line tension carries you wider and FEELS slower, But if you have a tight line you can pick when you want to turn and get instant & controlled direction the other way and you get early as you want to the next ball. The hard part is figuring out what it feels like. It's not that hard to do once you know what it is. Then you just make it habit. If your working hard at this point you're not doing it right. 15off is easy to over ski for some reason which leads to other bad habits (reaching early/fast, etc.). The reason i run 15off is because it teaches you rhythm/control, you have to do alot of things right to make it feel good. How many people do you know who make it look easy? not many!
-blackdog
I think reaching slow is one of the biggest factors to keeping a tight line around the buoy. Every time you get late and try to speed things up you start getting later and later and in worse and worse shape. This was the comment I heard just this week, "If you get late slow down everything at the buoy and make up the time when your behind the boat." Essentially they were saying that trying to make up time around the buoy results in you 1) rushing the turn and getting a bunch of slack and/or 2) over turning at the ball and taking more angle than you can handle an losing the rope or losing your angle. In order to keep a tight line your reach and turn cannot be rushed they need to be slow and methodical everytime whether you are late or not. If you are late, don't try to make up a bunch of time at the buoy, but instead make it up behind the boat in your pull.
-lagdawg
Jhughes lets try an experiment, read the line tension discussion, try it for your next few sets on the water, try it free skiing, try it in the course, try it fast, try it slow, try it on jumpers...just pay attention to the rope, try to keep a little tension on it from the second wake to the apex, look at pictures of 39 & 41 off skiers 1/2 way from the 2nd wake to the apex. pay attention to where the handle is & where the elbows are and try to emulate that and then let me know how your skiing is doing. i'll bet if you fix the rope control you'll almost instantly pick up 2 to 4 passes. how many people would try that to pick up a couple of passes. i'll even go a step further any pass you can control the rope on, you can run. How's that for a bold statement?
-Blackdog
April and Chris Eller tried to point this out to me in the spring. April suggested I run 2 handed passes to enhance my handle control. Chris suggested I work on reaching slow in the turns. I heard what they were saying but I didn't feel it. You have to feel it to understand it. The feeling is that you are hanging onto the pylon of the boat through the handle. Imagine that your handle was welded vertically directly to the pylon. If you were to grab onto that welded handle, that's what it feels like when you have a tight line in the course. It feels like you are a superhero who can actually stretch their arm out 60 feet and grab onto the pylon directly.
It's funny how I've heard this advice a million times but only recently felt it. I felt it by keeping my elbows in close after the second wake and not letting the handle out any faster than I needed to in the turns. You need to feel what rope tension is and learn to preserve it at all costs though the course. Tension in the rope is like trying to start a fire on a deserted island- once you get those embers going, you don't want to let them die out. You hold that tension after the second wake and cherish it as it carries you through the turn. If you let the handle out too quickly (as seen in the photo above), the flame goes out and you are out of luck.
The best part about keeping a tight line out of the wake and into the turn is that it fixes so much other stuff. A tight line gives you a nice, controlled, upright turn. It's so much easier to get in a good wake-crossing position when you turn on a tight line. Every problem in slalom can be traced to a step or two back from the problem area. In my case, a step or two back usually comes down to a loose line after the wake and into the turn. Not slack, but not a tense line either. The photo above illustrates it perfectly- just enough lack of tension in the line to let it bow in the breeze a bit.
This is the single most important thing I've learned in slalom. If you are struggling at 28, 30, or 32 MPH I'd drop everything and concentrate ONLY on maintaining tension in the line after the wake and through your turn. You might think "hey, I don't get big slack in the turns so I'm fine". Lack of line tension is very difficult to detect unless you know what you're looking for. If it doesn't feel like your handle is connected to something solid during the entire pass, then you don't have line tension. Just by figuring this one thing out, I feel like I could gain an entire pass in the next couple of weeks. It's that important. Concepts like this one are the entire reason I created this site. In my opinion this post alone means "mission accomplished" for what I'm trying to do here.
Comments:
MiracleDriver, 8/24/2008: yep, tight line = smooth skiing.that's the theory, and getting it depends on how you learn. I'm a visual and kinesthetic learner so telling me a theory like this won't really get me to do it. its telling me what to do with my body to get a tight line.
for me the key is how the weight is distributed over the ski and what I should be doing with my heel or toe side in relation to the ski. flat ski = no speed so you have to be on edge.
more weight on front foot allows the ski to turn via the bevels on the ski.
knees bent = shock absorbing
straight, low arms = tight line and increased swing.
often we think "why did I get slack" - its obvious you need a tight line, but what caused the slack? its definitely not always caused by poor back arm pressure, and often caused by poor weight distribution and overall posture.
there is no 1 key to slalom, it all depends on where you're at.
jhughes, 8/24/2008: MD, I disagree completely. I think if you feel what a tight line really feels like, the other stuff you mentioned falls in line. Feeling the pylon through the handle is very basic, very easy to understand, as opposed to five or six other tips which achieve the exact same thing. Again, simply telling someone to have a tight line doesn't do much because they haven't felt it. I just felt it, and it really helped me more than any single slalom concept out there has. The point of this post was trying to explain that feeling- not to just echo "Keep a tight line". There is no one key to slalom, but IMO this is the closest thing to it.
Blackdog, 8/25/2008: Joel, i'm glad you were able to experience this, every skier should get to feel this at least once in their life and know why it felt good. It's why i make it my highest priority on my fundamental list. Now that you've felt it, your next step is to figure out how to repeat it everytime, every set. Don't worry about speed or line length just figure out what makes you control the line. For me it was reaching way slower than i thought i needed to. Also twisting out as you release the handle will aid in keeping the rope tight if you can process both of those....You're right about telling someone to keep a tight line doesn't do much, but hopefully "contolling the line" will create enough thought about ski direction and movements to help people improve. The main problem that i see in 15 off skiers is reaching too quickly and too soon.
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