There are only three important things you need to keep in mind when you’re learning how to water ski. Pretty much everything the beginner needs to know is wrapped up in these three golden rules of water skiing. They are the foundations upon which all the other skills and techniques rest.
So let’s just get straight into it.
Here are your three Golden Rules of water skiing:
- Keep your arms straight
- Keep your knees bent
- Don’t let go! (until it’s time to let go)
They’re fairly self-explanatory, but let’s take a deeper dive into each.
Golden Rule #1:
Keep your arms straight
Bending your arms may not seem like a crime, but it’s probably the biggest mistake that new skiers make. It’s certainly one of the most common.
It never seems like a bad idea at the time – in fact it instinctively feels like the right thing to do. But like so many of our instincts, for performance this one is not helpful. In fact the natural urge to bend our arms is pretty much the exact opposite of what we should do.
It is an irony in learning to ski, that whenever you find yourself with your elbows substantially bent, you are almost always about to become re-acquainted with the water.
That might seem counter-intuitive, because the main reason you bend your arms in the first place is to pull your torso towards the boat. It is usually an attempt to regain your balance. At the very least, it feels like something that will buy you some time, in the hope that the ski rope will get some tension in it again.
But it rarely turns out so well…
There is a simple reason that bending your arms almost always ends with you in the drink: Once you’ve bent your arms, you can only straighten them again. That’s all you’ve got left.
The most common reason that a beginner bends their arms is to deal with slack in the rope. But after bringing the handle in close to the torso, the only action left at that point is to straighten the arms out again. As you can probably imagine, straightening your arms from this already-out-of-balance position only puts you at an even more pronounced incline, and into the water you’ll go.
For the advanced skier there are other hidden traps to bending the arms, but I want this post to focus on beginner skiers. So let’s move on to Golden Rule #2:
Golden Rule #2:
Keep your knees bent
Straight legs are bad, mmkay?
Straight legs are bad when you’re trying to get up out of the water. They’re bad when you’re trying to stay up. They’re bad when you’re crossing the wake. They’re bad for pretty much everything.
They’re just bad.
Your position in the water before the boat takes off is called the ‘cannonball’ position. It gets its name from being similar to your body position when you do a cannonball or ‘bomb’ dive into a pool. You can read all about how to get into the cannonball position in this post. It involves having your arms wrapped around your knees, with the tips of the skis in front of your eyes, and the tail of the skis under your backside.
To achieve this, you’ll obviously need to have your knees nicely bent.
As a beginner in the rush to get up on skis, it’s easy to fall into the trap of standing up too early, and straightening your legs too far and too fast in an effort to get above the water.
Violating Golden Rule #2 by standing up too early in this way generally leads immediately to a violation of Golden Rule #1, as you bend your arms in a futile attempt to manage the resulting slack in the ski rope. Just before going into the drink.
Straight legs have no place once you’re safely up and skiing either. Instead, keeping a good bend in your knees will allow you to shift your balance quickly and easily. Bent knees will also act as shock absorbers, soaking up bumps and waves in the water – big and small. This is particularly relevant when crossing the wake.
For the more advanced skier, the major issue with straight legs is the negative effect it has on the turning water ski. Straight legs in the turn will prevent the front edges of the ski from properly engaging with the water. Straight legs and a cork-screwing ski can still create an impressive spray of water, but it doesn’t actually get you to the other side of the wake very well.
If you want to learn more about this concept you can read about it here and here. But this post is for the beginner, so I’ll leave it at that.
Golden Rule #3:
Don’t let go!
The boat engine is stronger than you. All of that force is transferred to you through your forearms (not your biceps, you’ll note, as long as you’re obeying Golden Rule #1 by keeping your arms straight).
Pretty much anybody can get up on water skis, and by following the advice in these pages you can minimise the forces working against you. But you can never eliminate them.
At the end of the day, you just need to hang on tight.
There are plenty of ways to improve grip strength if that’s a problem for you. Here are a few ideas:
- wrist rolling exercises
- hand grippers
- dead hangs
- shrugs
- farmer’s walks
However you decide to work on your grip, know that you’re only going to get up if you are willing and able to hold that handle when the boat takes off.
There really isn’t much more to Golden Rule #3, so I won’t labour the point.
There is, however, an exception to this particular Golden Rule: When it’s time to let go, it’s time to let go.
The exception that proves the rule
What I’m saying here is that you should absolutely hang on for as long as you can, but there’s no point still hanging onto the ski rope once you’ve already been pulled over the top of your skis, and there is no further hope of getting up on this attempt.
Let go before the pull of the boat pulls your skis off your feet, drags you under the water, strains your shoulder, or all three! There’s nothing to be gained at that point, so save yourself the hassle. Give yourself a fighting chance at another attempt.
Letting go of the handle should never be the primary reason for you missing an attempt (if you can help it). But if you’ve already missed that attempt, then continuing to hang on will only make everything else harder later on.
Wrapping up
So there you have the three Golden Rules of water skiing. Keep to those simple rules, and there will be no stopping you.
Leave a comment below if you think there’s a Golden Rule that I’ve missed!
Your virtual water ski coach,
Todd
PS – Before you go, why not:
