Sustainable Angle

By Wade Williams

Angle, simply stated, is the direction of travel a skier takes across the wake. When you watch a pro ski, you have to notice the incredible amount of angle generated. It's also fairly obvious that there is a lot of strength required to ski with that much angle. The misconception that trips up the majority of skiers is thinking that angle is generated by applied force, which is wrong. Angle generates speed, but force does not generate angle.

The loading of the rope as you ski into the wakes is the cause of a premature edge change and 'wakeboard pop'. Attempting to increase the load you feel through the line and ski by using muscle power makes you unnecessarily heavy on the boat as you approach the wake. Imagine the swing set at the playground -- pulling on the chains doesn't swing you higher, does it? The same is true behind the boat.

What this means is that your arms must be 100% straight and relaxed. By moving your shoulders further away from the handle and allowing your hands to move down your body, you'll feel your arms stretch to be their longest. You must feel this within moments of hooking up with the handle, but it must be smooth without causing unnecessary rope load. And the kicker is, all of that must happen in a fraction of a second.

When you finish a turn, the only reason to ever bend your arms, thus pulling in on the handle, is to suck up slack. Even then, this should only last until the boat absorbs the slack back from you, thus stretching your arms back to their length.

To help make sure that you don't pull to hard, you should hold the handle in your fingers - not your hands. Your hands should feel like they hang next to your hips in about the same place they do when you are standing upright on land, relaxed. Once you are in a relaxed position with your arms straight, then and only then you can only lean away from the pylon to generate angle. Your arms will only support the weight of your body, as you lean as much as you can comfortably and in control. This leaning motion is in fact what generates angle.

Any load held in the arms or upper body will diminish angle while increasing muscle fatigue. This will make you feel like you did a lot, but you wouldn't have skied that well. Holding load as you ski into the wakes will cause the boat to begin pulling your body up over across your ski and towards the boat before you reach the second wake. This feeling is horrendous, and is the cause of 80% of all across the wake crashes. The stronger you are, the harder you'll go out the front if you continue to try to muscle your body into the proper position once you've already made the mistake of holding load out of the turn.