Alignment in Skiing, Training, Life By: FlowPoint Method (Marcus Brown and Jenny LaBaw) Alignment: (noun) 1. arrangement in a straight line or in a correct or appropriate relative position. 2. a position of agreement or alliance
Alignment in sport is the infrastructure upon which all other work should be built. Without a strong foundation, whether that be skills or technical understanding or actual physical positioning, the support won’t be there to withstand the increasing progression of applied forces. In most sports, within the physical domain, this strong and aligned structure is called athletic stance. So for simplicity, we adopt the term athletic stance with the FlowPoint Method as well. If you’ve ever played any other sport (basketball, wrestling, soccer, golf, etc), athletic stance looks pretty similar across the board - feet shoulder width or so apart, bent knees, hips slightly back, chest tall and light on your toes. However, that is NOT athletic stance in waterskiing.
Our sport is rare when it comes to forces on the body. For the purposes of this conversation, we will limit our discussion to the acceleration phase of the course. Some people call this the downswing, but simply put, this phase begins when the rope comes tight at the finish of the turn, and ends when we reach centerline (center of the wakes). When skiing, we are basically carrying a heavy load (sometimes really heavy) with our arms, while simultaneously resisting a heavy load (sometimes very heavy) through our feet, ultimately using both of those forces to propel ourselves rhythmically through a slalom course. What’s even weirder, is we do this from a tandem (staggered) stance with our feet glued to a board. Athletic stance in waterskiing looks a bit more like this....
