Learn to control your jump skis

In this article we are going to focus on how to control your jump skis and techniques you can use to help you master them

The key to mastering your jump skis is to spend time on them before going over the ramp, the more confident you are cutting around and jumping the wakes the better prepared you will be when sliding over the ramp for the first time.

We will focus this article on how to get over the wakes and jump the wakes with the correct body position.

Much like any sport your base technique will be the most important part of your jumping journey. The correct base and learning to correctly stand on your skis will help so much when you come to do more advanced jumping.

We always recommend to keep your ski size in line with your skill level. When learning to jump never use skis that are longer than 84". The length of your skis is also determined by your height and weight, a young kid shouldn't be on skis any longer than 74-80" when learning to jump. An adult can be on skis longer but no longer than 84".

Step 1:

Standing on your skis and crossing the wakes are vitally important in the first stages of jumping.

We are learning to ski from our feet up, meaning using our skis not our shoulders to move across the wakes.

Shoulders should stay still and in this stage we are only using our feet and hips to move across course.

Use very light angle keeping skis flat, the goal is to learn body control on top of the skis, we want to get fully confident on these moving platforms. Knees slightly bent, Arms straight, Shoulder and hips level.

As the handle starts moving across the wakes, just go with it, don't force any movements. As can be seen in the video below

Step 2:

Once we feel comfortable moving across course keeping our arms straight we can move onto gaining lift off the first wake.

The goal is to lift off the first wake and land before the 2nd wake. We are learning at this point to get air between our skis and the water without any adjustment in our body. Their should be no movement once we lift off the wake.

To lift off the wake (jump off the wake) we never snap our knees, this will only lead to instability, all our lift comes from rising up the wake with our hips, you'll get more control and lift by using your hips and using the wake ramp to gain that jump.

If you watch any athlete in any sport you will never see the best ones using their knees, they will gain momentum by using their hips to jump up.

Hope this information helps as you learn jumping.

In the next video we will focus on different drills that will help you learn to cut or gain an edge on jump skis.

Remember jumping is fun and not dangerous when done in the right environment, reach out to people if your unsure of where to start, we hope with these small videos we can provide information that will help.