Tom GellieBig Picture Skiing Pty Ltd · Coach/Director

Ski with a crooked inside leg? WTF? Find out more and listen to the full podcast

10 Jul 2025 · 1 min

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1:09

In this excerpt from Tom Gellie's podcast, a skier who recently underwent knee surgery discusses his recurring problem of an inside leg that appears crooked during turns. Tom explains that elite racers keep the hip lower and further inside the turn than the knee, and that a wide, stable stance helps prevent the knee from collapsing inward. The conversation delves into the biomechanical reasons behind the crooked‑leg visual—how the femur‑tibia line tilts due to the Q‑angle, and why focusing on nudging the hip inside the turn rather than pushing the outside knee outward can restore proper alignment. The skier describes his narrow, boxy lower‑body posture, the lack of hip stability, and how adopting Tom’s bird‑eye perspective (seeing the femur and tibia line) made the correction click, leading to a more balanced, injury‑friendly ski stance.

Chapters

You want me to ski with a crooked inside leg? And he went, yes.
If we look at any good, like, you look at a World Cup ski racer snapshot, bam, going around a gate, if their hip is on the snow, their hip is lower and further to the inside of the turn than the knee.
I blew my knee. I got the surgery done. My physios were always saying, make sure you're not going to let the knee roll into the middle.
Like the knee, in vertical, is collapsing inwards.
I was literally like looking at the videos just going, oh my God, what am I What is going on here? You could see my knee, you could see my inside knee. My stance had separated really far apart.
So wide feet, wider than my hips.
I'm a pretty narrow person. I looked really boxy from like the knees down and my hips were not stable. So I said to Tom, and I said, is it like you want me to ski with a crooked inside leg? And he went, yes. You want to, because from the bird's eye view, looking down at, you know, where you can see your femur and your tibia, it looks like it's crooked. Everything just sort of fell back into place and it was awesome. And, but I'd never had that awareness over that.
When you bend the leg and it's, uh, over here, you can see it looks crooked. The knee is still hinging straight, but because the more it bends, the Q angle from this point gives that cheeky bum cheek. Look inside turn.
Really focus less on moving this inside knee out of the way. This is my outside ski. I started instead trying to allow my hip to nudge inside the turn, past this leg here, past this knee point. And then what I mean by the crooked leg, when you can see my eyes, if I look down at my inside leg here, it looks crooked.
No, the tibias are pretty much parallel there. From your hip joints down to your ankle joints is not a straight line. It has this quadriceps angle. So you can actually still have parallel shins. But if you go up and you look at a skier at the thigh level, there's this V shape.