Tom Gellie explains how angulation—lateral bending at the knees while keeping your torso upright—shifts your center of mass and helps you cross into the next turn. Knee angulation reduces joint load and is crucial for short turns on longer skis, though it doesn't directly increase edge angle.
Chapters
Welcome to the lecture on angulation in skiing. I'm really looking forward to sharing this with you because I think this is a topic that has got some areas of really unknown and not well-described sort of uses and mechanics of how to create angulation. So I really hope you enjoy this lecture. So what is angulation? So angulation refers to the movements made laterally in the body to create angles at certain joints. In my head, it's the ability— if you angulate well, it's the ability for you to separate in your joints laterally. It helps with a toppling effect, which you can see JF doing in these images. And so that's not just used to balance over the outside ski, balanced, but for this turn, whatever reason, Ted's able to incline further inside the turn, his center of mass is basically further inside and Michaela's further outside. But this just shows the, the point that angulation does not necessarily change how much edge angle you've got. My torso has stayed pretty well upright. The main change occurs right around the two knees here. A little blue object sitting on top of the tibia to show that it does not really change as much compared to where— yes, being around here is still now over my base of support. Whereas if I then take the image on the right side and I start where I just showed on the left, but then take the knee angulation away— so watch again the rotation, retracting the legs, you can actually use the knees to help cross over into the next turn because there's not a lot of load going through that point. You're sort of taking pressure away. Yeah, if you're trying to make short turns on a GS ski or a longer ski, you're going to have to be able to master this ability to create angulation from different places. And from this, you're going to have some problems with really lining up the edge, and you're actually going to take the ski further off the edge, or the only way you can get increased edge angle is by moving your mass even further inside. One's not wrong, one's not right, they're just, I'm just putting this in here to show that there are different ways to angulate or to help get mass balanced against the edges. A lot of it comes from his upper body shifting over the top of his skis through what I would call a greater or a further angulated kind of position.
