Snow Skills

To improve snowboard turns, let’s focus (for the moment) on the movements that won’t result in a balanced, carved turn. A common movement that many beginning snowboarders make is turning the board to an edge, in lieu of setting the board on an edge.

If you’re not experienced and have little confidence in your riding, you’d be prone to try to be comfortable by shoving the nose of the board across gravity to check your speed.  The issue with a shove of the board is that it requires an unweighting to do so and now you don’t have much pressure on your edges so they don’t hold.  To compensate, you’d probably increase the edge angle, but since there still isn’t enough weight on the board, now it’ll just skid.  And since you’re not comfortable, you’ll bail out of that turn and start a new one, probably with the same results.

Want to avoid the self-repeating skidding and lack of comfort? Start the turn by setting the board on its edge.  The ability to edge from the top of the turn to its end will allow you to balance on that edge all the way through and avoid any unwanted unweighting movements.  The key is to use a combination of knee and ankle flexing in both legs set the board onto a new edge first and only then using the rear foot to steer.