Name: Snowboard Turn Exercises (RANKED WORST TO BEST)
Uploaded: 2024-08-30T16:34:20.000Z
Duration: 14 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Participle clauses

We do it all the time as we make our way down the mountain, rolling from one edge to the other.

And the edge change can be seen as the start point of every turn you'll ever make.

So if you get it right, you'll set yourself up to properly control the arc of the turn.

So in today's video, I'm gonna run through some of my favorite and least favorite edge change exercises.

Some of them are downright stupid, but that doesn't stop people doing them.

And the reason I want to show you the bad ones is so that you get a better understanding of what you should and shouldn't be doing on your board.

Some of them are quite easy, some of them you'll find more of a challenge.

So without further ado, let's get into this video.

I call it the counter rotation trick, and it goes like this.

You literally swing your upper body around in the opposite direction to the lower body to change the board from heels to toes, toes back to heels.

So let's first give this drill some credit.

Well, as you can see, I am changing edge.

But in this case, the means don't justify the end.

That's because if you start adopting this method into your riding, it will completely hamper your progression and you won't move far beyond this level of wishy-washy skidded turns, which means you're not going to get much further than these mellow piste slopes either.

But the main reason why this exercise is so useless is because it promotes counter rotation.

And when you bring that into your turns, it does two really bad things.

Firstly, it always leads to your back foot skidding out.

Skidding can be seen as the opposite of gripping, therefore we want to eradicate it as much as possible from our riding.

And secondly, counter rotation puts you in a weak position.

If your body is twisted and not aligned properly over the board, then you're just going to make life much harder for yourself.

I can get away with this bad posture on these beginner slopes at slow speeds, but in more difficult terrain and going faster, it just won't hold up.

So that is why counter rotation should not be seen as a solution to making an edge change.

For instance, if you want to quickly slow down and make a speed check, or it's also used in a load of freestyle tricks.

And I have in fact made a video that I'll post in the description down below where I go over three simple freestyle tricks that use counter rotation.

So it has its place, but helping you get better at turning is not where you should be using it.

So now let's move on to exercise number two.

This exercise follows a similar theme to the first one in that we are focusing on movements made with our upper body.

But this one is a lot better because at least this time, your upper body is moving in the same way that you want the board to go.

So let's take a look to see how it works.

You keep your shoulders in line with the board, but when you want to change edge, you turn your front arm down the hill ahead of the board.

You can see my turns don't actually look too bad, but obviously I'm doing other things that this exercise doesn't cover.

For instance, it doesn't tell us anything about how I cross my center of mass over the board at the edge change.

So sometimes it can be an effective way of getting people to turn, but really it's just not an effective way of turning.

That is because it is a very delayed way of making the edge change.

The movement, it starts up here with your head, your shoulder, your arm coming over the board.

And that movement gradually works its way down your body, through your core, into your hip, your knee, and your ankles.

The things that are actually turning the board.

So you can start to see that if it's our lower body that's turning the board, if that's the thing that's really having an effect on where our board goes, maybe we should start thinking about if that's where we should begin the movements at our edge change.

But for me, the real reason why I hate this exercise is that because although people like me can pull my arm around and make it look nice and easy, the reality is that for a lot of beginners, if you make this movement, if you turn this arm around like that, oh, I almost did it there.

This exercise covers all important movement of crossing your center of mass over the board at the edge change.

Get the timing of it wrong, as is all too easy in the last exercise, and you'll catch an edge.

But with this exercise, you can safely cross between your heel and toe edge positions without worrying.

So make sure you begin by traversing across the slope.

Then as you stand tall, your board will flatten underneath you and you simply sink down onto your new edge and then repeat for the next turn.

Now you'll see that the movements really aren't much at all.

But by standing tall, my hips are drawn over the middle of the board, letting me safely roll from one edge to another.

So this is a great exercise as it really simplifies the idea of turning.

And in fact, by just making these movements, you'll be able to perform some basic carve turns like I'm doing right now.

But it isn't higher on the list because it's still not the most effective way to turn your snowboard.

For that, we need to get into knee steering.

I'm going to set this up with a task that's pretty easy to grasp, but trust me, it's more difficult than it looks.

I want you to imagine you're in a supermarket shopping aisle and it's really narrow.

We've got wine bottles stacked on one side and baked beans stacked on the other side.

So give me a watch, see if you can figure out what's going on first, and I will explain what I'm doing.

I'm going to try and just turn my board around a point, staying within that narrow corridor as I go between toes, heels, and back to toes again.

Now, I said this exercise is all about knee steering, and staying within this narrow corridor really makes you have to isolate certain movements.

And the key movement that I'm making is pulling my front knee out across over the board.

I want you to imagine you've got two levers sticking out the top of your knees, or two ski poles jammed down your boots.

At the moment, on my toe edge, they're both pushed forward.

When I want to make the turn, I'm going to pull my front lever around first, and the back lever is going to follow.

The same thing happens as I go from heels to toes, but it's just in the opposite direction.

Push one forward, follow with the back one.

As you can see, it doesn't look like I'm doing much, but it's clearly a really effective way to get the board to turn around on a point.

And the effect of moving my knees over the board is that I get what you might have heard as something called foot pedaling.

As I roll my knees around, my front foot flattens, back one follows.

Same thing happens as I go from heels to toes.

But as I just explained it, I much prefer to talk about using the knees as levers, because if you think about foot pedaling, it can be tempting to kind of slam your foot down, and really your feet are quite passive.

The movement comes from your knees, pulling them across over the top of the board.

Stick with this one, because despite it not looking like the most exciting thing to do, these small independent knee steering movements are a necessity for higher end riding.

And this exercise is the ultimate test of whether you can perform those movements or not.

For me, that drill is essential if you want to master complete control of your snowboard.

It really isolates that knee steering movement specifically, but you'll see big improvements to your overall riding when you bring it back into all your turns, wherever you are on the mountain.

Now, it's not higher on the list, because despite looking really easy, it's actually pretty complicated.

And you can achieve the same task, that is those turns, side slip to side slip, within a narrow corridor, by regressing all the way back to what I showed you in drill number one, where you just counter rotate like this and this, and you don't want to do that one.

So if you're doing it, make sure you're getting it right.

And if you want to go further in depth into that knee steering movement, I've got a video that I'll post in the description down below that shows you really how to do it.

It takes you through all the steps and then shows you how to apply it to much higher level riding.

I really hope you guys are enjoying this exercise list and through it, you're gaining a better understanding of some of the movements you can make to help turn your snowboard.

And if it is helping you, it'd be great if you could hit that like button, because that will help YouTube to push it out to a wider audience who might benefit from this video.