Name: The Secrets of Snowboard Carving: Part 1 - The Nine Elements
Uploaded: 2024-10-25T17:56:02.000Z
Duration: 42 min 4 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...

Snowboard carving is something of a lost art.

I mean, this is how we all rode in the 80s and 90s.

Hard boots were common, boards and bindings were generally stiffer, stances were tighter and posi posi was the standard.

Now there has been a bit of a resurgence lately.

I'm seeing more people riding in this style on wider boards with stiffer interfaces.

What I'm not seeing, though, is the expertise.

The riders who can consistently carve steep, fast, black diamond runs in soft boots with power and style, leaving only a pencil line track behind them.

The Europeans and the Russians see more concern with dragging their armpits than perfecting their linked turns.

And over in Asia, the riders are jumping around, swinging their arms, spinning, reverting, trying to make green runs look intense.

I'm chasing the perfect track on some of the steepest groomers anywhere.

A lot of this carving technique was developed in the racing community and kept secret.

And today, most of the online soft boot instructors who want to teach you to carve can't themselves leave a great track on anything steeper than easy blue.

The internet is full of carving tips videos made by people who don't have a clue.

I'm going to share with you the secrets of soft boot carving right now.

This is my own curriculum, assembled through decades of research in collaboration with top riders and further developed through many, many hours of coaching and carefully observing what works for my students in practice.

Just a quick tip of the hat to our sponsors, Coroller Snowboards, SkiFabs Board Storage Solutions, Power Ride Boot Stiffeners, Thor Mittens, and Never Summer Industries.

There are nine elements to the pencil line carve.

We're going to talk about arms, shoulders, obliques, hips, knees, and we're going to talk about the rotation, the compression and decompression, the fore-aft motion, and finally the transition, edge transition.

Here are some types of snowboard turns differentiated by the turn shape and by the tracks they leave in the snow.

The first turn we all learn is the pivot turn.

You're just switching edges all the way down the hill, pushing on the snow to control your speed, very basic.

Later, when we start to figure out our side cut, our tracks might look a little more like this.

You'll often see a little pivot in the initiation.

It leaves a mid-wide track and an open turn shape.

This is a down-unweighted turn, which means you're going to be fully compressed at the initiation and then fully extended at the apex of these turns.

You're often going to see a little chatter in the track as well.

It's either going to look like a serrated edge or it's going to look like a discontinuous trench before it pops along.

The goal of this turn is to get your body as low as possible to the snow.

Unfortunately, in doing that, you are out of position.

You are dragging your body, which slows you down, and you're out of position for that pure pencil-line carve.

You get snow down your neck, your mustache gets all wet, and it might look cool to your friends, but it doesn't feel as good as the energy return of the pencil-line carve.

The pencil-line carve is the pinnacle of the snowboard turn.

The goal here is to make your track as thin as possible, like a pencil line in the snow.

As long as your track looks more or less like this, you're doing it, and whatever else you want to do with your body is an expression of your own personal style.

Do it however you want, but first learn to make the pencil-line.

My personal style aims to minimize the weight I put on any dragging body parts and to make powerful pencil-line carves look easy.

Mostly it's the backhand I'm concerned with.

A lot of people who learned how to ride this millennium have this sort of warrior stance.

So we're going to take that backhand that's flailing in the back like a kite, we're going to bring it forward.

That's all we're going to say about hands for now.

We're going to kind of jump back and forth between these nine elements because they're all kind of part of the same motions and the same body positions.

The number one rule of shoulders is always keep your shoulders level.

So we pretend we're carrying a tray for example and whatever you're doing with your board, you have a martini on your tray, do not spill your martini.

The other thing with the shoulders is we're going to actually rotate a lot from our shoulders, but we'll talk about rotation more later and we're going to try to really generate that rotation from our hips, but we're going to keep our hips in line with our shoulders as we do that.

So now you're starting to wonder, how am I supposed to lean over and touch the snow and keep my shoulders level?

So on toe side, you're going to drop your knees and keep your upper body stacked and you're going to crunch in the front oblique to actually reach away from the snow.

When you start reaching down for the snow, look what happens.

My board goes flat, I lose that angulation between the board and the snow and my butt sticks out.

Edge goes up, oblique gets crunched, lift that inside shoulder up to hold that tray and keep your shoulders level.

We want to be in this kind of position, arms in front again, shoulders level, crunching in the rear oblique.

Look at some of the commonalities in body positions across these carving sports.

The lower body is leaning into the turn while the upper body leans away.

And I'm afraid here we're going to have to address the elephant in the room.

A lot of you probably don't want to hear this, so just mute the next 45 seconds.

Maybe we'll put a little eye candy in the corner for you.

Can you make a heel side pencil line carve on steep terrain in a duck stance?

What I will say is it's much, much more difficult than with a posi posi stance.

So I'm going to encourage you to go to at least 12 degrees positive in the back foot and 27 positive in the front.

When I drop that back foot to nine, I start to chatter on the heel side.

I need to have 12 minimum. 27 gives me 15 degrees of splay.

Now I know what you're thinking because I've heard it before.

Oh, but what about my freestyle and my switch riding and blah, blah, blah.

You have a carving stance on a carving board on a groomer day.

If you, uh, you know, a duck stance, if you want to ride the park or you want to ride the trees, no problem.

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The Secrets of Snowboard Carving: Part 1 - The Nine Elements

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