Name: Improve your Carving Game - Snowboard Better
Uploaded: 2025-02-01T16:18:28.000Z
Duration: 12 min 11 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...

Oh that's what we're looking for, that pencil thin line in the snow.

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Hey guys, Malcolm Moore here. Are you a fan of my new pink buff? Let me know. Anyway I digress, in today's video I'll be helping you take your carving from pedestrian to pro.

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Carving is where you put the board on its edge and have the side cut of the board pull you across the slope in a smooth turn. Now good carving is where you leave a pencil thin line in the snow. That's an indication that the board hasn't been skidding at all. So let's start off real simply at the pedestrian end of the spectrum like I said. I'm here on the side of the piece and what I'm going to do is pick up a little bit of speed, rock onto my heel edge and try and make a nice smooth arc all the way across to the other side of the slope. To do this, ingredient one is speed. A little bit of speed helps with carving.

Ingredient number two is to have good heel edge posture. That means knees bent, hips back, head turning, looking where I'm going and if you're not entirely sure what good posture is, check this video out up here. I've explained good posture in great detail. So we've got speed, we've got good posture, the third thing we need to do is the lateral movement. By that I just mean we lean. We lean our body laterally into the slope to get the sidecut to engage and for it to pull us around the turn. Alright, let's jump in, let's give it a go.

Same exercise as before, just this time on the toe edge. So bend the knees, push the hips forward, sit in that toe edge position, lean into the slope and have the sidecut pull you across the peak.

Now if your line in the snow isn't really looking like that, it's looking a bit more like a slug left it, like it's a bit fat, not very pretty. It could be for a few reasons. Now you want to make sure you're not kicking your back foot out at the start of the turn. Trust that by engaging your board's sidecut that will be enough to pull you around across the slope. Now it could be that your posture is wrong. Good posture really is a key ingredient to good carving. It could be that just the back end of your board isn't quite gripping. You know we spend a lot of time getting beginners to get weight on their front foot because that's what starts off the turn but the back foot is actually important as well as for getting your whole board to grip, for getting grip across the whole of your sidecut. So maybe try applying a bit more pressure through the back foot.

That's what we're looking for, that pencil thin line in the snow. Perfect. So let's start linking those two turns together. All you need to do at the end of the turn is simply to extend your legs and stand up. As you do this that allows the board to flatten meaning you can roll it onto your new edge but it also helps you transition between your heel and your toe edge posture. As I stand up it brings my hips over the middle of the board meaning that I can then drop them forward into my toe edge position. Spin around. The same applies when we go from toe edge to heel edge. I'm coming across the slope, my knees are bent. When I want to change edge I stand up, my board flattens, my hips are across the middle of the board and I can sink them back into my heel edge position and complete the carve across the piece.

That was great. We were getting the board to carve but we were just kind of being a passenger on the board and by that I mean we were just sitting the board on its edge and having the board take us around in that quite large radius turn.

Now that's fine for your mellow green slopes but you do that on anything a bit steeper and that boards going to start picking up loads of speed as you're making these really big turns with a lot of time spent in the full line. So what we want to start to do and where things get a bit more fun is when we can actually tighten up the arc of that turn. Tighten up the radius of those carves.

Now the way we do that is that we need to get the board to actually bend like this.

For it to bend like a banana or more professionally we need it to go into reverse camber. Now there's a few ways that we can do that. You can just take a bit more speed. You can lean laterally into the slope a bit more but the best way, the way that gives the best and the most immediate results is to actually push your legs into the board. The way we do that is simply to extend the legs. As you push your legs into the board you apply pressure through the middle of the board. You bend it like a banana. You push it into reverse camber and you increase the radius of your turn. No you don't. You decrease the radius of your turn. You make it smaller. I'm getting too technical here. Basically by pushing your legs into the board as you extend you're going to tighten up that turn. So that's what we're going to do now. Have a quick play with this. Push those legs out through the turn and you can kind of do it progressively through the turn or you can kind of pump it like you're riding a wave. Get that board to kind of nip back up the slope. All right let's give that a go.

I'm getting too technical here. Basically by pushing your legs into the board you're going to tighten up that turn. You make it smaller. You push it into reverse camber and you increase the radius of the turn. You make it smaller. I'm getting too technical here. Basically by pushing your legs into the board as you extend you're going to tighten up that turn. So that's what I'm going to do now. Have a quick play with it. Awesome. So that is getting way more fun already. We can really influence the size and the shape of our carved turns. What you've probably started to feel as well is that as you release the pressure from that board, so you're pushing your legs into it, you bend it into reverse camber, when you then release that pressure the board really snaps you out of the turn. I could really feel it popping me out and in those turns

I was using that to help with that extension movement as I rocked my way over from one edge to the other. You can do a couple of things with this. You could even take that snap and pop an ollie at the end of the turn. Make your edge change in the air. Pop off your toe edge carve, land into your heel edge carve. One thing that I really like to do is I like to progressively push my legs out through the turn, build the pressure up in the board and at the end of the turn I release it all and I snap my legs up underneath my body and try and get them high up on the slope to begin the next turn nice and early.

So rather than before when we were standing up and crossing our hips over the board, this time we're actually bringing the board underneath our body. We call it a cross under turn. Now this is really effective because you bring the board nice and high up to start the turn early but also because you've stuck your legs up underneath you, you're starting the turn in a crouch down position. You're in this low position ready to start extending your legs and applying pressure through the board right from the beginning of the turn. Whereas before we were standing up then sinking into this low position which you could then apply pressure from. Here you're doing these cross under turns, you can get pressure right from the start of the turn and this is what I start to call more high performance carving. So give me a watch, I'll film some in slow motion so you can really see the board snapping up underneath me. So from my heels to the toes I've got to bring it up underneath me and back up the hill. From the toes to the heels, same thing, I release that snap, pull the board underneath me, you see it lets me engage my edge nice and early and already I'm in that low strong position to start pushing out through the turn.

Perfect, that's as much as I could fit in at the end of the day. I've been super busy this week teaching loads of lessons and if you'd like to have a lesson with me, I live and I work out here in Alpe d'Huez in France. You can find all the details of the ski school

 I work for down below. As always, if you've enjoyed this, please hit that like and that subscribe button for more content like this. Until next time, see you later.

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Improve your Carving Game - Snowboard Better

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