Name: Snowboarding Tips - How to Ride the Flats - With a Real Beginner
Uploaded: 2025-02-01T16:23:25.000Z
Duration: 9 min 16 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...

Gerund

Present continuous

Today I'm riding with Abby and we're going to be showing her and showing you some tips and some exercises to help you get better at snowboarding across flats.

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Now the reason a lot of snowboarders struggle with getting across the flat piece is that it's because it requires a completely different turn shape to what you'd normally be doing across the rest of the mountain.

So normally when we're snowboarding we make what's called is that after each turn, whether it's heel side or toe edge, we get the board 90 degrees across the slope to slow ourselves back down and get a bit more control.

Now if you're to do this type of turn on the flats, not only are you going to just run out of speed, get stuck and end up skating across them, but you might have found yourself it's actually quite dangerous when you turn that board 90 degrees when you're on a flat slope, it's very easy to catch an edge.

So I'm going to show you that it's better when we're riding flats to change our turn from this shape to what we call an open turn.

We basically really stretch out the turn so the board's almost running in a straight line but we're still rolling from one edge to another and the technique required for this is actually very similar to what we do when we're carving.

So we're going to start off with some carving exercises.

We're here on a nice wide mellow green slope, perfect for practicing some carving.

So what we're going to start doing is actually have the board going in a straight line on a flat base to begin with.

Now starting on a flat base it's quite important to understand this position because it's this neutral position that we're always in in between every turn.

Every time you go from your toe edge to your heel edge, your heel edge back to your toe edge, even if it's only for a fraction of a second, at some point you're in this flat base position.

So it's important we understand it and know what it feels like.

Now a lot of people also think that this is the best position to ride across the flats in, that you just want to be completely on a flat base.

Now whilst it can work sometimes if the piece is completely level, if it's not you're completely at the mercy of the fall line.

By that I mean even if your slope looks pretty flat, if it's slightly cambered off in one direction or another, if you're not on an edge and your board's just on a flat base you will end up going down whichever way the slope wants you to.

So if you've ever been riding flats and you found like your board has a bit of a life of its own, it's probably because you're on a flat base and that board just feels quite skittish under your feet.

But anyway back to the exercise, as I said we're going to start in this flat base position.

So this is neutral position, my shoulders are dead in line with the board, I've just got my head looking down where I want to be going and once you've done this for a couple of meters, you've got a little bit of speed, all I want you to do is start to bend your knees through your shins, press into the front of your boots and you're going to sink into that toe edge position that you already know.

Now I want you to dis any urge here to make any rotational movements to try and force the board to come around, but simply by getting your weight in the right place, the side cut of your board will engage in the snow and it's going to grip and pull you around across the piece.

So what we should see in the snow is a nice smooth arc and if you've got your weight exactly in the right place, you should leave a really thin pencil thin line in the snow.

So I'll give you a quick demonstration, give me a watch before you set off, make sure no one's coming down from above, you're not going to crash into them and we're going to give this a few goes.

We're starting on the toe side because we're on this side of the piece, we're going to take a look back at our line, see what went right, see what went wrong and we're going to repeat the exercise a few times on the heel edge as well.

Nice, we can see my line here on the heel edge, we've got Abi's line just there on the toe side.

So we can see it's a bit fatter at the top, a little bit rushed at the first part of the turn, she's kind of kicked that back foot around, but towards the end we're starting to get a bit of an arc as the board grips in and begins to carve a little bit across the side.

So we had a teeny bit of practice there doing the carve turns and the green slope just up that way.

At the top of the lift we just had a bit of a talk about posture and we're just practicing the posture more as we came down here, but now the end part of this slope is really, really mellow.

So we're going to go back to trying these carve turns, but rather than doing it one turn at a time and still closing off that turn, we're going to go back to what I mentioned earlier about these open turns.

So we're going to start off the exercise exactly the same way, I'm going to be flat base, coming down the side of the piece, a little bit of speed, I'm going to just rock my weight forward onto my toe edge, feel the board grip, bring me around, but rather than getting the board to keep coming around right across the piece, I'm going to stand back up into my neutral flat base position and the board's at about a 45 degree angle and I'm going to rock back onto my heel edge.

So I'm just going to do these big wide open S-shaped turns carving down the piece.

Now we are still on a bit of slope, so if you do start to pick up too much speed, yeah you can finish the odd turn off, slow it back down and then get into it again.

Essentially we're trying to ride here the same way that we would ride a flat slope, just rocking from one edge to the other.

So give me a watch and then as always, jump in, give it a go.

So we've done a few carving exercises there to help hold that edge in the snow, get that board to grip and get the board to actually bring you through the turn, rather than rotating your body or developing any bad habits to try and get the board to turn.

Now we've been practicing again just on a slightly steeper slope, we did one run on the really mellow slope where we got those open turns that I was talking about achieving.

Now at the bottom of this run we've got a really long flat section, so we're going to see hopefully how that is now going to all come together and help you on the flat bits.

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Snowboarding Tips - How to Ride the Flats - With a Real Beginner

stick

struggle

engage

stretch