Improving snowboard turns starts with mastering fundamental techniques like body position and edge control.
Improving your snowboard turns involves refining your technique, particularly focusing on how you position your body and engage your edges. A common goal is to achieve smoother, more controlled transitions between turns.
Focus on Proper Body Position and Stance
A key element in smooth turns is maintaining a balanced and effective stance. Your body should be aligned in a way that allows you to efficiently transfer weight and pressure to your edges.
Avoid Leaning Too Close to the Snow
A frequent mistake that hinders turn quality is collapsing your body or leaning too close to the snow. According to the reference, this posture is a primary cause of unwanted chatter and vibration throughout your board during a turn. Instead of achieving a clean carve or slide, the board skips and vibrates, making turns feel unstable and less smooth.
Practice a Stacked and Balanced Stance
To counteract leaning too close and improve turn smoothness, focus on maintaining a stacked position. This means keeping your body aligned vertically over your board, with your joints (ankles, knees, hips) flexed but stacked on top of each other.
The reference specifically advises to work on feeling stacked and bounce over top of your snowboard. This "bouncing" or active movement over the board implies using controlled flexing and extending through your legs to manage pressure on the edge, rather than just hinging from the waist or leaning excessively into the turn. This helps you stay balanced over the board's edge, allowing it to slice cleanly through the snow without excessive chatter.
Here are key takeaways for improving your turns based on this principle:
- Maintain a stacked body alignment directly over your snowboard throughout the turn.
- Actively use your legs to apply pressure and absorb terrain, almost like bouncing over the top of your board, especially through the transition between turns.
- Consciously avoid leaning too close to the snow or collapsing your upper body towards the ground.
- Recognize that leaning too close is a common cause of chatter and vibration, indicating inefficient edge hold.
- Focus on pressuring the edge through controlled movements in your legs and hips while keeping your core stacked.
By focusing on a stacked and active stance rather than excessive leaning, you can achieve better edge control, reduce vibration, and make your snowboard turns significantly smoother and more controlled.
