HOW TO SNOWBOARD EFFORTLESSLY

When you see good snowboarders, they aren't fighting with the board, they're not kicking it around, they're not having to work against it. In fact, their riding should look incredibly lazy. It doesn't look like they're doing much, but clearly they are because their board is working for them. It's gripping and it's pulling them through the arc of the turn and they're clearly in control. The way that they're able to ride like this is simply because they're getting their weight in the right place. It's by getting your weight in the right place that you're able to really ride effortlessly, which is what this video is going to be all about. I'm going to talk about what is the right place for your weight, how you get it there, and when in the turn you put it there. Let me just cruise on down here a little bit further. I'm still out in Sass Fae, having my early season trip. I'm right up on the glacier. It's so cool. Let me just pan the camera around. You can see all this incredible ice stacked up over the cliffs behind me. Really, really cool place. Back to the tutorial. To ride effortlessly, to ride lazily, to get the board to work for you, you need three things in your locker. The first thing is pretty good edge control, so you can do this, get the board to grip and travel across the slope without skidding out. The second thing you need is average posture. Good posture is great, but average posture will do because posture isn't the be-all and end-all of good snowboarding, as some people might have you think, perhaps myself included in some previous videos. What's more important, and what I really want to show you in this video, is that it's all about getting your weight in the correct place. The third thing you're going to need, which hopefully we all already have, is a basic understanding of gravity. Let me just pull over to the side here whilst we've got some sun out. We're going to start with the first thing I mentioned that you need, a bit of edge control across the piste. In fact, to do that, you're also going to need the second thing I mentioned, which is average posture, which basically means you're going to have your hips stacked at least somewhat vertically over your edge. We're going to talk about the hips a lot in this video because the hips are kind of where we can think about your center of mass being located. Our center of mass is obviously going to be really important in getting our weight in the right place. Let me just begin with a little traverse across the slope to briefly run through what your posture should look like. Knees slightly bent, hips back, shoulders over hips, over the edge of the board. As I change edge onto my toe side, the hips have now been nudged forwards, not so much that I'm arching my back or anything like that, but my hips are just nudged forwards so that they're now stacked vertically over my toe edge. What should you feel yourself as you're doing this? On the heel edge, you should feel the calf muscles kind of just pressing against the back of your boots, pressing against your high backs, but because of how you've got your shoulders stacked over hips, stacked over your heels, you should really have the impression, because in fact you are, stood on your heels. You should feel as though you're stood on your heels, which sounds kind of obvious because that's what we're doing, but really just try and feel that as you traverse across the slope on your heel edge. Round on the toe edge, you should feel that you're stood on the balls of your feet, not up on your toes, but here you really have the impression that your weight is sinking and just kind of dropping down and being held up by the front of your boots. My shins are right there pressing into the front of your boots. That's the posture, that's what it should feel like. Now the third thing I mentioned that's really going to help you get your weight in the right place is to have an understanding of gravity, because gravity is a force that will pull you down the slope. Well, I mean actually gravity is just the curvature of space-time, but hey, let me stay in my lane. Think about gravity as a force, and as you change edge, I want you to imagine gravity pulling your hips across the top of the board, the change between your heel and toe side position. In fact, you don't even need to imagine it doing it, because it will do that. Let me just show you, let me pick up a little bit of speed. So I've come across, I'm in this heel side position, and I just let gravity pull my hips over the board onto my toe side. Let gravity pull my hips back behind the board onto the heel side, let gravity pull my hips forward, and it's this back and forward movement of the hips over the top of the board. This is really building upon a concept I talked about in one of my first videos of this season, where I said you have to edge change, and then allow the board to turn. So edge change, and then allow the board to turn, but here, in order to ride effortlessly, we're really thinking about gravity doing the work for us, gravity pulling our hips over the board, and then we just sit in that position with our weight in the right place. I want to elaborate on what the right place is, because I've talked about how your shoulders and your hips need to be stacked vertically over your edge, but we also really need to think about where that weight is in relation to the turn. Now I'm going to put a little diagram up in the corner here, because I think this really well explains it. You can see the S-shape of the turn, but that second line is my center of mass, and my center of mass is going to be on the inside of the turn. This should be a familiar concept. Imagine when you started learning to ride a bike without stabilizers. You have to lean your weight onto the inside of the turn to get the bike to turn. If you imagine motorbike riders when they're racing, they're right fully over. Because they're going so fast, they can really drop their center of mass onto the inside of the turn. When you are learning to ride a bike, you would have found that if you drop your center of mass in too much, you fall over, and if you do it not enough, then you're not going to turn. It's a similar thing for snowboarding in that if we lean over too much, yes, you're going to fall over on the inside of the turn, but where it's slightly different is that if you don't lean in enough, you're not necessarily going to fall over, however, the board isn't going to grip. It's not going to pull you through the arc of the turn, instead, sorry, you're just going to skid out. It's all about getting your weight in that sweet spot on the inside of the turn where the board then grips and pulls you through the arc of the turn. This is where it's a bit of a balancing act, and it's going to change because if you're going very slowly, if I'm just cruising on a flat, I barely have to put my center of mass on the inside of the turn. That's actually why people struggle riding flats a lot because it's the same movement, but it's barely there at all, it's difficult to get it right. As you start picking up more speed, it's easier to then rock your weight on the inside of the turn. I'm just going to do a few turns and just have a look at that diagram, I'll pop it back up there, and see how my center of mass is on the inside of the turn. It's gravity that pulls it over at the edge change right here. I'm going quite slow now, so this is going to be a small movement, but now, as the slope gets steeper here, I'm just going to allow myself to fall over the board at the edge change. It's almost like a trust exercise, fall over the board, fall over the board, and right there, that's my center of mass crossing over the board at the edge change. Really focus on this movement coming from the hips, passing back and forwards over the board right there at every edge change. Let me just come around over to the side here. What a gorgeous day, it is lovely. Now you might be thinking, okay, just pass your weight over the board, but how is this going to tie in with some of the stuff that I've talked about in my other videos, like independent knee steering? Because you might be thinking, yes, just moving your center of mass over the board is fine for these lazy big carve turns, but how is it going to work if we want to do shorter, tighter turns for steeper slopes? Well, you can still imagine the same concept, but what I'm going to do is imagine that I've cut you, split you down the middle in half, so we now have front hip and back hip. We can simply let gravity to pull our front hip in across the slope first, and then it will be followed by the back hip. I'll post a bunch of videos down below. I've got my sort of older video, which is kind of like the Bible on this movement. Oh, I shouldn't say that. It's the ultimate guide on this movement of knee steering, it really explains it. I've got other videos about different drills. I've got my ski pole drill, I've got the flagpole drill that I posted recently, which is all about getting the same movement. You want to be able to lead with the front leg, with the front knee and hip, because it's by doing that that you really are able to get more control of the board, because if I drop into the turn, if I cross the front half, my front hip over the board first, it allows me to maintain grip at the end of the turn, at the back of my board, and then engage the new edge of my board at the start of the turn. Once that starts gripping in, I then just allow gravity to pull the back hip over the board like so. The board will then grip through the turn. Once again, at the end of the turn, I'm just going to release front hip, back hip across the board. Let me just demo a few of those, but the focus here is really riding lazily, getting the board, getting gravity, sorry, to do the work for us, and then the board will just get in the right place and it will perform. Front hip, back hip, front hip, back hip, and this just allows me to really ease the board into the turn, get the front of the board gripping, the top of the board gripping at the start of the turn, right here, and then the back of the board driving you through the end of the turn. This is starting to bring in fore and aft movement as well, and I don't want to get too techy on this video because it's really just about being lazy, getting that sensation of folding your hips over the board because when you do that, that is how you feel how your board performs. As I alluded to in the intro, once you have a feel for how your board performs, then it becomes really like riding a bike. It's really simple. You just get your weight in the right place and off you go. This is my first run of the day, and this is something I like to do always on my first run. Just make sure that I'm sitting my weight in the correct place before I try and make any fancy movements because you need to get your weight in the right place before you start trying to do all that other stuff. Give this a go, and as I mentioned, I'll reference some of my other videos that explain that knee movement a little bit better. It's not got a huge amount of views because it's very, very techy, but I also have a video on short turns, which is what you'd need for riding the steeps, but it also really goes over this movement of the weight shift, but also in relation to the front foot, back foot, front knee, back knee steering that you want to do that creates torsional twists upon the board and what that can do to really give you nice grippy turns. I'll stick that one up there. Thank you for watching, guys, as always, and I'll see you in the next one.