Learning: Snowboarding
A lot of my childhood memories were spent on the bunny hill at Snow Trails Ski Resort in Mansfield, Ohio. Every winter brought the excitement of polishing my skiing skills and trying to convince my parents to let me try out snowboarding.
One fateful year, when I was around 8 or 9 years old, my parents finally conceded to letting me and my twin brother begin our careers as professional snowboarders. At this point, my dad, who was our main skiing instructor passed the baton to my older brother who had been snowboarding for quite some time then. The two of them tag-teamed together to get me and my brother somewhat functioning down the bunny hill.
However, after some time I felt that my progress started to wane. At first, I attributed this to the fact that my older brother is a lefty and thus taught me an unnatural way to snowboard, but now that I think about it, I think there were some fundamental skills that I neglected to learn.
For example, when snowboarding, people usually switch between heel-side and toe-side, where heel-side refers to your heels facing the top of the hill and toe-side refers to your toes facing the top of the hill. As a child, heel-side always scared me, so I avoided it. Something about seeing the entirety of the hill below me was overwhelming.
For this Learn project, my goal is to master heel-side snowboarding and share my experience with how that went!
This winter season I had a few opportunities to get back into snowboarding and master the nerve wracking heel-side edge. After warming up a bit on the bunny hill I moved to my first green. During my outings, I noticed that snowboarding is all about weight distribution and your center of gravity.
Heel-side edge is commonly the preferred edge-side because it’s an action that is done almost every day. To get into a heel-side edge, the key is to lean your front foot’s toes down into the snow and your back foot’s toes up towards the sky all while sinking into a seated-like position. Imagine you’re sitting into a chair. This movement helps move your center of gravity backwards so you don’t fall over while distributing your weight. Another thing to keep in mind is the lower you sink, the quicker you can transition into your heelside, i.e. for an emergency brake.
Keeping these tips in mind, I soon found that the heel-side edge was a lot more preferred for myself as well.
Now that I can do heel-side and toe-side with my dominant foot in the back, I can practice carving. Carving allows for more speed while also while also having more control and less chance of slipping!
In addition to carving, my next snowboarding goal is learning how to master both edges with my non-dominant foot. This is difficult since my weaker leg (left) will be in that back steering. However, once I add that skill to my arsenal, I can switch stances as necessary.
Overall, i’ve made huge progress with adding the heel-side edge to list of snowboarding skills, but more importantly it felt really good to get back out on the snow and try out snowboarding again! I’ve still got some time until the end of the season, so i’ll report back with my next lesson learned in snowboarding!