Graham Sinclair - CASI Lvl 3 Instructor Choosing your first snowboard can be as overwhelming as it is exciting! There are a ton of different snowboards available on the market today, each with marketing campaigns designed to entice you. This guide will serve to help you navigate the market and help you, the beginner snowboarder, to choose the right board.
Within snowboarding there is a long held debate as to what is more important to consider when selecting a snowboard; height or weight. In my 30+ years of snowboarding I’ve come to believe that height is the most important consideration, unless you’re on the heavier end of the spectrum. Keep reading as I add my thoughts to the height vs weight debate.
I believe snowboarding is just as much art as it is sport. We, as snowboarders, are all artists and we each express our art in unique ways. The mountain is our canvas and the brush strokes are our turns and maneuvers. Style is how and where we choose to make those brush stokes to create our unique way of coming down the mountain.
Snowboard stiffness is one of the key specs to consider when choosing a snowboard and this article will dive into how to choose the right flex for your level.
With the enormous variety of snowboards available on the market, how do you choose the right snowboard shape for your riding style? There are a few key questions you can ask yourself to help narrow down which board will best serve you.
A snowboard profile is the way the snowboard is designed to bend from the contact points, i.e., the places where the board touches the snow when laid flat and without a rider strapped in and pushing down on it.
As a career snowboard instructor, I know how to gauge someone’s proficiency level just after seeing a few turns or even after asking a few questions. To help you gauge your own proficiency level, in this article I’ll run through some of the types of terrain and different maneuvers that snowboarders at each proficiency level can typically do.
Knowing your own ability level is the first step in choosing the best equipment to maximize your progression. Board shape, flex, and profile along with size and width are the key specs to understand when choosing a board.
Simply put, directional snowboards work best with the nose of the snowboard going downhill first and twin snowboards work equally as well with either the nose or the tail pointing downhill first, that is natural or switch.
For freestyle snowboarding, I recommend Twin shape, which has equal tail and nose length versus directional, which has a slightly longer nose and a slightly shorter tail. Having equal nose and tail length allows you to take off and land tricks both natural and switch (i.e., with your natural back leg forward), which is a key part of freestyle.
You might have noticed that not all snowboard boots have the same lacing system. There are three main systems for snowboard boot lacing: traditional, speed lacing, and BOA.
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