Improve Beginner Snowboard Turns with One Skill

If you're a beginner snowboarder and looking to improve your beginner snowboard skills and take your riding to that next level, I'm going to give you one thing to focus on and really describe how this should feel so that you can implement it into your own riding. The most important thing you can work on as a beginner is your stance over top of your snowboard. If you can dial in your stance and how everything feels, you're going to dramatically improve your snowboarding. I'm sure you've heard before to have your knees bent and back straight and that's a good foundation, but there's a lot more that goes into it. The first thing that you should feel with your stance is you should actually feel like your shoulders are square to your snowboard. With your shoulders square to your board, it's going to keep you in line with your board and give you the best balance for making your turns. So as I go down, I'm trying to feel my shoulders feeling lined up with my board and it's giving me that good balance through each turn. The next thing you should feel is your back hand over top of the tail of your board. By having your back hand over your tail, it helps you to complete each turn, especially your toe turn. As your toe turn comes around, by having your back hand over your tail, it gives you the best balance and really helps you to steer that toe turn around. So when I go to steer, back hand over my tail helps to bring it around smooth. The next thing you should feel as a beginner is your head looking over your shoulder. With your head looking over the shoulder, that means that your shoulders are still square to your board and with your head looking over your shoulder, that means that you're not facing too much down the hill. If you're facing the bottom too much, you're going to spend a lot of time on your heels, but if you're looking over your shoulder, that means you're going sideways and that's really going to help you to do your toe turns and your heel turns evenly. So head over your shoulder, that's going to even out your riding in general. The next thing you should feel in your stance is when you turn onto your toes, you should feel your knees bending into the slope. When you're going straight, you have your knees bent, but when you get onto your toes, having your knees bent forward towards the snow will help you get on your toe edge, slow yourself down, and so you can get going straight. This area is a little bit flat, but it's the same principle that will help you anywhere. When you get onto your toes, bend your knees forward into the snow. For your heels, the feeling is the opposite. When you turn onto your heels, you should feel your bum going down and you should feel like you're sitting into a chair. The sitting into a chair feeling is going to again keep you balanced over your board. It's going to help you lift up your toes and just slow yourself down even to come to a stop. When you get yourself going again, if you sit into that chair, it's going to put you into that good position to stop yourself. Your back as a beginner should feel straight and tall and with your shoulders just back a little bit too. With this tall back posture, it really helps you just to stay centered over top of your board. If you become round at the shoulders and leaning over, that's when you can just put too much weight over top of your toes and slide out. So back straight, shoulders a little bit back to give you that good center stance. A quick recap, your knees should be bent, bending forward on your toe turn. Your butt on your heels, you should feel like you're sitting into a chair. Your back should be straight and tall with your shoulders back to keep centered on top of your board. Your backhand should be over top of the tail of your snowboard and your head should be looking over your shoulder with your shoulders square to your board. All these things are going you a better snowboarder, help you to progress past beginner and this strong foundation will continue to take you all the way through expert. Thank you guys for watching, be safe out there learning and I'll catch you in the next video.