Snowboard MA

Nice riding. What looks good: you're balanced, relaxed, riding a pretty clean edge, both regular and switch. In terms of improvement, it's hard to say because a lot of really good riders will ride beginner terrain like that, but stylistically on that type of terrain I'd like to see you working the board a lot more and/or buttering more. Technique wise you don't look like you're really driving the board with the lower body, and you still have a bit of "hand jive" going on in relation to your turns, particularly with your right (rear) arm and shoulder when riding regular -- you are using more rotation than you need to particularly to set up for your heelside.

Balance-wise, you're parked more or less in the middle of the board. You can get a cleaner edge and carry much more speed while carving over flat sections like this by starting the turn with your balance much more towards the nose and then driving it all the way to the tail combined with an extension of the legs through the end of the turn, then retracting to start the next turn and repeating. Vlad had a couple good posts on this last year. Your legs are fairly straight, and you also exhibit a fair bit of inclination or leaning your whole body into turns; without riding more dynamically, this makes sense, and the inclination can also be fun, but keeping your upper body more erect, and arching your back and pushing your pelvis out more on toeside, will help a lot with staying balanced while working the board more.

You may well bend your legs much more on steeper terrain than you are doing here. A good exercise on flats is to just start out with your legs bent to close to 90 degrees and upper body erect, and just not permit yourself to stand up while making your turns. It takes a couple turns to get the board loaded up and then you can start making rounder turns driving the board out from your body.

You passed up what looked on the video to be a perfectly good snowmaking berm towards the end there! Also, it's good terrain to work on frontside or backside 180s, nose presses, etc. plus those can be fun to work in.

Very nice riding overall though.

You know ................... (60 minutes style)

When you're on terrain that's not a challenge, it's not fair to criticize that you could have done "more" because you don't need it. You can work the board. You can bend your knees. You can use your ankles. The 180s are nicely done and you're leaving some nice carved tracks. This is nice riding.

Your left foot seems a little far out from under you. I see the knee behind the toes in a few stills going forward and switch, and the inside of the foot way outside of the outside of the hips. My suggestion is to TRY moving only the left foot back one set of holes. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but a change might work better for you.

I'd also like to see a little more turning of the front foot and a little less turning of the front shoulder. You may find that bumping the stance angle up a notch or two does the job and/or you can work on consciously steering more. This dovetails with CT's comment about working the board more.

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Ma

Regular:
- balanced and smooth
- decent range of motion (flex/ex in knees/ankles/hips)
- solid alignment
- could use more twist (but not needed on this style of terrain - would need it on steeps/bumps/trees/high end carving though)

Switch:
- balanced and smooth
- less range of motion (flex/ex in knees/ankles/hips)
- slightly countered alignment
- more pivot (back leg pushing tail of board around a bit, not as much tail follows tip going on)
- could also use more twist (again not needed on this terrain, but good practice to use it here too)

I agree w/ the comments about 'working the entire edge'. Which means you could show more fore/aft movements, but again the terrain doesn't require that you use those movemnt options. There you go, that's my $.02.

JB