Who doesn’t love snowboarding? It is a sport that captures the imaginations of millions of people. People who live far away from mountains are often seen planning vacations every year to hilly areas where they can enjoy this sport. This incredible, fun support has gotten popular over the years as people continue to watch videos and photos of others engaged in this sport, on the internet.
Snowboarding is a popular activity, and most people don’t get any lessons or training to do it, and still enjoy it properly, but it is important that you learn the initial stages of doing it first. If you are someone who is not properly balanced, there are chances that you will fall badly, and injure yourself. Learning snowboarding can be a daunting task for some people at first, but don’t worry, if you have the will to enjoy this amazing sport, you will learn all the “do’s and don’ts” of it in a pretty short time.
Below are some easy tips that you can follow and ride those mountain slopes with full confidence.
Learning to Skate Well
The first and foremost tip for potential snowboarders is that you should learn to skate well. Trust me, it will make your day much easier. By skating, I don’t mean skating on the snowboard! It’s the skating shoes we are talking about here. If you have never been on a mountain then you wouldn’t know that when you are on a snowboard, you can’t enter and exit the lifts with both feet on the snowboard. One foot has to be outside the snowboard because otherwise, it would be too hard to approach the lift. The lift is the time when your skating practice will come into handy. When you are skating, basically your front foot is strapped into your binding, whilst making the back foot free. The back foot will be used to push the snowboard along, just like we do in skating shoes.
By learning to skate in basic skating shoes, snowboarding will seem much easier to you.
Take Lessons
It is never a waste to take lessons on something that you are planning to do. It simply makes you extra confident and teaches you the basic tactics used in a specific thing. For example, if you are planning to go on a ten days trip to mountainous areas, you can cut it short to nice, and spend the extra one-day taking lessons about the various activities you will be performing over there. Lessons will teach you the proper techniques, and your instructor will give you instant feedback to make you better. You can also consider watching informative Youtube videos regarding snowboarding to better direct you for this support.
You can find many licensed instructors online to teach you snowboarding. However, just be sure that you are choosing the right instructor as there are many people who use top fake ids to pretend to be instructors but they aren’t.
Bend Your Knees
There could be many reasons people fall on their snowboarding adventure, but the most common one is that people don’t bend their knees properly, and not enough. With bent knees, the chances of you falling are greatly minimized, because you will absorb any shocks or bumps more effectively on difficult terrain. Falling isn’t a bad thing, as people come up much stronger and more experienced after learning from their mistakes, but you shouldn’t fall just because you didn’t bend your knees properly! You can watch various Youtube videos regarding snowboarding positions and one thing that you will notice in most of them would be the properly bended knees.
Look At Where You Are Aiming To Go
As a matter of fact, your brain will naturally program your body to go where you look. If you are someone who wants to go across the slope, start looking in that direction, and you will smoothly go there. But if you want to go across the slope but you are looking down it, your body will naturally try to go down the slope, and this is where the problem begins. This is eventually going to put your body in a bad position, and going unplanned in a direction where you didn’t plan first, is eventually going to make you fall! Many people have been badly injured in the past as a result of this.
Ensure That You Have a Proper Gear
Suppose you come across a snowboard on the Facebook market that is abnormally cheap. What would you do? Well, most of the people, in this case, would end up buying it for sure, but wait….NOT SO FAST! What in fact you may not know, or what the seller doesn’t know too or he doesn’t want to tell you is that certain snowboards are better to learn on than others. If the cheap snowboard that you are purchasing is aggressive and advanced, then there are chances that it’s going to be extremely hard for you to learn about it. This would increase the learning time, and could also slow down your progression, thus making the overall experience frustrating.
Ensure Your Gear Fits Properly
Your boots are extremely important when it comes to snowboarding. You have to make sure that your boots should fit snugly, whilst not cutting off the circulation. One of the good things about snowboarding is that you don’t have to deal with any kind of weird or awkward boots, but at the same time you have to make sure that your feet don’t move inside the boot and should be held firmly in one position all the time. Let it be clear that if your feet aren’t inside the boot and it’s constantly moving, it will be extremely difficult for you to apply pressure to the edges of the snowboard. This will also make your learning process and your overall snowboarding adventure extremely fatiguing.
So what are you waiting for? Start preparing for your snowboarding adventure!
