- Hi, I'm Amy Gan, from AASI. We're here with REI.
Previously, we've covered how to snowboard.
Today we're going to be looking at those next steps
and how to venture to the rest of the mountain.
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We're going to be covering: steering with both feet,
controlling speed through turn shape,
riding steep terrain, and riding in the bumps.
With any of these skills we practice on our snowboard,
it's really important to put in a lot of mileage.
It's not something we do once,
and we check it off our list,
it's something that we're going to be practicing often,
and every time we come out riding,
to keep those skills up and progress.
Steering with both feet
is gonna be really important as we progress.
It's the same skill that we practiced
in the very beginner lesson,
where we initiated with the front foot
and had the back foot follow.
That's the same exact thing
we're gonna be applying to steeper terrain.
To steer with both feet in a turn,
traverse across the hill.
Initiate with your front foot,
quickly followed by your back foot,
shift onto the new edge,
traverse back across the hill and finish your turn.
If this is done correctly,
it should feel really smooth,
that the front foot is doing most of the work,
and the back foot is following nicely,
and the upper body doesn't have to do any work.
When we're practicing steering with both feet,
we're trying to avoid having to use our upper body
to swing our board around.
This is gonna give us more control,
and even though we're doing it skidding right now,
that's how we snowboard most of the time.
It's also the exact same skills
we're going to be working on when we do move to carving.
When we do this, we're gonna be focusing
on using the shape of the turn through a skid
to be slowing ourselves down during the turn
and towards the end of the turn
by steering back across the hill.
With this, we're gonna be focusing on the skid,
nice and evenly throughout the entire turn,
and that's gonna be dumping speed.
And this really applies when we get to steeper terrain.
What we try to avoid is having to slam the brakes
at the end of the turn and chatter out.
If we can get ourselves to skid throughout the entire turn,
by the end we're riding nice and smooth
back across the hill.
When we want to close our turns
is when we're on really steep terrain.
This is gonna allow us to slow ourselves down,
and make sure we're in control
before we enter our next turn.
Where we might wanna ride an open turn
is maybe at the bottom of a trail, when it flattens out,
and we need to carry speed to the lift.
We're gonna want to open that up
so that we don't slow ourselves down too much
during every turn, so we can make it to where we want to go.
What we're doing in steep terrain
is exactly the things we've been focusing on
as we've been learning.
The things we wanna make sure we cover
are exaggerating our weight onto our front foot
when we enter a turn,
matching our shoulders and hips to pitch of the terrain,
which means that the steeper it is,
the further I need to get my shoulders and hips
down the hill,
so that I can keep that weight on the front foot.
Just like in our beginner lesson,
our first couple turns,
we often wanna drift and lean away from the hill,
and this isn't gonna allow us to get the board
to grip up right, and it's not gonna allow
for the controlling that we want for the whole turn.
We also wanna make sure that at the end of the turn,
we come all the way back across the hill,
to slow ourselves back down.
Riding bumps are really fun,
but as a beginner, they can be a little bit intimidating.
We're gonna give you a few skills,
so that if you happen to come upon a bump run
you weren't expecting, or at the end of a powder day,
when it starts to get choppy,
you can have a few things to keep in mind,
to get you through comfortably.
The two tactics we're gonna use to ride the bumps
are traversing across them,
and absorbing them while we're riding.
So when we go into the bump field for the first time,
we wanna focus on traversing across the hill,
rather than looking straight down the fall line.
Traversing is going to allow us
to keep our speed down, and absorb the bumps
without getting out of control.
Ideally, you can find a bump run
that has groomers on each side of it,
so that you can just traverse across,
get out onto the groomer, make your turn,
and traverse back across on your other edge.
As we're traversing,
we also need to be absorbing the bumps.
So we're gonna be using our legs independently,
to suck up and push down into the bumps at the same time.
This is gonna allow the board
to stay in contact with the snow,
so we don't get any accidental air.
When we do this, we head up the bump
by sucking up our front leg, and then our back leg,
and then pushing down our front leg and then our back leg.
These are things I do in my snowboarding every single day.
The more you practice them and put time
into each of these skills,
the more areas of the mountain
you'll be able to conquer and have more fun with.
I hope you like this video.
Please check out our others and subscribe to our channel.
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