Just another day at Snowpark NZ
One of the most important parts of any day on the slope is your warm up. You don’t strap in at the start of the day and start sending 1080s off 70 foot jumps, that’s a recipe for injury. Warming up properly is one of the simplest, yet best ways to make sure you don’t get injured.
How To Warm Up Correctly
1) Do a warm up lap down a blue or green run. The goal of this is to warm up your muscles and get your ‘snowboard brain’ to turn on.
2) Lap the park and start with easy tricks like straight airs and 50/50s. You should always start with easy tricks that you know you can land every time, this lets you get your muscle memory into ‘park mode’.
3) Progress up in difficulty. The goal here is to warm up with tricks that have very low risk before you progress up to the bigger tricks. How quickly you progress depends on how experienced you are, but here’s how my usual day in the Whistler Blackcomb park goes:
- One lap of nothing but straight airs on every jump
- Next lap is 180s/360s
- Next is 540s
- Then 720s and corked/inverts
- Then 900s and so on.
As you can see, I don’t even get to the new tricks that I’m trying to learn until I’ve finished 2-3 laps of the park. This way, by the time I’m actually trying new tricks, my body is already warmed up and my muscle memory has kicked in.
That’s it. Warm ups are simple and easy to do and they’re a smart way to reduce your chances of injury.