I focus a lot on snowboard technique in many of my blogs, but it’s for a good reason. Good technique allows you to advance faster in a sport that limits our ability to practice as much as we want.
There’s a few main reasons why our ability to practice is limited:
1: Snowboard hills have limited opening hours
Unlike many other sports, good terrain limits our ability to pump out lots and lots of practice hours.
For example, let’s compare snowboarding to basketball. If you want to practice your basketball skills, it’s as easy as grabbing your basketball and finding a flat concrete area. As long as you have light of some sort, you can keep practicing as long as you want. However, on a ski hill, you’re limited to riding until the lift shuts.
There’s no after hours riding, unless they offer some sort of night riding, and even then, your time is limited and the terrain is usually sub par.
2: You physically can’t – and shouldn’t – snowboard non stop
The longer you ride and the more tired you get, the likelihood of getting injured increases. No one likes being injured and managing injury is one of the key elements of progressing your snowboarding. Obviously, if you’re injured, you can’t snowboard, which means you can’t progress.
This is why you physically can’t and shouldn’t ride past your point of exhaustion.
3: You spend more time on lifts than riding
Ever noticed how much time we spend on lifts in an average ski day? Take an average park lap in the terrain park, which might take you 5 minutes to complete. Now time the chairlift ride to get back up to the top of the park. The actual time you spend on the chairlifts each day might actually be more than the time you spend riding.
Compare this to someone who’s playing basketball and you realize that you might have gotten 4 attempts at learning a new trick in 20 minutes, whereas the guy playing basketball can shoot the ball 50 times or more in 20 minutes.
When we really look at it, the actual number of attempts that we get to learn a new trick/technique in a full day of snowboarding is usually far less than many other sports.
4: Snowboarding is expensive
Snowboarding has a huge price barrier for many of us who do not live on ski resorts. There’s the cost of getting there, plus accommodation, time off from work and not to mention the cost of equipment, lessons and lift tickets.
At the end of the day, we’re paying a lot of money just to be on the hill to practice our tricks and techniques.
What does all of the above mean?
When we want to improve a skill, there’s two main factors. Quantity and quality. We can’t focus on quantity when it comes to snowboarding.
Well, I mean you could, but that would probably mean you’d have to be willing to quit your job and follow the snow year round. Many of us aren’t in a situation where you can do that.
So what’s left is quality. You have to make those precious days on the snow count for something. That’s why I focus so much on technique. We want the quality of our practice to make up for the fact that we can’t just spend all day, every day trying to learn a new trick or technique.
Don’t forget that there’s other benefits too. If the average snowboarder learns a trick in 8 days and you use awesome technique to learn it in 4 days, you’re effectively learning tricks twice as fast as he is. This means 100 days on snow would become equal to the average snowboarder’s 200 days on snow.
So, that’s why I focus so much on learning technique. It comes down to would you rather learn things slowly or learn them quicker and use your time on the hill effectively.
- Jed
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