How do you judge good snowboarding? JSBA Interview, Part 2: Movement, force and riding quality

How do you judge good riding?

Teacher

Enjoying snowboarding takes a whole range of movements. Different ways of riding call on force in different ways.

The board has its own basic performance. How the rider uses it changes how much the board skids, and it changes the speed. What we look at is whether the rider can control those changes deliberately.

CASI, SAJ or any other organisation — every one of them faces the same question: how do you judge whether someone rides well?

JSBA looks at the result of the riding to see how the rider uses movement and handles the board.

kaku

Got it. That part I understand.

Teacher

So what does carving take? Let’s widen the frame first: what abilities do you need to enjoy snowboarding at all?

First, you have to be able to keep your balance on a slope. But standing there is not enough. You also have to be able to start sliding.

Once you are moving, do you stop because you hit something, or can you stop when you choose to? So starting and stopping are both essential.

But if all you can do is start and stop, all you can do is go straight down. So you also need to turn — to make the board draw a curve. Then, when there is danger ahead, you can turn away from it when you choose to.

See original graphic 1/4 (in Chinese)

Lean is more than tipping your body over

Teacher

The basic movements in the manual include moving your centre of gravity forward and back, side to side, and up and down. They also include edging, and adjusting how the body tilts to keep its balance.

Edging lets us use the board’s sidecut. When we actively set an edge and ride it, we also have to adjust the body axis that runs up from our feet, so the body tilts.

That tilt is called “lean” (傾倒). It can be a tilt of the whole body, or it can be adjusted through movements of different parts of the body.

On the toe edge (toeside) and the heel edge (heelside), the body does not tilt by the same amount.

You have probably all ridden a bicycle or a motorcycle. Motorcycling has terms like “lean” and “lean out” as well.

As a child on a bike, did you ever try tipping only the bike while your body stayed upright?

Bringing the body to the inside of the turn, the way racers do, is “lean in”. We borrow these terms to explain how the equipment, the body axis and the centre of gravity relate to each other.

In the manual, lean out is called 反弓, a “reverse bow”. Take the bicycle again: the bike tilts, but the rider does not fall over with it, and keeps balance by adjusting posture instead.

To keep your balance and make the turn you want, you need lean and lean-out, combined with shifting your centre of gravity forward and back and side to side.

See original graphic 2/4 (in Chinese)

Deeper and faster: what makes it hard?

Teacher

And of course there are up-and-down movements too. These are all fundamentals from the manual — techniques you need to use flexibly while riding.

The events at the technical riding championships change roughly every two years. The riding that is in fashion, and the techniques people are interested in, are shaped by those events too.

We have built events around movements such as lean and lean-out, and we have also set different themes, “deeper, faster” for example.

A shallower, more open turn is faster; a turn pulled in deep and more closed slows you down.

But the theme was “deeper, faster”. So you had to strengthen your edging while cutting, as far as possible, the speed the turn takes off you.

In other words, make a deeper turn and still hold on to as much speed as you can through edging and pressure. That is a very demanding task.

At the time, the fashion in Europe was to lean the body far into the turn, close to the snow or even touching it. That is probably not quite the same as the leaning in people do today.

As I recall, the ground-hugging carving of that era (Eurocarve, Vitelli) looked like letting your body slide across the surface of the snow.

From there it gradually developed into today’s riding: even when the turn is deeper and the forces are bigger, you can keep your centre of gravity in a position that supports those forces.

See original graphic 3/4 (in Chinese)

Carving is not enough: you also need to skid on purpose

Teacher

Carving keeps developing. But all along that development, the technique of making the board skid on purpose to bring the speed down has been indispensable.

People who are new to snowboarding often think an advanced rider has to be able to carve.

Of course an advanced rider should be able to carve. But they also need to control skidding on purpose. It is a technique you use all over the mountain.

To enjoy the whole mountain, you need carving and you need skidding. So you have to have every kind of technique.

Skidded turns are easier to pick up naturally through practice. Early on, the edge angle is usually small and the body leans into the turn less, so the board skids easily and balance is easier to keep.

For instructors, though, learning only to carve without understanding these principles is not, in our view, enough to become an instructor.

That is why the instructor certification exams include skidded turns too: we want instructors to understand first how these techniques work.

See original graphic 4/4 (in Chinese)

The original post copy

Part 2 | Threads post

The copy as it appears in the original document, translated without edits.

Interviews with JSBA founding veterans, Vol. 2: snowboarding’s lean-out turns out to have something to do with how a motorcycle corners?

How did snowboarding develop from its basic movements into carving?

Compared with the riding systems of other countries, the JSBA riding style squeezes physics to the limit.

You must be wondering how the people who created this system judge the quality of someone’s riding.

Further reading

The Chinese–Japanese snowboard glossary (in Chinese) covers the technical terms in this post. To take the practice back onto the snow, see SnowWind’s courses.