Snowboarding Basics Illustrated for Beginners

The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics brought a renewed awareness of winter sports in China, and snowboarding, which originated in the mid-1960s in the United States, is closely linked to skateboarding and surfing. Many beginners have questions about snowboarding. So, what are the basic snowboarding skills?

Straight Line Skiing

First is straight line skiing, which may seem simple, but many beginners stumble when trying it, sometimes tilting sideways, sometimes flipping forward or backward. Next, we’ll analyze the most basic skill of body balance in straight line skiing.

Taking the example of maintaining balance when standing, everyone understands or can intuitively feel that a person can only maintain balance when the projection of the center of gravity on the plane is exactly within the corresponding range of the soles of the feet. Therefore, one of the most important and obvious factors in maintaining balance is to avoid excessive tilting of the body. During skiing on snow, due to the very small frictional resistance, when our body is disturbed and becomes no longer upright, it is very easy to lose control and cause the body to tilt at a large angle, ultimately leading to a fall. In order to better master the balance of the body while skiing forward, we need to slightly tilt the body forward so that the center is closer to the front foot, which can effectively reduce the risk of falls or rollovers.

Braking

Next is braking, which also becomes a technical skill on a smooth and sloped track. Braking, obviously, is to increase the resistance encountered during movement. Going back to the discussion of resistance when walking on snow, we know that to increase the resistance encountered when moving on snow, we need to exert a greater pressure on the snow, causing it to deform significantly. In snowboarding, braking is achieved by turning the snowboard sideways and slightly lifting it up, reducing its contact area with the snow. One important issue that cannot be ignored in this process is body balance, because this process requires the athlete to actively tilt the body and snowboard appropriately, so if the amplitude is not controlled properly, it is easy to cause accidents such as falling down.

Turning

In introductory skills, the most difficult one is turning. Those who have practiced skateboarding may be more familiar. In snowboarding, to achieve turning, the toes and heels need to cooperate and adjust the strength. Simply put, to turn in that direction, slightly tilt in that direction. The underlying physical principle is that when the human body tilts to one side, due to the fact that the human body itself has a certain speed of movement, a part of the gravitational force is then used as the centripetal force for the human body’s rotation, allowing the human body to rotate around a certain axis to achieve turning. The relationship between the centripetal force provided by the gravitational force component and the radius of rotation can be described by a simple formula:

If the angle of inclination is larger or the speed of movement is smaller, it can be seen from the above formula that the radius of rotation will be very small. In this case, the athlete will rotate around a very small circle, which can easily lead to body imbalance. Therefore, in order to better achieve turning, a certain forward speed is required and the degree of body inclination needs to be controlled, and the balance of the body needs to be grasped.