How to Snowboard Big Lines: 4 Keys to Pushing Your Riding (Used by Professional Coaches)
Snowboarding big terrain is terrifying.
We ride a piece of plastic down mountains specifically choosing terrain to make it harder. Every bump and obstacle is trying its best to end our day.
That’s what makes it so much fun!
If you’re anything like me, the best part about snowboarding is the feeling of conquering something that scares me. The worst part is crashing.
In this guide we look at 4 steps professional coaches use to help their students progress safely on their snowboards, while riding the hardest terrain they’ve ever ridden. Skills that allow them to evaluate the risk and decide when to go and when to walk away.
How to Survive Snowboarding Big Lines: 4 Keys to Pushing Your Riding
Does it go? How to analyze a feature and evaluate the risks.
Progression. The steps we have taken leading up to this point.
Do we have the skills to ride it? Is your skill set and the challenge level compatible?
Risk vs Reward. Is it worth riding today?
As a coach, progressing the riding of athletes and hobbyist snowboarders of all ability levels, risk management is at the forefront of every decision we make. Lets look at some key factors to focus on to help you push your limits without breaking yourself:
1. Does it go? How to analyze a feature and evaluate the risks.
First step to any new challenge is to take a step back and look at what we are planning to ride. For most of us, when we get scared we tend to do all the things we know we shouldn’t. We forget all that we planned to do, get tense and lean away from the danger.
On a board, this is no good.
Before these things happen we want to make sure we have a clear picture of what the feature looks like, and what our exit strategy is should things go wrong.
The key areas to focus on are:
The Approach - Where can I enter? What edge? How fast? Point of commitment? Conditions leading up to the feature?
The Feature - Where do I have to turn? When do I need to go straight? What are the crux points?
The Exit - Where do we want to end up? How much space do we have to slow down? Conditions of the exit? Any hazards?
This is a lot, but in reality it happens quickly and boils down to:
Does the feature work?
Can I ride it in control?
Do I know my exit?
2. Progression The steps we have taken leading up to this point.
We all have that friend. The one who invited us to join them in their favourite hobby, took us to the top of the mountain on borrowed equipment and said “follow me”. Seconds later we’re standing there alone, shitting our pants, wondering how we ended up here.
Progression is key at every level from beginners to world class athletes. There is no substitute for building on top of a previously developed skill set. The jumps may be big, we may even skip some steps, but we’re always adding to something we’ve done before.
Are we ready to ride this? Using a bit of self analysis, think back to previous challenges, did we ride them successfully? More than this, did we feel like we wanted more. More height. More speed. Steeper. Have we shown ourselves that the challenge that came before this, is one we truly conquered.
Ticking features off a list, once and done, is a great way to get yourself into an unrecoverable situation with huge consequences.
3. Do we have the skills to ride it? Is your skill set and the challenge level compatible?
Looking at everything we have assessed thus far, we can start to see where the challenges are going to be. Each one is going to require a specific move or skills to execute successfully.
Having a good understanding of our current skillset and where we sit within our own progression is the key to determining if;
what we know we can do, and what we need to do, line up.
Thinking about our strengths and weaknesses on the snowboard can help us overlay our skillset with the challenges we will likely face.
Coming from snowboarding and biking first and picking up skiing later in life, I have often found myself standing at the top of a mountain looking down at the line I am planning to ski. I know exactly what I need to do, but don’t know if I actually have the skills yet to do it.
This is one of the big challenges that comes from learning something quickly. We often find our confidence growing and with that, speed and challenge level. Which is awesome, until something goes wrong and we have no idea what to do to recover.
Confidence and skill go hand in hand. They move in balance, often passing each other for the lead, but always closely followed by the other.
4. Risk vs. Reward. Is it worth riding today?
Snowboarding is inherently stupid. We fly down mountains, trusting our brain and our body to work with the speed and precision required to keep us alive. We constantly make it harder as it becomes easy. We spend our entire snowboarding lives increasing the risk to seek a little (or a lot) more of the rush of adrenaline.
As a coach, risk vs reward is the basis of almost every decision we make. More specifically, the potential of failure and the consequence should failure occur. Everything we have talked about so far comes down to this relationship.
What is the outcome should something go wrong?
What is the likelihood of that happening?
We all have our own levels of risk we are comfortable with. Our comfort for where we sit on this scale will be different.
To be unaware of the scale at all, is reckless.
This seems like a lot, but really it is just the beginning. Learning how to manage risk in a mountain environment has some fantastic parallels to risk management in every day life.
Our ability to make quick decisions that have profound impact on our own wellbeing.
A process for comparing outcomes and pathways to achieve them.
Building self analysis skills that allow us to see where we fit in relation to the challenges we’re facing.
Using a process like this puts us in a much better position for success. It’s what keeps us safely progressing. It’s the number one reason why getting a lesson in anything you’re passionate about from snowboarding, skiing and mountain biking to cooking or driving a car, is some of the best money you can spend on your hobby.
Let the the experience of a qualified coach do this for you, trust in knowing that all of this has been taken care of leaving you to focus on what matters; how much fun snowboarding really is!