SunSurfer

https://youtu.be/GiONqn9R4N0 Both on the same course. Kosir at 00:28 Wild at 01:34 Look for the line of the shoulders and arms, in particular on the heelside turns. The contrast is particularly marked for these two. (Nevin Galmarini is another with a strong heel & toe style. He comments in one of his YouTube videos about how heel and toeside turns are quite different for him. Wild rode with this style at Sochi, both in slalom & GS. (embedding not permitted by YouTube) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bI-FhmBqy9c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDilQWhZxfk His early coach, Monique Pelletier, was teaching him this style, her style, as an 11 yr-old. She is an ex-USA team World Cup racer - but on skis. I suspect that our chosen style will often reflect the route we came to alpine snowboarding. The softbooters will more often be heel & toe. The ex-skiers will more often be out of the sides of their boots. Both styles work, but there are distinct differences in how to setup the boots (particularly flex) & bindings to suit the chosen style. Advice given for one style won't necessarily work for the other style. Understanding which style you ride is crucial for making progress.

Thanks for the thoughtful and thought provoking answer. The analogy to weightlifters is interesting. For riders who weight their edge "heel and toe" the stance for the "clean" part of a clean and jerk is appropriate. For riders who ride out of the sides of their boots, the lunge position used in the final part of the jerk is a more appropriate illustration. To see the difference in rider style in modern racers, compare Vic Wild and Zan Kosir. Kosir is a heel and toe rider, Wild rides out of the sides of his boots, with the difference most obvious on their heelside turns. Jim Callen, from all the videos of him I've seen, is a heel and toe rider.

Jim, I'd be fascinated to read a reasoned philosophy of binding and stance set-up. I've read Jack Michaud's tech piece on Bomber but ultimately been unsatisfied by the reasoning.

From your post you've begun at a point that is halfway through the process. Unless the foundations of your stance are straight and sound the rest will be problematic. Begin with your boots. The soles should be flat on the floor when your legs & feet are straight below your hips. This is about the same distance apart as your feet would be if you were on skis and gliding straight down the fall line on a beginner slope. You will probably need to adjust the boot cuff canting to achieve this. Now measure the distance apart the midline of your boots are in that same position. Take up the position and measure it a number of times, average the results. Now set your TD3 bindings, centred on the inserts on your board, at twice that boot centre line distance. Set your front 3 degree cant disc at 60 degrees and the binding plate at 60 degrees. Your front foot needs no canting. The body geometry reason for this I've set out in my last post in the Cant and Lift thread started recently by McCarver. Set your rear cant disc at 65 degrees and the binding plate to 49 degrees. This will give you the appropriate inward cant for your rear foot. This is the process I've used for myself, adjusted for your preferred stance angles.

Unlikely to see snowboarders with upper body motion like TL until they move their centre of mass around like he does. GS skiers clearly weight their edges by alternating weight from front heel and rear toe, just like the mainstream snowboarder. ;-) Seriously now, contrast the upper body position and motion of Vic Wild and Zan Kosir, both very good current racers. Wild keeps his body facing down the fall line both heel and toeside. On Kosir's heelside his body very clearly faces across the board and somewhere closer to Wild's position on toeside. Intriguingly, the YouTube video of Vic Wild as an 11yr old shows the style of his formative coach, Monique Pelletier, with the same facing forward, hands forward, shoulders across the board stance that Vic continues to use. Monique is an ex World Cup alpine racer - on skis.

Maybe the rider is not quite as flexible as he once was. :-)

Queequeg, I agree absolutely. Stance is so much more than just stance distance.

Or by slightly increasing the amount of inward canting on the rear foot.

The perception of "width" has a lot to do with the tension your muscles around your hips and knees are under. As the binding angles swing from across the board to along the board, the relative position of pelvis and feet changes, from feet side beside but a long way apart (0 degrees) to one foot in front of the other but now tucked in under the pelvis. I wrote about how this changes the appropriate binding set up in the Cant/ lift thread that was recently discussed.

Stance distance = distance between centre point of each binding. Changing binding angles changes almost everything APART FROM stance distance. In particular it changes the relationship of your hip joints and feet. Thought or actual experiment: TD3 cant discs at your personal stance distance on snowboard. Now rotate binding plates from 0 degrees to 90 degrees. You've just gone from duckfoot to skwal and everywhere in between. Your stance distance has remained unchanged.

https://vimeo.com/10029545 Vimeo not allowing this to be embedded when this post made. Taking settings off the end makes the link work.

I would also recommend working your way through Erik Beckmann's website. His thoughts on boot setup were enormously helpful to me. I've attached to this post my own mental framework for thinking about the interplay between rider size, binding angles, stance and stance distances, heel & toe lift, and canting. It's a kind of unified theory that covers alpine snowboarders, skwallers, "softies" style riders, and monoskiers. Also attached is a spreadsheet for working out binding angles for a given riders size and C-to-C stance distance that should need no canting. I will now put on my asbestos riding suit and wait my learned fellow riders responses. :) 2016-11-26 A framework for hardboot stance and binding setup.pdf Heel Toe Rise Angle Calculator.pdf (I'm working on "Butts, Boots and Bindings", looking at the interplay between edge pressure technique, boot flex and what we want our bindings to do.)

I found these on line and downloaded them. Now I can't find where I found them so I've uploaded them to my YouTube channel. Ten years on some of these faces and riding styles may be a little different. How many of these riders will be at ATC 2017? If you know where the originals are, or were the original author, please post. The original files were called ses_copper_bowl.wmv & ses_pow_ryth.wmv During an enforced layoff due to recent surgery I've been collating all the SES/ATC videos I can find on YouTube into playlists. Other similar playlists exist, for example, on Johnasmo's & FineLineClub's channels.

How do I determine cant and lift? Or did you mean how to decide what canting and lifting to use? That's a different thing all together. There are articles written about how to decide that on the Bomber site, I think with Jack Michaud's name attached. I've got my own theory about what is likely to be a good starting point, based on anatomy & geometry, which I've alluded to above. In the end you want to be in a comfortable balanced stance as you make a straight line glide down a slope, ready and able to move your weight over either edge to initiate turns in either direction. As Pokkis suggests above, unless you're on a stiff full isolation plate, your effective angles of rear heel and front toe lift and inward canting, relative to your hip and knee joints, will increase as the board bends in the turns. The more the board bends the greater the change.

To try and answer McKarver's original questions, and drag this thread back into line. Can I change the cant and toe/heel lift, without using the stackable shims....? You have to use some sort of wedge, but you are not limited to the ones F2 provides. How do I determine lift and cant? I make my own wedges and mesasure the result as illustrated. The Clinometer is one of many free apps that will measure levels/slopes for you. The Intec boot heel sits about 2mm above the Intec base plate. The Intec heel & toe wedges are made of exterior ply and coated in epoxy resin. These have been in use for several seasons now. The Snowpro toe lift wedge is made of HDPE kitchen chopping board. The cant wedges used to flatten out the built in SnowPro canting are made from 1mm thick layers of differing width HDPE to create a wedge shape.

Canadian & US warships and their helicopters helping out in Kaikoura. In the neighbourhood for the NZ navy's 75th anniversary. Troubles bring out your friends. Thanks.

In NZ on Mt Ruapehu we recognise "Turoa powder". It's blue, transparent, and melts in the afternoon. Marginal temperatures will do it for you every time with thaw/refreeze cycled repeatedly. I think ice skates are the only appropriate equipment for it!

To get the boot sole to sit flat on bail binding heel and toe units the answer is that a sloping shim is necessary at both ends. Intec heels are more forgiving because the heel rides on the Intec pins, not the boot heel sole.

For F2s, the absolute height of the higher wedge, for any given degree of lift, varies with sole length. In my experience, and I've tried it, angles of lift greater than 6 degrees start to run into issues related to the angle between the now sloping heel and toe units while the bolts attaching them to the metal base are still perpendicular to the base. That's in part why I, only slightly tongue in cheek, suggested Bomber might want to look at some more cant disc angles including a 9 degree for racers rear feet. I source my extra length bolts etc. from a local stainless steel fastenings company. Almost everything I want is in 304 or 316 grade marine stainless. I then trim the bolts to suitable length so they don't gouge my boards using a hacksaw, then file, then thread die to finish, for the wedge/binding I'm using them in.

I must have heavy F2s. My metal base plate large F2 Intecs are essentially the same weight as my non-sidewinder TD3 Intecs. TD3S are able to produce nuanced lift and cant within the range of the 0, 3 & 6 degree base plates. Their toe and heel pieces stay firmly in place. F2s can be canted and wedged outside that range if you're prepared to fabricate your own parts. Now, if I can just persuade Jim C to produce 4.5 and 9 degree bases for me to have a play with on my TD3S. ;-) I have a theory, linking anatomy & geometry, that predicts if your boot shells are canted so that your boot soles are flat on the floor (with feet same distance apart as if you were straight line gliding on skis), then for binding angles 60 deg +/- 5 most people will need no canting. At lower angles progressively more inward canting will be helpful. At higher angles progressively more outward canting will help comfort. Strangely enough with the Trench Digger bindings setting the 3 or 6 degree cant discs to 60 deg and just rotating the binding plate to the desired angle produces this result as a first approximation which can then be tweaked to the riders final preference. Playing with Scott Firestone's Trench Gear 3D app is the best way to appreciate the fine tuning that the Bomber bindings uniquely provide in today's market.

Corey, get back into your workshop and build your own wedge/cants. Exterior plywood and epoxy/fibreglass or Dynel makes fine and durable heel and toe blocks for F2. My biggest gripe with F2 Intecs is the creep I get in the toe bail position over the course of a day or so's riding.

Thanks John. 2 big quakes about 4 months apart hit Christchurch, The second was the more destructive, and hit just as people thought the aftershocks of the first were dying down. This quake sequence, with its initial quake(s) 30 times more powerful than Chch 2nd quake, is hitting a much less populated part of the country but has blocked the main road and rail route in the northern half of the South Island with lots of very large landslides. Kiwis are also mentally giving thanks for a building code that is well regulated and results in modern buildings that rarely catastrophically fail in a major quake. You may not be able to use them without extensive repair but at least you can walk out rather than come out in a body bag. We're practiced at this, though you don't get used to it. A national insurance scheme for earthquake damage underpins people's personal insurance. Our schools teach what to do in a quake. All part of living in the Shakey Isles on the Pacific Ring of Fire. Or California.....

Watching a hard boot snowboarder carve beautiful turns is a danger to your mental health. Deciding you'd like to learn to do that is even more dangerous to your sanity and your wallet. You'll start hangin' out in places like Bomberonline, where the crazies are. I was once like you. Turn and run now, before the addiction to the edge bites. To follow this path is the way to Maddness.

28 recorded quakes in the last hour alone on official GeoNet app along a network of faults 200-300 km long. It's like the whole northern half of the South Island is creaking and groaning.