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Ah a fellow softbooter. Just read carefully what the guys above said. I've been in your position a few years ago and learnt a lot from these guys and from the extremecarving website. Most of these techniques can be used with softboots, but of course there are limitations. Especially body rotation into the turn requires a lot of thoughts and a fair bit of trial and errors before being understood and applied with success in the context of duck stance. In order to save you some time, I would say the first thing you really need to understand is that good edge hold is created first and foremost by tipping the board high on the edge. For both feets, so carefull with unintended torsional moves. And on your heelside, let your spoilers help you by avoiding the soft-as-noodle ones and by setting them with a good bit of foremward lean. Then you'll be able to try to let your edges do the turning work and start to develop edge awareness. If I remember correctly, there was on this very website a series of article called "the norm" or something to that line. That has been a great help for me in the past as it was organized in a very progressive way. Sure the more you go into advanced hardbooting technique the harder it will be to adapt them to duck stance, but by then you should already be able to draw very fine lines on average slopes and good snow. Just be prepared to spend a good amount of time perfecting your turns, but the good news is progresses will come at a pretty steady pace and will come until you stop trying to improve.

Ah the endless style vs technique debate... I am of the already expressed opinion that technique is a set of basic moves we put together to achieve a goal, which can be for instance transitionning from one edge to the other and running the turn without skidding. Style would be IMVHO a mix of the choices we make in what order and how much we apply these components, and a set of not strictly necessary moves or postures we add to the basic technique. In that sense style can interfere with technique by requiring or allowing to slightly modify the choice, order and amplitude of technique components to achieve a same goal. And thats fine if you seek maximum enjoyment instead of maximum efficiency or performance. About the teaching governing body, it was even worst in France I believe. Even having the write to teach professionally until very recently required you do "technical test"... on skis.

Depends what you're talking about. Yes by nature, carving is avoiding slippage. And yes you can't really call yourself a carver until you can link quite consitently carved turns, start to finish. BUT, being a carver doesn't mandatorilly mean you are exclusivelly a carver. Just to avoid a name who is a user there and purposefully choosing another exemple, I have no problem calling Dylan Gamache a competent carver. Yet the fact his riding style includes several other aspects, some of which featuring "slipping" doesn't turn him into a "non carver". Snowboarding is supposed to be fun. If you have fun carving then fine. If you have fun slipping, then that's fine too. If you have fun doing both, guess what? Still fine.

Wow. Congrats Ryan on these progresses! I will be of absolutely no help, but would like to mention I am really interested in any comments or tips that might help to lay down heelside carves with duck stances. I already know about the heelside bootout problem, cause I have had it scrutinized specifically and confirmed by my wife during one of my last sessions. I also already know about the importance of keeping in check the back knee position (specific to duck stance, especially sensible with torsionnally playfull boards) that isn't mentionned explicitely yet in any softboot carving video. I am just not yet able to do any better than either a sitted down carve like the ones in the few mounths old vids of Ryan or an extended-body-high-inclination turn but still quite far from the snow (only with my slightly wider board - can't do that with the one having the heelcup boot-out problem). I recently tried with more spoiler canting, and that seemed to help, but that was on a session with my daughter who is just starting to ride average slopes, so I didn't really had an occasion to really try hard. Still working on it, and excited about the learning curve despite my age. Anyway if some other duck stancers visit this forum, let me just say this: working on this might not guarantee instant success, but it will definitely improve your heelside carving faster than just accepting the generally accepted pseudo-truth that real carving requires positive back foot angle. As a side note: thanks Ryan for helping me realize progresses still can be done in that department. Edit: Nils comment about the sidecut radius is right. My board with 10m radius is hands down my easiest carving board. Anyway she has 2 problems for me: - 252mm waist width gives boot-out even with 270mm boots. - it is a 10mm pintail/20mm setback board with a flex patern designed to provide stability and no pop. My favourite riding style when I'm not splitboarding or riding natural terrain is a (really) dumbed down version of what Ryan does and that board simply doesn't do it for me in the flatland tricks department. The Swoard Dual 163 is a bit better for that (surprising, he? Someone might someday choose a swoard for its flatland habilities, who would have known), but I have not yet made the move to purchase one, and honnestly would probably search more for something else with a bit more pop, a tad more width, and in a shorter size with maybe bigger tips (In my experience the effective edge length isn't that critical a parameter providing the sidecut and flex are right). 2nd edit after more carefull reading of what has been said previously (shame on me, I should know carefull reading is a prerequisite for answering): Ryan, the only suggestion I could make to you is to try a slight compromise in the binding setup: Maybe your board is torsionnally stiff enough to not notice, but on mines, I think I tend to loose the edge earlier under the back foot when using -12 or more angles. Still I do a lot of buttering stuff and ride switch very often. My compromise is +18 -9. I've found out the the back knee position is a lot less of a problem with -9 than with -15. Sure my heelside switch carving suffer from the +18, but I can assure you my buttering doesn't. Anyway that's just me and maybe it's even just in my head so I can't be sure it even really applies to me. Your call entirely, that was just an humble suggestion.

A skier friend to my wife, after having a little discussion about wether or not we should make another run on the freshly groomed super fresh snow carving slope or go enjoy some of the one foot powder available aplenty: "I don't understand why your husband wants so badly to go in the powder right now. Judging by the turns he made through the whole run, it must be hard to experience as much pleasure in powder." Mind you, he's a skier so can't understand what it's like to float other one foot of freshy, but coming from someone I rate as a good carver, I took it as some sort of compliment...:) But considering what some of you can do, it also made me want to redirect him to real carving video material rather than watching me trying to emulate what you do on a setup more suited to powder cruising.

I can only speek for myself, and even if I love carving, I'm still interested in every aspect of snowboarding or even some other "action" sports where the carve is an art that has recently been shadowed by "tricks". Typically, I'm pretty much disapointed by the place reserved in these sports publications to nice looking curves, and that's why I go to bomber from time to time, but not to the point I would suscribe to a strictly-hardboot-carving-on-corduroy magazine. What I'm saying is that I would certainly suscribe to a quality annual publication centered on the art of drawing nice curves, but probably not to one only speeking about hardboots. I think there is room for such a publication, hardbooting centered, but having regularly some articles about people who love making powerfull turns (and I'm not speeking of throwing your tail against a bunch of powder to throw some spray, I mean real turns) with their snowboards - be it hardbooted, softbooted, noboarding, or even from time to time in other sports would be really appealling. Imagine this: you center the mag on snowboard carving, mainly hardbooting but keeping an open mind about softboot carving specific equiment and riding technique, and putting a stack of interviews of characters, asking them specifically to speek about drawing curves if they are not mainly known as hardbooters. I'm sure Taylor Knox (surfing), Kainoa McGee (DK bodyboarding), or even Xavier Delerue or Jeremy Jones (you may know that those two have been more than capable alpine riders in the past) would have interesting things to say about putting it on the rail. It would also be fun to ask alpine competitors how they snowboard when they are not competing or training specifically. I'm pretty sure this would reach an audience outside the current hardboot world (me included) and as a consequence introduce more people to the sport.

Disclaimer: soft-boot related, please ignore if not interested. I made a big leap forward a few seasons ago when I took time to gather information from people who know how to carve (from here and from EC forums) and to try, tweek and translate this knowledge in the softboot context. The tweeking part is the hard one as not everything works the same with different angles and different tools, but better understanding how a carve works certainly helps a lot. Thanks a lot everyone other here, even if you did not intend to help softbooters make not-so-bad-looking turns, you helped me a lot. Maybe I'm delluding myself, but I believe in the power of trying to understand what happens and finding your own solution after gathering ideas from different people. So I guess I'll keep lurking here from time to time. Back to silent mode.

Can you elaborate on how "putting too much force through at the wrong time" leads to chatter? I would really like to learn about that as I am myself a big fan of all sorts of experimentation in turns. I currently believe that the turn radius, and even the fact you hold the edge or not is the result of a complexe equation between your speed, the pitch of the slope, pressure and angulation you apply under each foot. My guess is there is some range of torsion (=difference of angulation between the front foot and the back foot) that combined to different scenarios of weight distribution, pitch and moment of the turn where you can both hold the edge and change the turn radius. Although too much torsional input can result in having the front part of the board gripping and the back part sliding, which results in pivoting = loosing the carve or the back part being too much active, resulting in a wider carve or in chatter. I also suspect "correct" torsionnal input with too much pressure (high speed, high angulation) on a stiff board with a tight sidecut radius can also result in chattering and I attribute this to the edge never being engaged on its full length, letting the board resonate without the dampening effect a longer radius would have when the center of the board contacts the snow. Anyway, this is based on pure speculation + some experimentations with boards that are not your typicall carving sticks, and stances many of you don't even consider ridable. So I would like to learn what alpine riders think about these machanics (if applyable, I think a narrow stance with steep forward angles give more importance to general board angulation and flex than torsional inputs). So what you think about this?

Well, to my understanding, surfing = riding a WAVE. Unless you roughly estimate an avalanche = a wave of snow ... and you're stupid enough to try (and claim) to ride an avalanche, you do not surf snow. And you should realize, surfing a wave strapped to a board (tow in) is still surfing. Bad form of it if you ask me, but still surfing.

Sorry guys to up this somewhat painfull topic. I just have a few things to discuss and I think they haven't been covered yet. Disclaimer: I am a softbooter, but I realize my opinion may not be that relevant in most of the discussions on this forum. I'll try to refrain posting too much useless material. About going somewhere else: I am on several softboots (they say "snowboarding" but still) forums. Even some kind of moderator in a french one. If I want to learn about carving in general and how to improve my technique, I'll still go to carving specific sites. You don't even realize how irrelevant 99% of the answers are about carving in the softboots forums. At some point, you got to seek advices from people in the know. I think I can adapt the techniques mentionned on carving sites or choose what applies and what doesn't apply with my equipment/stance. The specific case of extremecarving.com must be covered: They ARE inclusive with softbooters, but they are not inclusive with any other technique apart from there "EC technique". Even if I learnt a lot from them, I feel other ideas can be tried picking from here (appreciated a lot the "Norm" articles, even if it has to be tweaked a lot in order to fit with my stance angles). Basically, I'm here because I feel I can learn a lot from some people here. Does this mean I will convert to hardboots? Maybe not. Will I try to convert you to softboot? Don't think I'm stupid enough. I'm with softboots for other reason than carving. Still I want to carve with my setup and I'll seek ideas where they are more likely to be. If I have the feeling my opinion may be somewhat remotely relevant, I'll express it, but I believe it won't be really often. It could change if a softboot carving subforum appears and talk about this is welcome. Just hope there won't have any flamewar between forward stances and duck stances (realize that: even with the same gear, this difference implies a totally different carving technique). Sorry for the noise. Back to silence.

I wish I had the opportunity to test these soft boots carving boards. Here are some conclusions I came to using various standard freeride/freestyle boards. They may be not relevant as I'm only talking about freeride/freecarve purpose, not BX competition, and I lack experience with the high end carving boards. In theory, you can carve hard any sidecut/flex combination but you have to consider the height of the middle of the board compared to the tips at any given angle (if laying hard is the goal, consider mainly the high angles). Long sidecut radius with solid flex tend to keep a long decambered radius once on edge. Hence a long turn radius and the board is hard to overpower into a short carved turn: you either carve large turns or slide. Short sidecut radius with mellow flex is not a super good idea: you will overpower the board constantly, meaning if you carve a hard turn, the radius of it will be really tight (exemple: I think when I try to lay one on my Salomon Prospect which is 8,4m SCR and really soft flex, I turn at about a 3m radius, which makes it hard to transition into the next turn without washing out). This is only possible with large stance because a tight one will cause the middle of the board being fully engaged, reducing the pressure on the tips and as a consequence, their efficiency. Short sidecut with solid flex: I like quite well it on soft snow, but not that much on ice: only the tips are effectively griping the ice/hard packed snow during a carve with some angle. So the board tends to chatter/rebond. Case in point for me: my old Salomon Era 2004 (8m SCR with solid flex and torsion reinforcements in the tips.) Long sidecut with soft flex: For some reason, I think this is really versatile: The pressure is distributed other all the effective edge, you can let the gravity help your turns, but still, you are able to overpower the sidecut to tighten a turn, be it by dynamically loading the entire board or by focusing on the back foot pressure. Something else to consider with soft boots setups is the torsional flex: Between the feet and the tips, it's a no brainer: the harder it is, the better the tips will grip, which is always usefull for carving. But between the feets, you want to be able to use some twist when needed (for sliding a turn on demand, quick fixing on edge pressure repartition during a carve, etc...) but not too much otherwise you will have parasital reactions potentially leading to cause unvolontary slides in the middle of a carved turn. Hope this makes sense. Please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.