Another "Critique My Riding" Thread

[Wolf]

I've been boarding for several years but been on a slow learning curve, mostly only getting a few hours on Sunday mornings before the little hill crowds up.  And unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to ride with anyone better than me who might give me some tips, nor seen any video of myself.  Until now when a staff member at the ski area got some short clips of me.  The snow was pretty firm but had a fresh groom (see below).  I wasn't aware that I was being caught on video, so wasn't trying to do anything impressive.  Plus, these were fairly early runs where I try to preserve some old legs.  But that's probably good - this is video of me relaxing and not trying to impress anyone.  One more factoid - many of the turns are just little "wiggles" setting up to make a last easy turn toward the lift.  Really, only the last of the three segments has any longer turns.

What I notice is that I don't see much push-pull.  Not sure if I need more?  It's more of a little hop to transition from one carved turn to the next. Plus the usual need to reach more for the outside boot cuff on toe side, and bring outside elbow toward inside knee on heel side.  That seems to suffer when I'm preserving my legs.  Equipment is a Donek FC 167 Secret (bought from jburk this year), bindings mounted somewhat forward of centered on the inserts, old Raichle SB 225 boots, TD3 with zero front and 6 degree lift rear, angles about 50 front and 45 rear.

If anyone has any wisdom to share I'd welcome my first ever critique from riders who are certainly way ahead of me.  We'll have hard, fast, refrozen granular conditions next week after a rainy 50 degree weekend.  But it will have a decent groom on top so it will hold an edge and I can try any suggestions.  New video is highly doubtful though - I need to make some friends :).

(As far as the grooming, it happens that I won a contest at the ski area this year to ride along in the groomer.  That ride-along happened the morning of the video - that's apparently why the staff member even showed me riding the lift.  So without ever touching any controls in the Pistenbully, I'm taking credit for the nice grooming).

Here's a link to the video:

Edit:  Sorry, the link doesn't seem to work anymore.  The person who took the video must have removed it.

Edited March 17, 2019 by Wolf

[lonbordin]

Your around an hour away from the Mount Cleveland crew. Some accomplished carvers there... 

Edited February 23, 2019 by lonbordin
Mount Cleveland

[1xsculler]

What's wrong with your carving on that hill...nothing!  Just keep doing it and progress to steeper slopes where you will be forced to become more aggressive and to lay it down harder and take up more of the hill.  The exact thing I'm working on.  You're doing it more prettier than I am on a slope like that.

$0.02 of advice from a wannabe and it's worth less.

[Gremlin]

I see you rotating your upper body out of your heelside turn. Your back knee looks pinched in behind the front as well.

6° heel and no toe lift seems odd to me. What's your stance width?

Footbeds? Any canting?

Edited February 23, 2019 by Gremlin
Technical Difficulties

[Wolf]

Stance width is about 19inches/48.5cm.  Footbeds are just the standard flat plastic pieces inside the boots, no other footbeds inside the liners.  I'm guilty of pulling the back leg knee inward on heelside.  It seems to help me rotate my body into the turn - i.e., the look of rotating out of the turn that you mentioned feels worse to me if I don't bring that knee in.  That may be wrong - just what seems to work for me.

As far as the 0 and 6 disks, it's always felt better to me to be leaning a little forward.  But once again, that's without anyone advising on the right or wrong way to do things.  And I don't use any canting on the disks or boot cuffs.

Thanks....

[ibrussell]

Don't worry about canting if it feels ok  I run 0 front 6 back.  Read somewhere on here a start for Stance was something like  .65 x inseam.   You look static,   even on easy greens you can practice weight/unweight   As you start your turn put pressure on the front of your boots by sinking your hips and driving your shins to your boots, the harder you drive the more/faster the board should turn. in the middle to 3/4 of the turn you should start to unweight, (standing back up from the crouching, I'll move at least 6" on a green and a foot on blues to drive quicker turns)   The faster you stand up the more unweighing, that's when you change edges and start sinking again. On older camber boards you could catch air in between turns.  Go out make some C turns, J turns and fall so you fine out how to scrub speed and where you should have unweigthed to start a new turn.  But remember have Fun.

[SunSurfer]

Lower body: Agree with @Gremlin , your back knee looks tucked in,  and you seem to be very knock kneed relative to the placement of your feet. Can't tell if that's just your anatomy, or due to boot cuff canting, or TD3 binding cant, or a combination of any/all of those 3.

From your reply above you'd benefit from going through a revision of your boot binding setup, from boot insoles out.
http://beckmannag.com/hardboot-snowboarding/hardboot-binding-configuration
and/or

Your whole body (upper and lower) looks tensed and relatively rigid, not tensed just enough for control and relaxed enough to aborb the bumps. Checking for issues around binding setup and stance distance may help with the lower body and give you a more effective platform for board control and bump suspension. 

You look to be relatively tall, judging by the your height versus board length, and your stance a little short. Measuring from side of sole of heel to midpoint of kneecap seems to be as good an anatomical guide as any for a starting stance length. Myself, I ride a little longer stance, to the top of my kneecap @ 56cm (approx. 22 inches), bindings (62F/58R) centred on the inserts, with equal 6 degrees of toe and heel lift (using UPZ RC10s, not Raichle/Deeluxe) i.e. centred rather than tending forward, and a relatively upright trunk. A modern design board, like your Donek "Secret", shouldn't need to be ridden "forward" to get it to perform.

Your arms are held in front of you and relatively close to your sides. You appear to be using them more to cue the orientation and angulation of your upper body. I find my arms are really useful for helping with fine tuning balance side to side as the board goes edge to edge. Like you, I use the knee on the outside of the turn to help set the edge cleanly, but most of my edge set is now achieved using a sense of tilt/pressure felt through the soles of my feet. The recent video of my own riding below (unlisted on YouTube) is provided as a contrast to your own, to illustrate what I mean in terms of knee and arm, position and movement. It was shot on a very shallow Green slope, similar to the one in your video, so the carves are not super deep, under the chairline at West Buttermilk, on a 2017 Coiler Nirvana. The differences will be most visible when the video is played at reduced speed. 

 

Edited June 28, 2019 by SunSurfer
better stabilised video

[Gremlin]

Get yourself some footbeds. Anything that doesn't hurt and is a more accurate contour is an improvement. I recently forgot the generic pair I was riding at the time and spent two runs confused as to why I was floundering. Upon their replacement, ability was restored. After that I finally caved and sought out a custom set from the eminent @Beckmann AG. One of the best things I have ever done for my riding. The more control you have through the bottom of your foot, the more freely your larger joints can provide support and absorption since they're no longer tied up in the act of keeping the board on edge.

Check out his brief explanation of footbed posting here. I'd also suggest giving his set up guide a read if you haven't.

 

And thanks again for the Cateks. They've proven to be excellent for my needs.

[Wolf]

Thanks guys.  SunSurfer - I'll be silent for a while as I measure and do some more reading on Beckman's pages.  I like your geometric approach.  It's quite intuitive.  And to show everyone what a total amateur you're dealing with, I discovered that there are some footbeds in my liners.  They're older stock liners and I didn't realize there are some separate footbeds in there.  The footbeds feel pretty insubstantial and are marked 26/26.5 so I wonder if they didn't originally come as part of the liners.  My boots and liners have always felt supportive so the footbeds may be dong at least some good.

I do want to apologize again that my video really only shows a couple of useful low speed turns toward the end, so there's not much to look at.

[Beckmann AG]

1 hour ago, Wolf said:

I do want to apologize again that my video really only shows a couple of useful low speed turns toward the end, so there's not much to look at.

There's plenty to look at, thanks for posting.

Based on your riding history/experience, and your recent awareness of how you appear in motion, what do you want to change in your riding, and why?

(Your opening statement reflects more of a desire to meet standards associated with a perception of good riding, than it does with the practical needs of your riding).

 

[Wolf]

1 hour ago, Beckmann AG said:

Based on your riding history/experience, and your recent awareness of how you appear in motion, what do you want to change in your riding, and why?

I feel pretty comfortable under relaxed conditions with good snow, and the skiers here think I'm a snowboard hero because they haven't seen a better carver nor many snowboarders who left age 60 behind a couple of years ago.  I'm not unhappy with the way I appear, but that probably isn't the determining factor.  Like others have posted before, any non-optimal conditions or a steeper run than I'm used to become a challenge.  I spent a day at a larger local ski area (Seven Springs, PA) when the Callens had a one-day event, and the combination of rather lumpy half-frozen granular spring snow and runs far steeper than anything I'd encountered before meant I just skidded around.  It was too big a jump to even attempt to carve turns.  But others had no trouble, so it certainly wasn't "uncarvable" conditions.  So I guess the summary is to look for traits that would limit my ability to progress to more challenging conditions.  

I am limited by what my legs can do.  While I'm active and hike a lot, I don't do any strength training for the legs like I probably should.  So I guess desire #2 is to require the least work out of the leg muscles to ride competently.

By the way, thank you for all of your excellent advice on your web pages and in the forum.  I have to admit that I couldn't get used to the outward cant that you seem to advise (if I understand that right), but your advice in another thread to just see what static stance position feels comfortable in bare liners, bare shells, etc. was what led me to my lift angles without any canting.  With the six degree difference between front and rear lifts, I feel the most equal pressure on my front and back leg quads.

[Wolf]

20 hours ago, lonbordin said:

Your around an hour away from the Mount Cleveland crew. Some accomplished carvers there... 

They must ride at Boston Mills and Brandywine.  I got my season pass there years ago, but am now a Snow Trails regular instead.  It would be nice to connect with those guys sometime.

[philw]

14 hours ago, SunSurfer said:

Lower body: Agree with @Gremlin , your back knee looks tucked in,..

Yes. The OP can clearly ride, but it looks a bit old school. Most people moved on from tucking the back knee in, it's very rare to see it these days. I think more modern [race] stances are more fun and flexible, but it's just my opinion.

14 hours ago, SunSurfer said:

Your arms are held in front of you and relatively close to your sides. You appear to be using them more to cue the orientation and angulation of your upper body. I find my arms are really useful for helping with fine tuning balance side to side as the board goes edge to edge.

 <laughs> the one thing I don't like there is the arms, which look unnatural to me. But it's just opinion and fortunately we can all do what we like - I've no idea what's "correct", and because we don't have huge bureaucratic hard boot snowboard school orthodoxy it's not even defined. 

Watching old snowboard videos reminds me why I try to go for the "gunslinger" position with relatively static arms - back in the day we waved them around like dancers and I perhaps wanted to get away from that. But... this is just a style issue, so long as none of us are waving the things around in an attempt to rotate on the ground (which we're not). I often spent half a run putting my gloves back on: the arms aren't in my opinion required to do anything to ride a board. They will swing a bit of their own accord if you do hard fast short turns, simply because of the mechanics of the system. 

Back on the OP video. I'm not seeing much up/down. As stated it's a relaxed slope so you could just rock from edge to edge, but a little flex of the legs into the turn would be good if it got steeper at least.

Personally I'd be worried about not riding centered - the board is likely to have been designed to be ridden with the bindings centered over the sidecut. If there's a reference stance and you're the correct weight for the board then I'd put it right there. I've never not ridden centered on a piste board.

--
I'm not claiming to know anything, just filling in the time..

 

[lonbordin]

43 minutes ago, Wolf said:

They must ride at Boston Mills and Brandywine.  I got my season pass there years ago, but am now a Snow Trails regular instead.  It would be nice to connect with those guys sometime.

Snow trails is 4.5 hours from me or I'd swing over your way.

[bigwavedave]

Very static, no up & down motion going on, ie, weighting/unweighting. Ankles, knees, hips should be flexing, at least a little. Try flexing up & down as you start out, before your first turn, then time your first turn to coincide with your weight coming down, decambering the board as it goes up on edge. If you can't flex up & down easily standing flat on the board, you might need to change your stance til it feels comfortable. Maybe softer springs in your boots would help?

[Wolf]

I'm thinking of making a few changes in stance as an experiment, but Beckmann might override this.  Since nobody likes the forward stance, I'm positioning the rear binding centered on the inserts, and the front binding 1cm forward of centered.  I know the front binding should really control the stance location, but I want to keep a little forward bias just so I'm not changing too much at once.  The new binding positions also add 1cm to my stance width.  I'm going to tweak my angles to 55 degrees on both bindings.  Doing SunSurfers "stand static in your boots" to get reference stance width told me that I really don't need any duck foot open angle on the rear foot.  One other small change that might help a bit with the appearance of tucking the knee is that I had a little more forward lean on the back boot BTS.  I've now set both boots to be the same.

Now if bending my legs more and moving up and down more were just as simple as an equipment tweak.  But I saw that problem right away when I got the video.  Next week's hard, fast frozen granular should force some more dynamic riding.  Fortunately, I'm a weekday guy now so I have lots of room on the hill.

lonbordin - Google says Perfect North is 4 hours from me, so you should make me come down there!  But that would be hard to do since I can get some real vertical if I drive four hours in the opposite direction.

[AcousticBoarder]

I am in a sililar situation so I don't know how much I can contribute, but I am also recommending custom footbeds. I noticed a huge difference since I got mine and cannot recommend them enough. 

More than that, if you do not feel relaxed/ you are tensed up when carpet carving, something is probably not right; read over @Beckmann AG's guide again. I also found some helpful advice in the following threads which seem like they may benefit you as well:

Good luck and have fun! 

[philw]

14 minutes ago, Wolf said:

... so I'm not changing too much at once. 

... I saw that problem right away when I got the video. ...

First point, absolutely. Personally I have found that changes are relatively easy to feel, and fairly independent, so moving things a little at a time ought to work. You may need to cycle through the settings a few times as they are related (so for example toe and heel lift are affected by boot lean etc).

On the second thing, well depending on where you want to go, you're half way there if you can see what's not quite right.

One thing which worked for me (well I think it worked) was to watch people who ride the way I want to ride, and then visualise looking like that when I'm riding.

[Wolf]

There may a ray of hope here.  The fellow who took the video said this in his email to me:  

• "It looked like you were easing into your morning runs… smart! I saw you later when I walked between buildings… looked like you were carving harder."

So while I think these short clips are a good indication of my general riding style (and areas to work on), maybe I already have the ability to push it a little more.

[lonbordin]

1 hour ago, Wolf said:

lonbordin - Google says Perfect North is 4 hours from me, so you should make me come down there!  But that would be hard to do since I can get some real vertical if I drive four hours in the opposite direction. 

Yeah... The Midwest is large. The other options between us would make us both drive a lot for a little.

Shred and Cuban Carving are a much short(er) trip for you.

[Beckmann AG]

 

If you take a look at the 'thumbnail' for your video, you'll notice both hands to the toeside, haunches well to the inside of the heelside turn, partial rotation toward the toeside, and dissimilar relation of both of your knees with regard to the centerline of the board.

All of which suggest you're 1) 'leverage biased' at the foot level,  2) overbalanced to the heelside edge by way of hip location.

 3) likely weight-biased toward the front foot.

The footage itself doesn't suggest that you're typically 'sitting' to the heelside, rather you're using a rather deft 'squirt' move to rebound the board to each edge, where you latch on as long as possible by 'holding' the rest of your body in a particular posture.

Which means you're not going to be all that versatile when you change the timing of things, or the type of turn from short to longer.

Or when the surface goes from soft/consistent to hard or chopped.

Tension in the body has a way of interfering with edge grip.

 

1 hour ago, Wolf said:

I know the front binding should really control the stance location, but I want to keep a little forward bias just so I'm not changing too much at once. 

If there's one thing you should alter in isolation, it's the forward bias of the bindings, and it will probably be easier and more effective in understanding cause/effect to change that, rather than immediately goofing with the other variables.

A flat front/lifted rear binding setting will, by virtue of geometry, bias your weight to the front of the board.

This will affect tracking stability of the board, and make it more difficult to hold a longer arc on harder snow, particularly on the heelside edge.

E.g., @ 04, and 017, 028.75

Until the board will track easily, there's no point in developing any additional vertical range from the legs, as you won't have a consistent platform to work from, as well as another effect not worth mentioning just yet.

You appear to have relative ease in finding each edge though, (in part by way of lower extremity compliance) so that's working in your favor.

So while your baseline binding configuration will affect weight bias, moving the bindings back gradually should change the rate at which that bias affects board performance. Which is to say, you'll still be somewhat limited in stable arc length, but you should be able to make a longer arc before having to change edges.

Find a 'best possible' with that variable, then start messing with the others.

Edited February 24, 2019 by Beckmann AG

[Wolf]

OK, thanks Beckmann.  I'll work on reducing the forward bias in the stance first.

[Wolf]

Thanks to everyone's comments, I think I found a major flaw (one of many?) in my riding.  I haven't been bending my front leg enough.  Somehow, I developed a style where I'm carving, and linking turns but the back leg is controlling things.  That's why I appear to have the back leg pinched in behind the front, and perhaps why the forward stance seems to work.  I got out yesterday and consciously pushed the front leg to bend more and that seems to give me much control over turn radius and how far I can hold the carve before transitioning to the next turn.  Everything works with my stance centered on the insert pattern too.  It's amazing how something so simple never became evident until I could see myself and get some input from better riders.

[SunSurfer]

If you're anything like me, finding you are making progress in your riding gives a great sense of satisfaction and pleasure. I am enormously grateful to the people who have shot video of me at the various sessions I've been to and then made it available to me. Been trying to pay that debt forward recently.

[Wolf]

Thanks SunSurfer.  Your setup video was quite helpful too.  We're the same height, and I found that my static foot spacing and need for zero canting was essentially the same as yours.  It was only last year that I was able to start to get a significant number of days on the hill, and on uncrowded weekdays.  Now I need to find a weekday buddy to get some more video of me.