Bad Idea.

[cb200]

I've been thinking about the whole sym vs. asym thing in the back of my mind for a bit.

A recent post brought an old idea back up and I thought I would throw this out into the public domain for some other mind to chew on.

When I changed from asym boards to sym boards my riding technique changed to a more forward facing aggressive style. The old asymmetric boards were based on a toe to heel dominant riding style the progression to a symmetrical board has led to a more symmetrical riding style.

Looking at the placement of my hips as turn both sides I notice that although my upper body was more symmetrical my hips are still at an angle across the board due to binding angles and having a front and back leg. I have begun to wonder what would happen if my sidecuts were asym not so the sidecut was shifted the oldschool way but actually opposite, so that my dropped hip would be in the center of the sidecut.

I have included a pic of a boarder dropping his hips in angulation in a racecourse it's not me just something I had on hand to use as an example of the body position. Anyway this is purely theoretical so if you decided to mount up you friends old pj backwards get locked into a carve and fire off into the woods, sorry I probably didn't think it through.

[Jack M]

give it a try and get back to us. But I'd say the guy in the picture is a little too far back, and too bent over.

[Derf]

In the early/mid 90s, I thought asym was a bad idea. When I was riding, I noticed I was pressuring the rear toes on toeside and front heel on heel side, making the weight shifting centered and not offset like on an asym board. When symmetrical boards came back in fashion, i said "finally"!.

[ajcannon]

Here's my take on the asym/sym debate: If you think of the body as a "point mass" (centered approximately at the rider's waist). The inward "centripetal" force on the rider acts through that point mass. Isn't the equation F=mv^2/R where v is the velocity, R is the turn radius, and m is the mass of the rider. In other words... if you combine all of the force that is applied to the edge of the board...the total "resultant" force must act directly through the rider's CG otherwise the rider will not be in equilibrium.

So the rider's feet position doen't matter, they simply transfer the forces through them no matter where they are placed.

So.. the location of the feet, heels, toes, etc doesn't matter it is the position of the rider's body CG that matters.

An anology to consider is a car going around a turn, if the car is designed correctly the vehicle CG will be directly between the front and rear axle resulting in equal lateral cornering forces on the front and rear axles (analagous to an equal distribution of force along the board edge - when the rider's CG is centered on the boards sidecut length).

So the question to ask yourself is...does the fore/aft position of your body's CG differ from your toeside to your heelside turns?

I would say that mine doesn't, but maybe if I had an asym board it would naturally do so becasue it would "feel right".

I think that is what riding is all about...positioning your body over the board to produce the desired pressure distribution on the edge.

Wow that really sounds lame, but if you really break it down it is that simple right? The only "control" we have over the board is the placement of our body over it (and I suppose we can roll the board with our ankles a bit - but I think that is a much smaller factor).

Damn engineers have to take the fun out of everything...Sorry.

[JJFluff]

I agree totally with ajcannon, The body has everything to do with the turn. Everything else is a reaction to where the body mass, or more importantly-center of gravity- is placed in the initiation of the turn. Everyone who believes that the shins begin a turn, have been misleaded from the beginning. Body acts like a lever in a turn. The longer the lever- the easier the turn. Thanks to gravity acting on us in a turn the correct postion of the body is always directly over the top of the board. Everything working together as one.