Rocker, Paper, Camber - Ro-Sham-Bo for your skills

2009-09-04 02:28:24

Recently Shayboarder solicited my advice on whether or not rocker snowboards would be a boon or a bust for beginner snowboarders. I was honoured to find that she thought my insight was worthy enough to be included in her article discussing the subject -- Rocker Start or a Rocky Start? . This got me thinking a little bit more about it, and with the snowboard season looming, I thought I'd get the coaching juices flowing again and elaborate more on my thoughts about the pros and cons of learning on a rocker board.

Rocker

I've found that rocker means a lot of things to a lot of people. There are two main categories of rocker, or reverse cambered boards: straight rocker such as the banana from Lib Tech, and hybrids such as Lib Tech's C2 and Never Summer's R.C. There are other variations of Rocker as well but I think they all revolve around these same two ideas: either straight up rocker or a mixture of rocker profiles.

Among the advantages of these boards are the lower contact area when initiating turns or pivoting, and improved float on deeper snow. These advantages come at a cost as rocker boards generally have much less pop than standard, cambered, boards. Pop is generally not much concern to the beginner, however, as they are generally more interested in sustaining verticality all the way down the hill than ollieing obstacles. Also, if you've ever tried to teach beginners how to snowboard on a powder day, you'll know the pain involved for both the student and the teacher. So for the beginner, the skill focus will be on pivoting.

Pivoting comes into play when making a dynamic edge change (e.g. going from heel to toe edge while moving down the hill). This also usually involves a brief moment where the nose of the board is pointed straight down the fall line and is often accompanied by an utter look of terror on the student's face (at least the first time). One common mistake at this stage is that the rider, wanting to bleed out some speed, will shift their weight over their back foot. Ironically, this generally has the opposite effect since, when the rider's weight is not centered, it's much more difficult to pivot the snowboard. Rocker snowboards will help mitigate this in two ways: 1) making it easier to initiate the turn in the first place, and 2) making it easier to complete a pivot if their weight is not quite centered. Some might argue that this is encouraging bad habits, however, people do this with regular camber boards as well. They just have to be more adept at it. Either way, it's something that will be corrected as the rider progresses and gains confidence.

Paper

Snowboarding can be an expensive hobby (if it's your life, however, there's no price too high). Beginner's are generally looking to maximise the money-fun ratio when purchasing their equipment. Rocker can definitely be an advantage in this respect. Even though some elements of the experience will be missing when using rocker boards vs. camber boards, few people take up snowboarding in order to become technically perfect riders. After all, it's all about fun.

So the key is that new snowboarders get a snowboard which will yield the most fun for their money. This is where a knowledgeable shop staff is important because, just like it's impossible to know you like pizza until you try pizza, a beginner snowboarder won't know what makes a snowboard fun until they ride it. Even though fun is a subjective thing, a knowledgeable salesperson will at least have a good idea of what works and what doesn't.

Ideally a new snowboarder will try out a few snowboards, through rentals, demos, and/or borrowing from friends, before deciding on what to drop their hard earned money on. This can't always be possible though, as demos are not always available and are often biased toward intermediate to advanced boards, and rentals generally suck (resorts tend to not one to spend a lot of money on equipment that will be abused). Whatever the case, choosing the right board, be it rocker or not, is important before the paper changes hands (cha-ching!).

Camber

In general, by the time a snowboarder reaches the stage where they'll actually achieve maximum board performance, and therefore make full use of their board's geometry, they are probably due for a new snowboard anyway. At that point, they'll also be in a much better position to say whether or not camber is good for them and their style of riding. Until that time whether they ride a board with rocker or with camber will not contribute much, one way or the other, to their overall skill development. The end goal is ultimately to be able to ride all types of snowboards competently, whether they have camber, rocker, no-camber at all, bindings, no bindings, flux-capacitors, no flux- capacitors... you get the idea. Technology does not a better snowboarder make.

Categories: Snowboarding, Pro Log | 0 Comments

Ride confidently and Carry a Big Stick - Hesitation leads to devastation

2009-01-21 09:00:28

It's now twenty one days into 2009 and I've been snowboarding for pretty much every one of them. That riding wasn't all strictly for fun, however, some of it was for business. In that time, Dana and I have been doing some training in the park trying to figure out some techniques to help people develop some freestyle skills. Our home mountain has a rad new pro-park this season and we're offering clinics to hopefully help people step up to it. The tricky part of offering freestyle clinics, however, is being confident that you'll be able to convey those skills to others.

One of the biggest obstacles for new park riders is the intimidation factor (unless you're a fresh grom made out of rubber). The reality is that, unlike snow, falling on metal and wood structures is painful. This alone is enough to cause confident freeriders to be hesitant to try park riding. I often say to people I'm teaching that, by riding more aggressively, you're more in control: hesitation leads to devastation. This philosophy should be adhered to, within reason, whenever your snowboarding. If you're stepping up to something that you're not confident with, then take a step back and come back to it when you are. Occasionally, however, you have to throw caution in the wind in order to make it to the next plateau. This can be done more safely with the assistance of a coach.

One technique we came up with to teach people how to do basic slides on a box is to use a bamboo stick as a guide. We had seen the technique used before by skiers and we wanted to adapt it for our own uses. Two of the advantages of using the bamboo pole is that it allows you, as the coach, to help the rider manage their speed while approaching and riding the box. It also gives the rider a point of focus so that they don't make the common mistake of looking down at their feet once they are on the box. Looking at your feet throws off your center of mass and generally leads to falling.

Realizing that having the stick was useful to help people with their body position on the box gave Dana the idea to use it to help with proper weight transfers when doing board slides. Now it was up to us to figure out techniques on how to do so.

Before I get into describing the techniques, I want to go over a little terminology. There is a lot of confusion out there about the difference between boardslides and lipslides both frontside and backside. The main source of the confusion is that both tricks look the same once the rider is actually on the rail; the key difference is in how the rider got onto the rail in the first place. I'm going to make an attempt at differentiating these two tricks and their variations here (please comment below if you think I'm wrong).

Boardslides involve approaching the obstacle, a box or a rail, and hopping the nose of your board over it, rotating 90 degrees in the process, and landing with it between your feet such that your board is perpendicular to the obstacle. If you are facing the obstacle as you approach it, this will be a frontside boardslide and you will have your back to the landing as you slide. If you have your back to the obstacle as you approach it, this will be a backside boardslide and you will be facing the landing as you slide.

Lipslides involve approaching the obstacle, a box or a rail, and hopping the tail of your board over it, rotating 90 degrees in the process, and landing with it between your feet such that your board is perpendicular to the obstacle. If you are facing the obstacle as you approach it, this will be a frontside lipslide and you will be facing the landing as you slide. If you have your back to the obstacle as you approach it, this will be a backside lipslide and you will have your back to the landing as you slide.

To summarize:

Difference between boardslide and lipslides.

Approach	Sliding	Trick
Facing obstacle	Facing landing	Frontside lipslide
	Back to landing	Frontside boardslide
Back to obstacle	Facing landing	Backside boardslide
	Back to landing	Backside lipslide

When first learning how to do boardslides or lipslides, it's best not to worry about hoping onto the obstacle. Instead it's preferable to find a box or rail that you can just ride onto 50-50 then turn the shoulders appropriately. To avoid confusion, we'll refer to these as lipslides because it's intuitive to think of frontside when facing the landing and backside when not facing the landing.

To get someone to do a frontside lipslide, we have them ride onto the box in a 50-50, then put the bamboo stick in front of them and get them to reach out and grab it with both hands. This will make them turn their shoulders to face the end of the box which will cause their board to rotate into a lipslide. Once they grab a hold of the stick, by holding it on a pivot (i.e. the coach), the rider will continue to pivot their shoulders and ride off the rail switch.

Backside lipslides are a little trickier. Have the rider ride onto the box in a 50-50, then place the bamboo stick behind them and have them reach out and grab it with both hands. This is a bit tricker because the stick must be close enough to the rider to not throw off their centre of balance since they will be sliding away from the stick.

We have had much success using this techniques with many of our friends who are novice to intermediate riders. In many cases, it only took a few tries before they were ready to attempt it without the stick. In some cases they even succeeded on the first try. This will most definitely become a common tactic in our freestyle skills teaching arsenal and may even have its own section in the yet to be written "Mont Cascades Freestyle Skills Coaching Manual." For the time being, however, there's snowboarding to be done so the manual will just have to wait.

Categories: Snowboarding, Pro Log | 2 Comments

Tea Bag Your Top-Sheet - Mont Cascades 2008-12-14

2008-12-14 22:51:30

This weekend was the second for instructor training at Mont Cascades. I was asked to be there to provide my services if necessary. So I rolled my tired body out of bed early on Sunday morning, after a good day of riding the day before, and made my way to Cascades for the appointed meeting time.

I arrived at the lodge shortly after eight o'clock, it was filled with an army of red ski-school jackets. I ran into Josh, the ski-school coordinator, who informed me that I was to be giving the sessions this morning since Dana was nowhere to be found. So I went outside to the meeting point at 9:15 and waited for the snowboarders to show up. There was only one rookie who showed up, he had just turned 14 and was getting prepped for his level one certification. It was looking like I was going to be running through the teaching progression once again this week. That's when Josh came by and said: "There are a number of private lessons booked today so I may need to grab some of your snowboarders for an hour at a time." To which I replied: "Yeah, about that, I seem to be the only certified instructor here today." If Josh was worried, he certainly didn't show it externally.

Fortunately Dana finally made it to the hill, so he could run the rookie training session making me available to teach private lessons throughout the day. A few minutes later, Ryan rolled into Cascades and since there weren't any lessons scheduled for 10AM, we decided to go ride and get him ready for his level two.

The conditions hadn't changed much since Friday night with the exception that it was much warmer and the fresh tracks were fewer and farther between. It was also quite overcast so the lighting was extremely flat making it difficult to see variations in the terrain. This would be an opportunity to test our Jedi mind tricks which allow us to ride without seeing. This is another benefit of being a CASI member, you have a direct line from the "Force" to your central nervous system.

One of the things that Ryan is working on, to bring his riding up to the CASI standard, is angulation. There are two ways to put a snowboard on edge: lean your body into the turn, or bend your knees into the turn. CASI expects that you can do the latter for your level two which is a lot more difficult to do than to understand.

One tactic we use to teach angulation is an exercise called Motorbike Turns. If anyone has ever watched motorcycle grand prix, you've probably noticed how the riders drag their knees on the ground when they corner. For toe-side, angulation, the idea is the same: while making a toe-side turn, you drive the back knee into the snow. This forces you to put the board on edge while keeping your centre of mass over it. This doesn't always work, however, if you also break at the waist which is one of the things that Ryan was doing today. This is when I remembered seeing Step Brothers the night before after getting back from Mont Tremblant. There's a scene in this movie where Brennan, played by Will Farrell, puts his nutsack on Dale's drum kit (as played by John C. Riley). I used this as an analogy to get Ryan to keep his upper body stacked over his board: when doing a toe-side turn, he should try to put his nutsack on his top-sheet. This seemed to help because Ryan was riding more upright for the rest of the day.

We worked on this for a while and checked in with Vince, who was coordinating private lessons on Sunday, to see if he needed us to teach any lessons. Fortunately Jordan and Pat showed up so our services were not going to be needed. This gave Ryan and I more time to work on his level two stuff. We continued riding for a few hours. We were even joined by Tara, Ryan's wife, who was taking her first runs on a brand spanking new Option snowboard.

I kept riding until my quads officially went on strike when I decided to call it a day. Although there were no bluebirds while riding today, an important analogy was uncovered about snowboarding: tea-bag your top-sheet. This will keep your weight stacked over your edge allowing you to power through varying terrain as well as provide for better edge hold in icy conditions. All you instructors out there reading this, please feel free to use this analogy, although you might want to be selective about the age group with whom you do. I'd hate to have to explain to a ten year old what tea-bagging is. In any case, it's a very visual analogy and relates to a hilarious movie which will be helpful in remembering the exercise. This discovery was certainly worth the 8.528 liters of petrol burned and the lactic acid built up in my quad muscles. I'm sure it will also give me a few more chuckles while riding this season. I'll be sure to keep tea bagging my top-sheet.

Categories: Snowboarding, Pro Log, Ride Journal | 0 Comments

Training Days - Mont Cascades 2008-12-06 and 2008-12-07

2008-12-08 19:12:29

This weekend was the first of two training sessions for Mont Cascades ski and snowboard instructors. There are two purposes for these training sessions: to get veteran instructors up to speed on any changes to the teaching philosophy, and to prepare rookie instructors for their certification course. As usual, at least for the snowboard side of things, this seemed to have been put together at the last minute. To deal with the chaos, it was decided that it should be amplified by adding a pizza party in between.

After a good night of riding on Friday night, I was hoping to get a few hours of sleep before heading back up to the hill to prepare for the training weekend when something strange happened. I was half asleep when the familiar ring of my cell phone receiving a text message brought me back to the land of the waking. The message said: "I hope you're not asleep." That was weird because I very nearly was. What made this even weirder was that I didn't recognize either the number or area code. This was oddly similar to the premise of a bad thriller. I put the creepy factor aside, however, and dismissed this message as a scam trying to steal my money (I had been getting those phone calls saying that I won some prize and had to press "1" to claim it thereby allowing the caller to charge a butt-load of money to my account).

Day One

In spite of the thriller movie phone craziness, I woke up early and made my way to Mont Cascades early to ride. On the way, I had to head into town to pick up Yeti who didn't have a ride. We got to the hill and were welcomed by ice covered with a thin layer of snow so the conditions weren't the greatest. There was even a sign at the top of the hill warning us about marginal conditions. But when you're given lemons, you make lemonade. At least the lift was running today.

After a few runs, we ran into Dana who, by all accounts, is the alpha snowboarder at Mont Cascades. Even though this first day was supposed to be a quick primer for the next day's session leaders, and Dana and I were rumored to be on the hook to do the training, as of yet no one had approached us to tell us. Dana decided to get proactive and go talk to the director. As we had suspected, the administration assumed we were to be running the sessions on Sunday morning. Dana would lead the veterans and I was to be training the rookies. Now that it was official, we decided to do a few park laps then call it a day to prepare for the evenings pizza party.

The Pizza Party

For those of you not familiar with the concept of a pizza party, the rules are that the host provides pizza crusts, and the guests bring toppings to garnish said crusts. This was a somewhat of a tradition for Dana while he was teaching in New Zealand a few summers ago. The staff would get together on Thursday, pay day for them, and make pizzas with whatever was left in the refrigerator to make room for fresh groceries on Friday. Given the obvious brilliance of this idea, and that Dana will soon be leaving his current apartment, a pizza party seemed like a good idea. At some point over the course of the evening, however, Dana and I had to plan out our sessions for the next day.

The pizza party was in full swing when my cell phone started to ring. It was the same number from which I had received the strange text message from the night before. My curiosity overpowered my paranoia (I don't even have a million dollars anyway) so I picked it up to discover that it was Shay. Apparently she got my number from a mutual friend in Whistler. I chatted with her for a while but had to let her go since I had to garnish a pizza with bananas.

Several weird but yummy pizzas later, it was time to call it a night. As I was leaving, Dana and I realized we still hadn't prepared our sessions for the morning so we decided we would wing it. It was already nearing 1 AM anyway and we were supposed to be at the hill in seven hours.

Day Two

Training day was looking promising as it was snowing pretty heavily on the drive up. However, I arrived to discover that none of the rookies had shown up for the session. So Dana decided that I would run the veteran session and he would supervise and give me pointers for when I go for my level 3 certification later this year. The ghost problem with the lift decided to manifest itself again, however, and the chair broke down just before we were loaded. So we decided to hike up the last pitch of the main run and no-foot back down. This was followed up by some one-foot descents and other shenanigans under the watchful eyes of ski patrol who were probably muttering about how irresponsible the snowboard school is.

After about fifteen minutes of this, the lift was still not operational so the director decided that we should have the indoor session in the meantime. After a quick overview of what to do if a client gets lost or injured, they finally got the lift working again so we made our way back outdoors to continue the on-snow training. To make it challenging, we decided to do everything switch, including ride the lift (i.e. with the wrong lead foot strapped in). It's a lot more awkward than I expected but it's also a good exercise to do to remind ourselves of what it feels like to be a newbie.

Having gone through the entire progression, providing useful tips and tactics along the way, the group could get back to riding (i.e. the fun stuff). We spent the rest of the day getting as much mileage as we could which is fitting since this is the new philosophy of the ski school: more mileage (or as I like to say it, less talk more rock).

In the end this turned out to be a much more useful training weekend than I had originally anticipated. Two full days on snow are perfect bookends to a pizza party. It allowed me to learn useful stuff like:

• Peanut butter, banana, pineapple and maple syrup are good toppings for a pizza, especially if you top it with ice cream after it has been baked.
• Random telephone calls from Shay are infinitely more pleasant than someone trying to steal your money.
• Riding the lift switch is awkward. Although now I want to try to ride a t-bar switch.
• NoBoarding seems like fun. Now I have to get a NoBoard. Thank you Greg Todds.

Today is to be a recovery day for me. I'm noticing that my legs complain slightly when I walk up stairs (I have to take them one at a time... what the heck?!?) But I'm looking forward to my next on-snow day which shouldn't be far off. In the meantime, I'll be using my recovery time to shop for a NoBoard conversion kit online.

Categories: Snowboarding, Pro Log, Ride Journal | 0 Comments