I’ve taught snowboarding for more than 15 years. I’m qualified to the top level in the European system, I’ve coached pros, ridden with some ridiculously good snowboarders, worked with gear for years and been lucky enough to ride all over the world.
I thought I’d have snowboarding pretty much figured out by now.
I don’t. But I have figured out that quite a lot of the stuff snowboarders obsess over doesn’t matter nearly as much as they think it does.
And some of the stuff they ignore really does.
Your Powder Technique Probably Isn’t the Problem
Every winter I see people asking how to ride powder, trees, steeps or cruddy snow as if there’s a completely different version of snowboarding for each one.
There are differences, obviously. But a lot of the time the new terrain has just exposed something you were already getting away with.
Powder is brilliant at this.
You can bully a snowboard around on a groomer, kick the back leg out and convince yourself everything is working nicely. Then you get into deep snow and the whole thing falls apart.
That’s not Japan ruining your technique. That’s Japan finding it.
Same with steeps. If your normal method of speed control is to let the board run and then slam it sideways, a steep pitch is going to feel fucking terrifying. It should.
So if someone books a lesson because they can’t ride powder, I don’t necessarily start by teaching them how to ride powder. I want to see them ride first.
Quite often, the interesting bit happens before we ever leave the piste.
Plenty of People Who Ride Blacks Aren’t Very Good Snowboarders
There. I said it.
Trail ratings have somehow become snowboarding’s ranking system. Green, blue, red, black. Keep ticking them off and eventually you’re an expert.
Except I’ve taught people who ride black runs all holiday and aren’t especially good at controlling a snowboard.
They’re good at getting down black runs.
You can sideslip a surprisingly large portion of the mountain. You can also make the same horrible defensive turn hundreds of times and even take it into some fairly serious terrain.
Meanwhile, a genuinely good snowboarder can mess around on an easy groomer changing turn shape, edge angle, speed, pressure and line and show you more actual board control in thirty seconds.
I’m not saying don’t go ride harder stuff. That’s half the fun.
Just don’t confuse where you can get down with how well you can snowboard.
They’re not the same thing.
Most Instructors Talk Too Much
Including me, when I started.
You get qualified, you’ve suddenly got all this technical knowledge and you desperately want to use it.
So someone makes three turns and you’re already thinking about their shoulders, hips, knees, ankles, pressure, timing, edge angle and the weird thing they’re doing with their back hand.
Then you tell them all of it at once.
No wonder they can’t even turn now.
It took me years to get properly comfortable seeing five things I could change and only mentioning one of them.
That’s probably one of the biggest differences between how I taught when I first qualified and how I teach now. I see more. I say less.
Coaching pros really hammered that home. Good riders aren’t mannequins. They have quirks, preferences and ways of moving that aren’t necessarily straight out of an instructor manual. If I changed everything I could technically find fault with, I could easily make them worse.
The trick isn’t spotting faults.
Any half-decent instructor can do that.
It’s knowing which one actually matters.
Gear Doesn’t Matter Until It’s Wrong
I love snowboard gear. I’ve worked with it for years. I own too much of it and I’m certainly not going to tell you that different boards all ride the same.
But snowboarders massively overestimate what buying better gear will do for them.
Going from a completely crap setup to the right setup? Huge.
Going from a good snowboard to this year’s $700 carbon-infused mega-deck because some reviewer gave it 9.7/10? Probably not huge.
Boots are where I see the biggest fuck-ups. Beginners rent boots, pick the nice comfy pair, then spend the day moving their feet around inside them while wondering why the board feels vague.
I’ve seen people trying to fix that with technique.
You can’t.
Same goes for bindings that don’t fit properly, completely inappropriate board sizes, ridiculous stance setups and edges that are absolutely destroyed.
Once your gear fits and is broadly right for you, though, you’re back to snowboarding.
Sorry.
Sometimes You Should Be Scared
This might be the snowboard-instructor advice I dislike most:
Just commit.
Sometimes, sure.
But I’ve watched riders stand above terrain they don’t have the skills to ride while somebody tells them their problem is confidence.
No mate. Their problem is they can’t reliably control their speed.
Fear isn’t always some mental barrier we need to coach out of people. Occasionally it’s your brain doing a pretty solid risk assessment.
If you can’t shape a turn properly on an easy slope, making the slope twice as steep isn’t going to unlock some hidden level of snowboarding. You’ll probably shit yourself, stiffen up and revert to whatever gets you to the bottom.
Then everyone celebrates because you “did a black.”
I’d rather make you better first.
The confidence usually sorts itself out.
The Longer I’ve Taught, the Less I Care About the “Right” Way
Instructor qualifications need systems. Of course they do.
I’ve spent years going through them, and the technical understanding they gave me is a huge part of why I can look at somebody riding and work out what’s happening.
But snowboarding isn’t an instructor exam.
Real people have different bodies, different boards, old injuries, weird habits and completely different ideas about what they actually want from the sport.
If you’re trying to race gates, I might care about something that I couldn’t give a toss about when you’re riding pow. If you want to carve harder, we’ll look at things that don’t matter much if your only ambition is to chase side hits with your mates.
I’ve become much less interested in making somebody look “correct” for the sake of it.
After 15 years, I’m mostly interested in whether the board is doing what you want it to do.
And if it isn’t, why not?
That’s the bit that still makes coaching interesting.
Right. I’m going snowboarding.
