What are your riding goals? Is anything holding you back?
That’s crazy about the airbag, @LMB!
*I freak out at high speed on steeps. By trying to keep my speed in check and stay in control I’m setting off too much sloughing.
You can work on this. Practice making shorter, more aggressive turns. Initiate quickly with your upper body and steer strongly with your lower body. One should follow the other in quick succession (almost simultaneously). You can practice this anywhere (it doesn’t need to be steep, work your way up to steep). Make the shortest turns possible while keeping your turns consistent and complete. You’re right, repetition here will help!
*the steeper it gets the less likely I am to be perpendicular to the slope, which puts me in the back seat. Dumb. I need to overcome that mental voice screaming ‘you’re going to die’ and just commit to the line.
Pretend you’re bouncing a basketball with your front hand. Practice this. It forces you to get your weight forward. Also, consciously dip your front shoulder down the slope.
*all of the above makes executing a toe side turn hard freaking work!
In the photo of you making a toeside turn, you can visually see you are counter-rotated. See how your upper body is open towards the slope instead of being turned into the turn (and not aligned with what your snowboard/lower body is doing)? That mixed signal runs all the way down to the snowboard. You can see your open upper body is twisting the hips, causing you to lean back.
Try to rotate your upper body into the turn to keep your entire body consistent with where you want your snowboard to go. More likely than not, you did the right things to initiate the turn; the key is holding that position throughout the entire turn until completion. If you’re opening back towards the slope, that means you’re ready to make the next turn. Does that make sense?
That said, when riding pow you obviously need to keep the nose up. This doesn’t mean you “lean” back. It’s more a “shift” of your hips towards the tail. Your upper body shouldn’t be leaning back (upper body stays perpendicular to the board).
*part of my mental barrier to being more aggressive over the front foot in those conditions comes from going nose in and over the handlebars a few times. The spinal compression from a scorpion fall in those conditions is not fun. Neither is setting off the airbag. So caution translates to bad form.
You need to convince yourself that riding with proper technique and more aggressively, is actually safer. It needs to be your mentality. It’s completely true as well. If you’re not aggressive with the terrain, the terrain will be aggressive with you. Related: speed is your friend (it encourages better technique and gives you stability).
Let me know if have any questions.
Thank you Jez!
Everything you said made perfect sense. And yes! I have heard most of it before, but not summarised all together in response to my statement of issues.
Legend.
I’ve got some stuff to work on 