Turns out, your legs need to be really strong, or you’ll have your hands on the ground too often. If that happens like every minute, your shoulders are not going to be pleased with that. I have a feeling that this short experiment may have caused some minor damage my physiotherapist was unable to detect.
That is true. However, spending one hour is way too much. Maybe something like 20 minutes three times a day for two weeks would be better. That way, the impact stress would be tolerable and necessary muscles would have enough time to grow. Sadly, that sort of thing is fundamentally incompatible with the way vacations and ski resorts work.
I learned the basics of snowboarding in an afternoon. Sure there was lots of falling and aches. Protective gear can help a lot though.
What’s tiring at the beginning is standing up all the time from falling so often. As you fall less often, you don’t need to stand up so often anymore and it becomes less exhausting.
With increasing skill you also need less muscle power to turn and stop.
When skiing/snowboarding you probably spend more time sitting in a chairlift than actually riding down the mountain. Then there’s waiting for friends, waiting in line, breaks for eating. I never measured the time, but you might not even get a full hour of pure skiing during a day on the mountain.
For learning I would recommend to first just go for a weekend and then later the same winter for a week. During the week take one day off for recovery. Some pain and exhaustion will always occur, but that’s just the way it is with any strenuous physical activity.
Best practice for preparing to learn snowboarding is to lie on the ground and then stand up repeatedly.
I never understood that. When snowboarding, you can just rotate to brake, and then you can just sit to take a break if you want. Heck, you can even do the leaf down a whole slope, easily and safely, and it’s still kind of fun.
Meanwhile, skiing requires superhuman leg strength, even if you just want to go slowly, and will twist your legs in gruesome ways when you fall.
If skiing takes a lot of physical work, that’s a sign that your stance is off. You can ski almost anywhere just by shifting your body weight from one foot to the other. Back when I was a ski instructor, my old boss (a ski instructor of multiple decades) used to say that skiing is a “skeletal” sport, not a “muscular”. If you’re working hard it’s likely because there’s something wrong with your stance and you’re subconsciously using your muscles to compensate. The most common specific example of this I saw in my lessons (and had a habit of myself which I’ve been working on for years) was skier’s quads burning out, because they were leaning back (consciously or not), because they lacked confidence (consciously or not).
I’ve come to learn that this advice applies to any physical activity. You can tell a master by their economy of movement, whether it’s snow sports, playing an instrument, martial arts, or tossing haybails. Use weight and momentum, don’t fight it.
My main issue is that the beginner’s stance they teach you is trying to maintain a pie shape to reduce your speed as you go down. The problem is that the skis want to either be parallel, either go fully horizontal. It takes a ton of effort to resist the skis’ tendency to align themselves that way, and the consequences for failure are dramatic.
There’s assuredly a way to make it easier, but with the trauma I have, I’m not sure I’ll want to give it another try.
Ah yeah, the pizza. Those should only be relied on to stop you on bunny hills and in lift lines. Your intuition is right that there’s a limit to how effective those can be.
Ironically though, the “way to make it easier” is the same technique that snowboarders have little choice but to learn from the start: turn until you’re going across the hill instead of down, because like snowboards, skis only tend to slide down when they point down. Then you make "S"s down the hill to maintain the speed you want, shallow “S” for speed, wide, traversing “S” to stay slow. You can commit to hold a turn until you’re completely sideways and come to complete stop, whether you’re pizzaing or not. No competent instructor would let let their students off the bunny hill until they can turn well enough to control their speed, so I’m really sorry that you found yourself in a situation where you had no control.
with the trauma I have, I’m not sure I’ll want to give it another try.
I don’t blame you for not wanting to try again, and I don’t mean to push you to because there’s millions of ways to entertain yourself on this big blue rock. For what it’s worth though, I’ve taught dozens of “first time” lessons where it wasn’t actually their first time, they confessed to me before we started that they tried skiing once years prior, had a bad experience, and only after years and years were convinced by someone they trusted to give it another shot. I’m proud to say that every single one of these students had changed their mind by the end of the lesson. So if you find a good, psia certified instructor and go one-on-one or in a small group, I bet that you’d have better luck. I promise, once it clicks for you that turning=control, the mountain just opens up.
You can twist to brake with skis too! (hockey stop) :)
You shouldn’t be exerting too much muscle if you are skiing on relatively unbroken terrain. The only time you really use a lot of leg muscle is in deep, deep, heavy powder, in order to keep your tips up. Or if you are going over huge moguls or bumps at a high rate of speed, using your legs as giant shock absorbers.
If you have tight boots, sharp ski edges, and a slightly forward stance, your leg muscles shouldn’t tire out very quickly.
My instructor told me that if you just relax, you won’t be in control any more, and the board will just slide somewhere. Instead, you need to actively push one of the edges down into the snow. That sort of board rotation requires good balance and strength. If you’re not up for it, you’ll end up loosing your balance, and sort of “falling” gently. No speed required. You can do these gentle falls, and you’ll feel nothing. It’s just that next morning, you’ll suddenly realized how much stress yesterday actually put on your shoulders.
Turns out, you should never go snowboarding unless you’re already able to stand on your heels and/or toes for an extended period of time. That sort of balancing, endurance and strength is absolutely crucial.
Huh. I never had an instructor. But yeah to me standing on my toes or heels for a while isn’t all that hard to me, even though I’m not in good shape. I guess that makes one (1) part of me that’s not critically weak.
Yes you can, however it takes a few trips (at least for me) to learn to do that without falling. In the process you will fall a lot and hurt yourself a lot.
This is exactly what happened to me. Never really fell in high speeds, because I was always in the easiest slope, so there was no serious impacts. A great number of super slow and gentle impacts do build up over time.
In my case, the only realistic way to learn is to start very slow and practice very frequently. Like, spend a few weeks doing it, but visit the slopes only 30 minutes at a time every day, maybe even twice a day. Unfortunately, that’s not how ski resorts and vacations work. Looks like several things are fundamentally incompatible with the idea of learning snowboarding.
Tried snowboarding, never again.
Turns out, your legs need to be really strong, or you’ll have your hands on the ground too often. If that happens like every minute, your shoulders are not going to be pleased with that. I have a feeling that this short experiment may have caused some minor damage my physiotherapist was unable to detect.
It gets easier with practice. Trying once is not enough practice. L
That is true. However, spending one hour is way too much. Maybe something like 20 minutes three times a day for two weeks would be better. That way, the impact stress would be tolerable and necessary muscles would have enough time to grow. Sadly, that sort of thing is fundamentally incompatible with the way vacations and ski resorts work.
I learned the basics of snowboarding in an afternoon. Sure there was lots of falling and aches. Protective gear can help a lot though.
What’s tiring at the beginning is standing up all the time from falling so often. As you fall less often, you don’t need to stand up so often anymore and it becomes less exhausting.
With increasing skill you also need less muscle power to turn and stop.
When skiing/snowboarding you probably spend more time sitting in a chairlift than actually riding down the mountain. Then there’s waiting for friends, waiting in line, breaks for eating. I never measured the time, but you might not even get a full hour of pure skiing during a day on the mountain.
For learning I would recommend to first just go for a weekend and then later the same winter for a week. During the week take one day off for recovery. Some pain and exhaustion will always occur, but that’s just the way it is with any strenuous physical activity. Best practice for preparing to learn snowboarding is to lie on the ground and then stand up repeatedly.
I never understood that. When snowboarding, you can just rotate to brake, and then you can just sit to take a break if you want. Heck, you can even do the leaf down a whole slope, easily and safely, and it’s still kind of fun.
Meanwhile, skiing requires superhuman leg strength, even if you just want to go slowly, and will twist your legs in gruesome ways when you fall.
If skiing takes a lot of physical work, that’s a sign that your stance is off. You can ski almost anywhere just by shifting your body weight from one foot to the other. Back when I was a ski instructor, my old boss (a ski instructor of multiple decades) used to say that skiing is a “skeletal” sport, not a “muscular”. If you’re working hard it’s likely because there’s something wrong with your stance and you’re subconsciously using your muscles to compensate. The most common specific example of this I saw in my lessons (and had a habit of myself which I’ve been working on for years) was skier’s quads burning out, because they were leaning back (consciously or not), because they lacked confidence (consciously or not).
I’ve come to learn that this advice applies to any physical activity. You can tell a master by their economy of movement, whether it’s snow sports, playing an instrument, martial arts, or tossing haybails. Use weight and momentum, don’t fight it.
My main issue is that the beginner’s stance they teach you is trying to maintain a pie shape to reduce your speed as you go down. The problem is that the skis want to either be parallel, either go fully horizontal. It takes a ton of effort to resist the skis’ tendency to align themselves that way, and the consequences for failure are dramatic.
There’s assuredly a way to make it easier, but with the trauma I have, I’m not sure I’ll want to give it another try.
Ah yeah, the pizza. Those should only be relied on to stop you on bunny hills and in lift lines. Your intuition is right that there’s a limit to how effective those can be.
Ironically though, the “way to make it easier” is the same technique that snowboarders have little choice but to learn from the start: turn until you’re going across the hill instead of down, because like snowboards, skis only tend to slide down when they point down. Then you make "S"s down the hill to maintain the speed you want, shallow “S” for speed, wide, traversing “S” to stay slow. You can commit to hold a turn until you’re completely sideways and come to complete stop, whether you’re pizzaing or not. No competent instructor would let let their students off the bunny hill until they can turn well enough to control their speed, so I’m really sorry that you found yourself in a situation where you had no control.
I don’t blame you for not wanting to try again, and I don’t mean to push you to because there’s millions of ways to entertain yourself on this big blue rock. For what it’s worth though, I’ve taught dozens of “first time” lessons where it wasn’t actually their first time, they confessed to me before we started that they tried skiing once years prior, had a bad experience, and only after years and years were convinced by someone they trusted to give it another shot. I’m proud to say that every single one of these students had changed their mind by the end of the lesson. So if you find a good, psia certified instructor and go one-on-one or in a small group, I bet that you’d have better luck. I promise, once it clicks for you that turning=control, the mountain just opens up.
Thanks. I appreciate the encouragement. Maybe one day!
Though even snowboarding I haven’t had the opportunity to go in years. It is pretty boring alone, after all.
True, I love skiing and boarding but I have to be with people or I just get bored
You can twist to brake with skis too! (hockey stop) :)
You shouldn’t be exerting too much muscle if you are skiing on relatively unbroken terrain. The only time you really use a lot of leg muscle is in deep, deep, heavy powder, in order to keep your tips up. Or if you are going over huge moguls or bumps at a high rate of speed, using your legs as giant shock absorbers.
If you have tight boots, sharp ski edges, and a slightly forward stance, your leg muscles shouldn’t tire out very quickly.
My instructor told me that if you just relax, you won’t be in control any more, and the board will just slide somewhere. Instead, you need to actively push one of the edges down into the snow. That sort of board rotation requires good balance and strength. If you’re not up for it, you’ll end up loosing your balance, and sort of “falling” gently. No speed required. You can do these gentle falls, and you’ll feel nothing. It’s just that next morning, you’ll suddenly realized how much stress yesterday actually put on your shoulders.
Turns out, you should never go snowboarding unless you’re already able to stand on your heels and/or toes for an extended period of time. That sort of balancing, endurance and strength is absolutely crucial.
Huh. I never had an instructor. But yeah to me standing on my toes or heels for a while isn’t all that hard to me, even though I’m not in good shape. I guess that makes one (1) part of me that’s not critically weak.
Yes you can, however it takes a few trips (at least for me) to learn to do that without falling. In the process you will fall a lot and hurt yourself a lot.
This is exactly what happened to me. Never really fell in high speeds, because I was always in the easiest slope, so there was no serious impacts. A great number of super slow and gentle impacts do build up over time.
In my case, the only realistic way to learn is to start very slow and practice very frequently. Like, spend a few weeks doing it, but visit the slopes only 30 minutes at a time every day, maybe even twice a day. Unfortunately, that’s not how ski resorts and vacations work. Looks like several things are fundamentally incompatible with the idea of learning snowboarding.
I agree! Snowboarding is a physically intensive young person sport