How To Carve On A Snowboard

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Hi guys. I'm Ben O'Neal. I'm a basic level two snowboard instructor working towards my ISIA.

Today we're going to look at carving. It's a really good aspect of snowboarding particularly early in the mornings if you want to have a bit of fun and go fast before you hit the park where there might be kite in the pipe. When we're carving, we're using the board right on its edge, and the nose is following the track of the tail.

It's really simple to see if you've got an effective carve, because you get a really small thin pencil line in the snow. Okay. The way I see it, there's four things you need to be able to carve.

The first one is a really important prerequisite. You need a nice smooth terrain. Secondly, you've got to be right in the centre of the board to allow that board to reverse camber, if you have a reverse camber board, and bend into the carve.

You need a quick, early, and committed edge change, and you need speed as well. Carving is slightly hard to do in an indoor snow-dome, and there's different types of carving. You may have heard the term crossover, or cross-through.

What we're going to look at today is the cross-undercarve, and the cross-undercarve is, if you like, when the head is the pivot-point and the legs will be flexing extending underneath the body, engaging the new edge at a very low flex. Whereas on a skidded turn, you're using part of the base and the edge to turn the snowboard, and the front of the snowboard maybe following a different track to the tail, when we're carving, the nose and tail following the same track, in order to do so, you need the board to be much more on edge. When the board is much more on edge, what happens is, the contact points are going to be the nose and tail.

And the side caught the snowboard here, using the force from the turn, and from the fact that you're standing in the centre of the board, the board will reverse camber, and allow yourself to follow the natural shape of the side car. The output from a carve should be a nice clean semicircle. In ideal terrain, particular mountain, what you find is that you may even have a keyhole carve where you're changing edge, extremely early going back up the hill, and changing up the new edge there, leaving a very thin pencil line.

A skillful rider will also be able to alter the arc of the curve by bending the board forward and enabling the camber to reverse even more, to tighten up the arc of the carve. And that's pretty much the basics of carving guys.