How To Choose A Snowboard

Hi, my name's Mark, I work at Snow and Rock in Hemel Hempstead. I'm the equipment supervisor here and I've been snowboarding for about eight to nine years. Today, we're going to be going through a selection of snowboards and how to choose your own snowboard itself.

Now, we do advise that you come into a shop to do this but what we'll do is we're going to go through quickly just the basics of what we actually do when we're picking a snowboard for a customer. Now, what we have here is we have a selection of snowboards. We'll go through the first one.

This is K2 anagram. It's a kid's freestyle snowboard. It's what we cast as jib rock.

If you can see here, what this means is it's flat between the bindings here and here is slightly lifted up. Lifted up at the ends on the tip and the tail, this basically helps with snowboarding for free-stylists because it gives them a little bit more lift and they don't fall over as many times. So they don't look like idiots like I do.

The next part, we have our weight variations. Each snowboard in this range has a few variations in weight. Now, we have the center stance, which means where the bindings are positioned.

The weight it can actually take up to so the kilograms of weight limit. We also go by height. Now, how we do this, this board is a bit small, but we put the board, for free-stylers, we generally put it just below the chin.

For an all mounting board, we put it between the chin and the nose, and for anything we cast as free riding or powder riding, we put it on the nose and above. Now, this is a kid's board. For a beginner, we also have a selection of boards.

This is the K2 anagram, works out quite a cheap board. This is what we cast as catch free technology. Again, flat but this time around, rather than being jib rockered which is pretty much from there to there, this is slightly whipped up at the tip.

This contact point here is lifted up to aid with beginners so they don't fall over so much and they can actually progress in snowboarding a lot quicker. This one has the same system here in weight variations and all the species we need. Now with beginner's board, they are very similar to a free-styler's board.

We try to aim a little bit smaller than a normal board would be. This basically gives them the initiation to turn a lot easier so they don't have to worry about falling over and again looking like an idiot. They can actually pick up snowboarding a lot quicker.

Now the big buzz from then onwards is basically going to your major range of snowboards themselves. Now, from here we have what we cast as a pure freestyle board. This one is very flexible, very poppy, quite cheap and basically designed to throw about on rails and jumps on itself if you wish to.

It's got an extruded base which is very basic, it needs a lot of wax but can be ridden quite dry. Very very popular with the indoor riders in the UK. We then have an all mounting freestyle board, slightly upper ranged than the ones we had a minute ago.

This one here has what we cast as sensitive base, it's on top of quality base, designed to absorb a lot of wax, be a lot quicker and extrusive but when dry, it does need to actually be waxed on a regular basis and it slows down. Still the system here with the weight ranges and again with a freestyle all mounting board, this one here is about the sort of height I'd pick. Just above my chin, to actually aid me so it means I can still ride the mounting and still ride kickers and rails without actually having any problems at the same time.

This is another one. This is what we cast as an all mounting free ride board. Slightly different in its flex, this one is a lot stiffer than the other boards we've been going through.

Principally because you need a little bit more stiffness and a little more power behind all mounting free ride board in itself, so you can actually do powder turns and actually go quite fast on this one. Same sense of b