# Help with jumps



## legallyillegal (Oct 6, 2008)

Sounds like you're leaning back when you land.


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## Guest (Nov 30, 2008)

there are 4 stages to successfully mastering any snowboard feature: approach; take-off; maneouvre; landing. they progress from each other so if you have a problem with your take off, the manouvre and the landing will suffer. problems with approach will generally affect all stages of the feature.

try deconstructing what you are doing. assuming we're talking straight air, for take off try finding a reasonable slope and practice riding on a flat board (i.e not on any edge an all). practice short hops from a flat board, landing back on a flat board. try rolling over features with no air at all and be aware of your approach. instead of speed checking (which will get you on an edge, albeit temporarily) start your approach further down the hill from a fixed point with no speed check, etc.

once you're happy that your approach is solid, take a look at your take-off. again, you can start a take-off progression on a regular slope on a flat board: make sure your weight is balanced; make sure you're not rotating your upper body to face the feature (you can do this by aligning your arms with the nose and tail of your board). have somebody take a look at you to confirm that you are in correct position.

one thing i've found to be hugely useful in fixing take-off problems is to take a breath as you drop in and exhale completely between the drop in and the take-off. try it - your take-off will be more relaxed.

for the manouevre section, concentrate on simplicity at first. practice sucking your legs up. you can again do this miles away from the park on a regular run. 

for landing, work on some weight forward exercises if your landings are crashing because you're too far back. try to touch the tip of your board. again, start small with ollies or even hops on a regular run before working up to natural kicker features at the side of the run and then kickers in the park.

good luck

alasdair


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## Guest (Nov 30, 2008)

Everyone goes through this stage when they start leaving the ground, I don't think its a matter of leaning back too much, rather its a misalignment of your upper and lower body. Here is what I would bet is happening:

Human instinct is to always turn your face and chest towards danger, so you have the best possibility of defending yourself. This applies even to less than obvious dangers. When you're on a snowboard, and especially when you're in the air, your brain perceives the immediate danger as that of falling forward, _down the hill._ As such, your instinct is to open your shoulders and turn your chest more or less forward, in the direction of travel. This is so ingrained that you probably don't even realize when you do it. Unfortunately this has negative consequences on a snowboard. You can see this in fairly new beginners even in normal turning. Its easy to spot a very new rider, because even when they make a toeside turn, often times their upper body will be twisted so their shoulders are turned forward and down the hill. They're basically making a toeside carve with their upper body positioned for a heelside carve. Many new riders also have a harder time learning heel-to-toe-edge transitions for the same reason. They make their heelside carve more or less correctly, because when on your heelside edge, the natural and correct upper body position has you facing more or less forward and down the hill. But when they go to shift to toeside, they leave their upper body facing forward and down the hill as much as possible, so they never get a smooth balanced transition. Nonetheless, if this goes uncorrected, many riders still learn to ride fairly well with this poor technique. Look for the rider making good progress down the hill, but with his upper body locked in a 45-degreeish angle forward and downhill. He'll be making edge transitions primarily with his back foot, like a windshield wiper, often _counterswinging_ his arms and shoulders to bring his board from heel to toe edge. 

While this rider might make it down the hill reasonably well, this natural instinct will absolutely sabotage him when he's in the air. When instinct takes over, and you open your shoulders and chest up like that, you're basically going through the upperbody motions to initiate a heelside turn. This causes you to land on your heel edge, or at best, flat based followed by an immediate shift to your heel edge. If you haven't figured it out already, its really freaking hard to land straight into a heelside sliding/scraping carve, so the usual result is your heelside edge washes out, and you fall hard onto your butt. 

To correct this, you need to overcome the instinct to turn your upper body forward. This will have positive benefits in your normal carving as well. Start with simple low/medium speed ollies. As you bend down to load up the ollie, look at the orientation of your torso. You should have your hips lined up with your feet, and your shoulders lined up with your hips. Pay especially close attention to your shoulders. Either shoulder socket should be almost exactly over the ball of either foot. If your front shoulder is a little closer to your front heel, and your rear shoulder is more towards your rear toes, you're already set up to wash out. Once your body is aligned and balanced, do a nice solid ollie. This is where that instinct is really going to kick in. As you're in the air, and as soon as you land, focus heavily on your should alignment. *Really* fight the urge to open your shoulders up. The way I really got this down was to make my ollies, and try to land either flat based, or a little on my toe edge, with my shoulders twisted just a little bit so that my lead shoulder was more over my toe edge, and my rear shoulder more towards my heel. I'd immediately try to go into a mild, *balanced* toeside carve. If your shoulders are opened up, this will feel horribly awkward, and you'll likely catch your heel edge and break the habit really fast. 

As you start to 'rewire' your instinct, up the magnitude of the airs. Start hitting larger jumps, all the while making sure to keep your shoulders lined up. Keep trying to land flat based, or slightly toe edge, and really resist the urge to make a heelside turn or carve to slow down. The danger-facing instinct will constantly try to reassert itself, so always be conscious of your upper body alignment. Eventually you will convince your hind brain that turning a little away from the danger but riding away clean is actually preferable to facing forward and getting a clear view of the exact spot where you're going to bruise or break your tailbone. Once you're landing balanced and aligned, you will be able to land directly into a heelside carve, but it will be a *carve*, not a scraping, defensive, speed-srubbing slidey-carve. Watch good riders go off jumps. Even if they're spinning, and by their rotation end up landing on their heel edges, they'll make a nice sharp carve, not a falling-leaf slide.

So if you're still reading, I think the best thing to remember is to continuously ask yourself: Is my upper body aligned with, or contrary to my lower body? When I'm having a problem with *any* aspect of my riding, this is the first thing I look at, and usually its the root cause of whatever problem I'm having. Learning to transition edge to edge switch, making toeside carves in choppy powder, making switch carves in powder, riding very steep fall lines, washing out on landings, even doing aerial spins. In every case, I fixed my upper body and the rest fell quickly and easily into place.


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## sedition (Feb 8, 2007)

ihop said:


> ...Rather its a misalignment of your upper and lower body.


This is spot on. I'll give another version of the same assesment with a few other tips.

*(1) Lead with you eyes*. Your body follows you head. Your head follows your eyes. Whether you are landing a dismount from an olympic high bar, swinging a baseball bat, or snowboarding, you want to keep your head, shoulders, hips, and center of gravity on the same plane. This will keep well balanced and up-right. If your upper and lower body are misaligned, then your center of gravity is not going to be squarely over your board. Most of the time this will result in a crash when your doing jumps, jibbing, butters, etc. Thus, spot your take off point, and once your in the air, locate your landing point. At first this will seem very contrived, but later it will become second nature and you won't even be aware that you are doing it.

*(2) Start small*. Find some very small jumps, and start there. Once you are comfortbale with it, and consistent at landing, move up to something larger.

*(3) Speed*. When a bicycle goes very slow it becomes unstable. Speed helps stay up-right. The same is true with snowboarding. I often see newer riders hitting jump way too slow. when they land, the impact unstablizes their body, and can lead to misalignment of upper/lower body (and thus a wreck). A little bit more speed would help keep them stable, and disapte the impact of landing.

*(4) Grabs*. Skateboarders have to hold their board when they do 1/2-pipe tricks because they are not strapped in. Yet, snowboarders still grab their boards when hitting jumps and the pipe. There is a reason for this beyond just style points; it helps stablize the rider by keeping upper and lower body aligned. When your first learning, throwing in a Mute or Indy grab can help keep everything going in a straight line. It may not work for you, but it also may make a huge difference. Give it a try and see what happens.


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## sedition (Feb 8, 2007)

*Snowolf*: Some good info in this thread from a number of perspectives. Might this be a contender for a sticky? Two great posts from some newer members (thanks guys!).


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## sedition (Feb 8, 2007)

Snowolf said:


> For more info about jumps, check out the how to guides at the top section of this forum:
> 
> http://www.snowboardingforum.com/tips-tricks-instructors/778-just-some-basic-how-tos.html#post4987


Nice. I forgot those were there!


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## Guest (Nov 30, 2008)

with respect, without seeing this guy, how can anybody make a strong statement about what they think is happening?

there are so many variables here, there's just no way that, in the absence of specific movement analysis, we can say, with any degree of certainty, that we _bet we know_ what's happening. we're all guessing - educated guesses certainly - but guesses nonetheless.

here's an idea, dpz102. can you have a friend shoot a video of your jump - or even a series of stills of your approach, take-off, manoeuvre and landing? i think if we see those, we can start giving some more assured analysis.

alasdair


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## sedition (Feb 8, 2007)

alasdairm said:


> with respect, without seeing this guy, how can anybody make a strong statement about what they think is happening?


Simple. I've been riding for over 20 years. In that time I've seen enough people learn the sport to be able to make some very general statements about very common mistakes. Sure, homeboy might doing something I've never seen before. However, if he follows the foundational advice that people have suggested he will be well on his way toward solid technique.


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## Guest (Dec 1, 2008)

sure. but in this case all we have is "_ended up in falling on my ass_". there are 100 ways to fall on your ass. he could be landing on the tail of the board or he could be rotating 90 degrees and slamming an edge in. two very different problems with (at least) two very different solutions. as i see it, it's just not possible to say "_i bet i know what's happening_" with any degree of certainty at all.

all that said, i agree with this in general:


sedition said:


> However, if he follows the foundational advice that people have suggested he will be well on his way toward solid technique.


regards

alasdair


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## Guest (Dec 1, 2008)

i'm quite light  the nature of this medium sometimes robs us of tone which makes that kind of thing more obvious.

i take your points. i think that you give some great foundational advice and i also tried to give more generalised advice. however, there was at least one reply in the thread which implied that the problem was something specific. i'm just discussing how - especially when we can't see the rider - giving specific solutions when we don't even know what the problem is, could actually hinder rather than help.

all this said, perhaps it wasn't implied - perhaps i inferred. i understand that communication is a two-way street and i'll happily cop to my 50%.

finally, i'm torn on you last statement. there's a fine line between considering a number of options and their possible solutions and guessing. i'll buy you a beer sometime and we can discuss this one in person.



alasdair


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## Guest (Dec 2, 2008)

hey guys/girls thanks for all the advise. I will have my friend take a video plus i will try to follow the advise you gave me. I will be on the mountain this sunday for the first time this season. We will see how it goes. Wish me luck, lol

Also if any of you go to camelback, mountain creek and or blue mountain we should meet up. I am always looking for my snowboarding friends. 

Good luck too all and stay safe this season.


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## Guest (Dec 2, 2008)

have fun man and rock it!

alasdair


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## Guest (Dec 3, 2008)

Glad everyone solved that one out easily 

This forum seems to be a lot better that way in comparison to some others, so I'm glad to be here 



dpx102 said:


> hey guys/girls thanks for all the advise. I will have my friend take a video plus i will try to follow the advise you gave me. I will be on the mountain this sunday for the first time this season. We will see how it goes. Wish me luck, lol
> 
> Also if any of you go to camelback, mountain creek and or *blue mountain* we should meet up. I am always looking for my snowboarding friends.
> 
> Good luck too all and stay safe this season.


Is this blue mountain, as in Ontario Intrawest blue mountain?


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