# Tips for improving BS carving



## MrCarota (Nov 5, 2021)

Hello Everyone, this is my first post here.

This is going to be my sixth season riding and I'm falling in love with carving. While I'm quite confident with my frontside carve and I manage to get quite low more often than not, I'm a bit struggling to improve my backside carve. I find it difficult to get low and usually when I try to force it a bit I end up with my butt in the snow.

Do you have any tips? 





Thanks!


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## Snowdaddy (Feb 2, 2018)

MrCarota said:


> Hello Everyone, this is my first post here.
> 
> This is going to be my sixth season riding and I'm falling in love with carving. While I'm quite confident with my frontside carve and I manage to get quite low more often than not, I'm a bit struggling to improve my backside carve. I find it difficult to get low and usually when I try to force it a bit I end up with my butt in the snow.
> 
> ...


Nice going on the riding and welcome to the forum.

One of the things you could look at is the turn initiation on the heel side. On the toe side you get the board on edge and then the board starts to turn. On the heel side it's not the sidecut making the turn because you're not getting the board angle up enough. Your're doing a sharper turn that the board radius wants. If I'm not mistaken that's the Slush Slasher and it has a long sidecut radius. When you get the board up on edge enough it's going to bend into a shorter radius. Look at 0:16 - 0:17 you can see a nice start of the turn. On the heel side it's much harder to get down towards the snow like that.

I think most of us (certainly me) have the problem where we don't get the board up enough on the heel side and try to make too short a radius because otherwise we're just going to go too fast. It's much harder to commit to that turn on the heel side.

You could try to rotate your hips slightly more forward and bend your knees more. You could have a look at Nicholas Wolken's or Xavier's videos about turning and see if that's something that could help you out.

Edit: Compare your body positions and look at the trajectory of your and their boards. Another fun thing is to practice your body position in front of a mirror. It's quite entertaining to see how you look like that.


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## OldSnow (Nov 20, 2019)

MrCarota said:


> Hello Everyone, this is my first post here.
> 
> This is going to be my sixth season riding and I'm falling in love with carving. While I'm quite confident with my frontside carve and I manage to get quite low more often than not, I'm a bit struggling to improve my backside carve. I find it difficult to get low and usually when I try to force it a bit I end up with my butt in the snow.
> 
> ...


One thing that immediately jumps out at me is that when you're engaged into your backside you're throwing your arms forward counter balancing.. forcing yourself to go back further to achieve the same balance.


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## MCrides (Feb 25, 2019)

Hey man. First of all, your carving looks great and better than 95% of resort riders, so you’re off to a great start. 

I agree with Snowdaddy about the initiation as you switch to your heel edge. When you switch to your toe edge, you’re tilting the board right into the downhill edge and riding it all the way around. But when you switch to your heel edge, you bring the back end around until you’re pointed down the fall line _before_ tilting on edge and riding the side cut.

This is suuuuuuper common, I think because it’s hard for our brains to lean backwards down the hill. But if you can clean it up it will help your heel carves because you’ll have so much more time on the edge.

Hope that makes sense!


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## WigMar (Mar 17, 2019)

Nice riding! I like rocking a Slush Slasher too. Gotta love that sidecut. This deep carving thread taught me so much. 

Getting down heelside is much harder but also much more rewarding than toeside imo. The biggest breakthrough I had in laying down heelsides is in the initiation. I throw myself at the snow over the nose of the board. I've really got to get more forward than I think is needed. The G forces of the turn come and hold you up off of the snow. The hardest part is getting the balance right, but you can get your hand on the snow to help with that. When you get low without getting enough weight forward, it's easy to slide out onto your butt.


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## Etienne (Apr 2, 2021)

So far so good, those heelside turns are not that far away. A few things I notice, which are all kinda related. You are bending your knees quite less than on your toeside. As a result you try to get low by leaning your upperbody, making your butt point out and as other have pointed, you have to compensate with your arms. And as a result again you kick in a little bit at the beginning of your turn, creating a bit of unwanted torsion (really minimal though).

So ideally you want to squat a bit more straight and lower… but that's not the easiest part, squats are hard 😅 . One thing you could try to help is to keep pointing at your tips with your hands, this would make your pelvis go "inside" to counterbalance. Also, on very mellow runs try to stay super align on your board, a bit low and smooth on your knees, then angle just a bit and let the board work its turn smoothly without to try to battle it, just being comfortable and well aligned. This will get you comfortable on how to engage your turn without kicking in and get to "know your board". From here you can try to push more engage forward more etc.


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## PwhyTwhy (Jan 20, 2020)

Crank down some more foreward lean. It looks like you are not confident commiting to the HS edge with your hands going forward to find balance. If you crank down the forward lean you will get pressure to the HS edge quicker and feel the support you need to full commit to the turn. You have enough speed. You could even try turning uphill more to prepare for the HS carve on steeper terrain to shed some speed. Im also going to guess you are not riding a posi/posi stance. I see a lot of duck riders carve like that because its hards to position the hips over the edge so they often compensate with a lot of upper body and arm flailing.

Hope that helps


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## Scalpelman (Dec 5, 2017)

Great thread. I feel like my heelsides look like the OP. Need to find someone to video me one of these seasons….. BTW your turns are getting dialed in nicely. 

Looking at the difference between your turns, there is definitely less rotation of your body toward the nose on heelside. As others noted above, focus on forward rotation of your body toward the nose, rather than forcing the board into the turn. Also initiate the turn with weighting the front foot and try not to weight the back foot until exiting the turn. It’s tough to retrain our minds away from the tail slash stop. 


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## MrDavey2Shoes (Mar 5, 2018)

WigMar said:


> Nice riding! I like rocking a Slush Slasher too. Gotta love that sidecut. This deep carving thread taught me so much.
> 
> Getting down heelside is much harder but also much more rewarding than toeside imo. The biggest breakthrough I had in laying down heelsides is in the initiation. I throw myself at the snow over the nose of the board. I've really got to get more forward than I think is needed. The G forces of the turn come and hold you up off of the snow. The hardest part is getting the balance right, but you can get your hand on the snow to help with that. When you get low without getting enough weight forward, it's easy to slide out onto your butt.


There it is


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## Winterzahn (May 15, 2021)

@MrCarota getting lower during the edge transition helps most, low crossover.
In sec 0:03 you have a pretty stretched transition followed by a fast overpowered edge up of BS (which washed the pencil line in snow a bit).
Lower transition with more bent knees and slow smooth BS edge up, would help. Then shortly before hand touching snow a slight extension of the legs. (here the low edge transition before ä, with bent knees pays off, as legs are bent now and give room for extension). Not too much leg stretch otherwise you boot out.

From my observations there are different laydown targets (3 levels of Backside touchdown/laydowns)

1) stretched fore arm with hand slightly touching snow, not going over tipping point, ass still 6 inch or more above the ground.

2) Next one is stretched arm and ass close to ground , ass almost touching snow, 1..5 inch above ground, still mostly on tipping point, or sligthly over

3) Hand and / or elbow on ground, full lay down, full over tipping point, you lie on elbow, ass up from ground a few inch.

target 1 is easiest , target 3 hardest to achieve

The crucial.part for all laydowns/or lower carve is: the lower the speed of your carving turns and the wider the radius is, the lower the edge crossover needs to be (more bent knees) to touch the snow.

here I did a level 3) (full lay down)
Longboards are nice for training as well


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