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Unweight board on kink??

3K views 13 replies 10 participants last post by  Thad Osprey 
#1 ·
Boardslides??
Ok I'm studying my training videos and watching lots of fellow riders to study their movements.

I"m gonna try some boardslides this year. I have 50/50 kinks and have done some boardslides on straight boxes.
When boardsliding a kink do you unweight your board just prior to hitting the kink?
I would think so but I have never heard it discussed. It's always just keep your base flat and adjust your body to stay perpendicular to the feature.

Hoping to nail this down this season.
 
#6 ·
This is something that interests me as well, as one of my goals for the season is to be able to boardslide rails. All of my friends bitch out saying that rails are way too hard and slippery. Is there anything I should expect, or anything I can do to prep myself for a rail?

I quoted the above because it also brought up another question with detuning because apparently I never detuned my new board, and learned everything from carving to hitting jibs on non detuned edges. Does it make that big of a difference, if so should I also detune my newish Attack Banana since it has magnetraction?
 
#8 ·
its always scary to go fast, but the faster you go (within reason) the easier it will be as you'll have more forward momentum and less downward mo...

try hitting your flatbox or flat rail or down rail as fast as you comfortably can, or at least try to step up the speed on those smaller features so you can take it to the kink with more speed... the more you're traveling forward the less impact you'll have onto the rail, onto the kink...
 
#9 ·
Truth here!

The biggest problem we face as new park riders or when advancing to bigger stuff is our fear causes us to want to slow things down. Speed is the hardest thing to maintain when you are apprehensive about committing to hitting a feature. My limited box riding has shown me that what Shred is saying is true. Speed offers an element of spatial stability and that translates to more stability on the feature.

Its really tough to make yourself do it and trust it. Take Shred`s advice and go to an easy, low consequence ride on box that you are totally comfortable with and just start lapping it at higher speeds. This experience will help you trust the stability offered by speed.
Yeah that helped me land my first boardslides. Going throughout the season with just my GF, I obviously didn't advance too much as she didn't know much herself, and was scared. It wasn't until I went with a buddy for the first time and he told me "just go faster, features will be easier". Having to keep up with him, because I'm not the type to be left behind, it quickly made me advance. It helped with everything from maintaining my carves better, to hitting features a lot easier.
 
#14 ·
Plenty of good stuff on here, so I just have about 0.5 cents to add. On speed, if you are worried, do it within reason. Bombing a jib feature can lead to unintended consequences and chances are most people instinctively slow down and the first try will be like (bah! wish I had more speed). The other thing with speed is the line you take to go into a feature. Think about it before you hit a feature, bearing in mind you have some kinks to go thru. And how much speed depends on what kind of kinks. But the foward vs downward momentum things is true.

Related to that above is like some have said you need to change your body positioning as you hit the kinks. This can be your shoulders, to how you angle your torso to be 90 degrees above a feature, to ankles which are IMO the most important cos they probably are the part of you that react the fastest and the most direct (but not only) factor influencing the edge angle you put onto a jib.

As for the unweighting issue, you see MANY riders do it. Especially on down flat down features or up flat up features cos there is an obvious angle when approaching a flat section where your board can catch. For straight up flat-down features where the kinks are just downwards, the problem is not so much catching but slipping out backwards cos you dont lean forward enough to match the gradient. Unweighting also becomes important when you do transfers on a kinked rail, like backboard-front-board-whatever out etc.

Last thing is the unweighting period is usually really short but critically important. Cos all your body adjustments like shoulder alignment, (counter) rotation, ankle flex are ideally done when unweighted so you come back down on the feature after a split second ready to continue to the end of the feature and stomp it nicely (which is the punctuation mark at the end of the sentence when it comes to jibbing).
 
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