Hello everyone,

It somehow feels “hard” and unnatural to bend my front knee. I have already set my highback to a more aggressive angle. It helped a bit but not enough.

Now I come to my question. Is there any stance angle/width that facilitates the bending of the knees? Currently I am riding at the standard width of the board (using the middle binding holes and at 15, -15 (duck stance).

Any thoughts that may help would be great!

Thank you very much in advance!



Levi

You dont want to force your knees to bend with an akward stance, that will just suck on long days. The main purpose of forward lean is to give you more response on heel side turns. I personally ride every binding I own with ZERO forward lean. Its all preference, we are all geometrically/anatomically different and what feels great for one person will feel awkward for another. I do encourage you to experiment to find your personal sweet spot, but dont make forcing the knees to bend a criteria.


Instead of thinking of it as trying to just straight up bend them, focus more on getting your weight over your front foot, this will naturally force a better riding stance.


The only time you really want to be leaning back is if the snow is so deep that you are worried about burying the nose...

Its a very odd feeling at first to lean forward. A common tip I give when teaching is to reach the front hand forward, pointing the direction you want to go, this will also help you get your weight over the front foot and engage the edges more efficiently

 

Without your board, just squat and rest your elbows on your knees...notice your stance width and angle of you feet....this is a good place to start with your binding set up. Then as ur riding/just mellow cruise on a comfortable green or blue run, do the same squat with elbows resting on your knees. For more visual details, find the creepy basement video...there is also reference of using your leading knee and pointing your turns as Steezy notes above.

and I also use 0 forward lean

 

Does moving your knees closer together or further apart make any difference ?

 

Reading between the lines it sounds like most of your weight when riding is on your back foot or you're leaning back toward the tail off the board. This is a very common problem.

Bent knees are not the goal, relaxed absorbent legs and proper weight distribution are. If you're doing it right you won't have to worry about knee bend.

Crouch down with your back straight and relax as much as possible. Exaggerate putting your weight on your front foot and leaning forward. The second you feel your legs tense up while riding, that means you got scared or off balance even if you didn't fall -- make a note that something went wrong.

Flat basing over bumpy terrain is a great way to know you're balanced properly.

 

Bent knees are not the goal, relaxed absorbent legs and proper weight distribution are. If you're doing it right you won't have to worry about knee bend.

This ^

Knees don't have to always be bent. But bending the knees should feel very natural and doable when you need to. So the number 1 thing you meed to work on is your stance, make sure you're in a position which allows you to bend the knees comfortably and without any strain... this may be a wider stance, different angles, fwd lean, body alignment, etc etc etc.

 

Need a video of you actually riding.
Maybe you are counter rotated that's what's causing you to have a hard time bending knees.

 

Is it slow spring conditions without "summer" wax on by any chance? Sometimes that forces you to keep your front leg straight and weight over your tail just to resist the drag.

 

I’m going to recommend that you set your binding angles to +/- 15 degrees, no forward lean on your bindings, and check that your stance width is appropriate for getting into a squat position, slightly wider than shoulder width.

 

Why won't you bend a knee?!

 

Hello everyone,

Now I come to my question. Is there any stance angle/width that facilitates the bending of the knees? Currently I am riding at the standard width of the board (using the middle binding holes and at 15, -15 (duck stance).





Levi

Therein lies a potential problem, in my opinion. Duck stance is just WAY too universally accepted as a viable stance option by MOST of the snowboarding community - even people who hardly ride switch.

Do you ride switch much? If not, let go of duck stance for a day, and set your angles to something like Front +21 / Rear +6. You might be pleasantly surprised, as I was, at how much more absorbent your legs are in the chop, how much more control you have over uneven terrain and surprise undulations in flat light. Don't even get me started on how it improved my carving.

And yes, it helped me bend both legs WAY more - both legs now acting as coilover suspension for my upper body, it felt like my upper body was just hovering above the snow, as my legs pumped up and down with the contours of the snow - and yet, VERY little fatigue, from this style of stance.

I might be alone in my thoughts, but there was a Youtube video where one of the famous snowboard Youtubers is showing his park and freeride setups. His "freeride" angles are, if I recall, +18 / -12. Lol. That's not a freeride stance. That's a solid park stance, on a freeride board.

I get the whole "each to their own" thing. Take a risk, try forward angles on your back binding [if you don't ride switch so much], and see if you like it.

 

You are not alone there. Duck stance actually stops most people completing their heel turns as that rear foot really limits upper body rotation, gravity takes over and the rider abandons the turn again. Do that 300 times a day and you just learned terrible muscle memory for snowboarding.
Back when my form was poor I rode 15 15 duck.
Now my form is much improved I find myself at 21 6 duck and if you do the math on that all that actually changed was my upper body became more open.
I think if you want to learn carving for example, set up your stance for carving, learn it, lock it down and then see how far you can push your stance back to where it was whilst still getting the new job done.

Nothing tested nothing learned.

 

My thoughts on the +\- 15 “Duck”
Stance as a starting point is that many people lack proper squat mechanics to be able to get low aka squat. If you position the feet slightly wider than shoulder width, angle the feet out, drive the knees out (as opposed to having knee cave on one or both feet foot), you are set up in a symmetrical position to perform the movement with your Bodyweight equally distributed over your lower body. Angle Adjustments made from there would be based on the fact that the individual can perform the fundamental movement mechanics.

 

6Snowboarding is inherently an asymmetric sport though, it can only become symmetric if we try to ride switch exactly as we ride normally.
So if we just focus on riding in one direction for a minute we quickly learn that the duck rear foot limits us opening up our chest.
We need an open chest to complete our heel turns.
Most peoples heel turn is worse than their toe turn so why set up in a way that inhibits your heel turn?
If you answer "I ride switch 50% of the time" then you are exempt lol but most of us dont most of us are leaving a lot on the table right there.

As heel turns are harder, set up in a heel friendly manner and put a little extra work into your toe turns. I bet your heel turns start running across the hill rather than down it and your toe turns quickly get back to where they were.

 

Personally, I love riding switch and personally can't deal with adjusting a solid technique in order to ride switch on something that is not perfect for it, I just don't want to be able to blame anything if I am not doing something as well as I would like. Hmmmm I sound like a perfectionist or at least someone who will use anything as an excuse for shit form

 

I ride one direction 90% of the time. But the reason is because I SUCK riding switch. I wish someone told me to learn switch when I was first starting. Now it involves a few painful days on the mountain to learn, which I keep avoiding.

 

Honestly I was the same, but I switched to duck stance and decided to go switch when gf was learning to ski, it's so much fun, a real challenge and it has improved my snowboarding a lot regular as well.

I'm in no way an expert but I just think about two things, saw a video which told me to crush a bug with your front foot on toe turns and open up your knee on heel.

Starting off doing a couple of J turns and then connecting. I mean, it feels weird but I highly recommend i, especially if you're riding with some people new to the sport.

 

I think a lot of the people are also watching Knapton absolutely rip and want to emulate his style of fluid carving and buttering with his duck stance. I don't think there's any right way to set up stance though.

 

Learning how to ride switch is a very nice skill especially when sometimes, you are just tired riding normal stance.
I sometimes get sore in my front leg and just pop a quick 180, bam, no more sore leg.

 

Find the angles you want, directional stance on directional board and duck stance on a twin park board. Same angles, just different body position. Riding a directional board backwards is fakie, not switch. Some tricks can still be called switch, but whatever.

 

The big snowboard YouTubers ride duck because they ride switch. If you don't ride switch then duck might not be best. Agree people should try things out and see what works for them

 

Any thoughts that may help would be great!

Levi

My thoughts would be to not read any replies to your thread and go ride.

Ride 100+ days in a season on a mountain (not a hill), with riders that are better than you.

Your riding will improve 10x

 

I bet you are reading this reply instead of being on the mountain!

 

Somewhere along the way, the point was lost amidst all of the guys jerking each other off with their non duck stances.

OP, can you reasonably perform a parallel air squat standing on the floor without any noticeable discomfort?

 

The only thing keeping me from a +/+ stance is jumps and drops, riding switch always feels a little odd, positive or duck stance be damned no one is as comfortable switch as they are regular, and hardly anyone is charging freeride terrain switch. I ride switch a lot but that's on groomers, in the park, and occasionally off a natural drop or sidehit. What I didn't like when trying +/+ was that my stability for ollies and landing jumps was non-existent, just felt wrong, couldn't bend in the ways I needed to. I'm sure over time I'd learn and adjust which I may dedicate a few days to this spring, but it makes sense that a duck stance let's you squat and absorb better than a positive stance, even having the back foot barely ducked out.

I agree you can't beat +/+ for aggressive heelside carves, but I'd rather try to compensate as a rider for those than limit my jumping and landing ability.

 

Everyone has a starting point based on their anatomy and physiology. If you walk like a duck already then positive angles on the back foot aren’t going to feel as natural. Guess what will feel natural? Duck. The point is don’t copy someone’s angles, but do consider them for the style of riding they perform and adjust them to your own anatomy and physiology. I ride 24/-9 but my feet are naturally a little bit ducky, so -9 on the backfoot feels to me like a positive angle probably feels for someone else with straight feet. Zero on the backfoot feels not so good to me and actually hinders my carving. Any more negative than 9 degrees and I start feeling like a park rat, compromising 99% of my riding for that 1% of the time jumping, doing park stuff, etc.

To the OP, I arrived at 24/-9 because these are the best angles for me to bend my knees and get in very low surfing positions to maintain flow, increase response, drive more power in to turns, slash on a dime, etc.

 

I agree with the point that Phedder makes in the above post. Duck stance allows both knees to track outwards which, from an anatomical standpoint, allows one to transfer and absorb the most amount of energy through the hips and legs from top to bottom. With the backfoot turned in, the knee will inherently track inwards, which is the weakest and most compromised knee position. It does make certain skill specific aspects of snowboarding such as hard carving more ideal and comfortable, but when you absorb a huge landing, you ideally want the knee tracking outwards and energy absorption transferring through the hips.

With that in mind, there is a compromise to every foot angle. What you are willing to compromise depends highly on what you wish to achieve with your riding. If the issue is a matter if squatting, I want to first know whether or not it is a physical limitation of the rider instead of jumping to highly specialized solutions, so let’s start with the most natural position for performing the squat: neutral spine, knees tracking out, feet slightly wider than shoulder width, feet symmetrically tracking outwards (aka duck stance). If you can’t perform this movement symmetrically, then no amount of asymmetrical adjustments will properly compensate for this fundamental human movement pattern barring leg length discrepancy or some other oddball anthropomorphic feature.

 

Agreed, thanks for breaking it down Poser. I just did your Pepsi challenge and confirmed zero and positive angles on the back foot hinder squatting for me. Increasing positive angles on my front foot has little to no impact squatting until the angles get crazy high and even then I can still get low, it just feels weird. So for me it comes down to balancing the angle on that front foot between having enough leverage and comfort while reducing the potential for drag. 24 degrees is my magic. I snow surf mostly in one direction with only a few minor kickers here and there so switch/jumping isn’t the focus like riding with flow, precision and power is. Just sharing so the OP and y’all can compare and contrast based on your preferred style. And if y’all have something new/better for snow surf style I’d love to hear about it too!

 

Just out of curiosity: When do you consider your stance duck? Does the stance need to be symmetrical front and back or just slightly negative on the back?

+15/-15

+15/-10

+29/-1

+30/0

+31/+1

 

Just out of curiosity: When do you consider your stance duck? Does the stance need to be symmetrical front and back or just slightly negative on the back?



+15/-15



+15/-10



+29/-1



+30/0



+31/+1

That’s a good question with no official answer. I suppose that if the toes are turned outwards at all then it would qualify as “duck stance”

 

Duck is positive front and negative back. So +29 -1 qualifies as duck, but is a very shallow duck that won't be able to swim in deep water and needs more bread than normal to survive

 

Before this thread I thought duck was symmetrical and I still do. Within this thread I think duck is positive front, negative rear but not necessarily symmetrical. It's a good way talk about it though since the OP's original question is how to get low, and perfect symmetry isn't required to do that (at least not for me).