Posted by Markus on

My stance on stance

Your stance on your snowboard should be dictated by your body, your riding style and your personal preferences. However I believe that there are some misconceptions about stance that I will bring up here. 

The preferred stance of most snowboarders is as much a result of the current fashion in snowboarding as it is their own choice. For example: about ten years ago people thought that you looked like a geek if you didn’t ride the widest possible stance on your board. Some snowboarders couldn’t ride certain brands because their boards didn’t allow for a 64cm (25,2”) stance. Everyone claimed that particular stance to be their own choice and what felt best for them as well as being really good for allround riding. After the “wide stance era” the pendulum swung back the other way and suddenly everyone preferred a tight stance, making it nearly impossible to bend your knees, but it got you that tight pants rocker skater look. Of course everyone claimed that they had their own individual stance and that their choice wasn’t a consequence of trends or fashion. Besides, tight stance is a really allround stance that works for everything! Nowadays most snowboarders don’t go past 59cm (23”) and almost everyone thinks that Shaun White has too wide of a stance and that it looks weird.

Here is a video of me from 2008 with what, at the time, wasn’t considered a wide stance. I think I had another spare 5cm worth of stance on that board!
Looks pretty wide to me in today’s context.

The preferred binding angles also changes with fashion, although it seems like the space for personal preference seems to be a bit wider here. In the glory days of halfpipe riding, around 2000-2004, most riders adopted a square or slightly positive angle on the back foot, with the front foot being fairly forward pointing with angles of around 21-24 degrees. When rail riding and park riding became more popular and park boards became synonymous with “true twin” snowboards most people felt the urge to have a duck stance, in order to make their switch riding as good as their normal stance, of course. Even people who rarely rode switch needed a twin board with a twin stance, because that’s what everyone rode. The duck stance is to this day the most widely adopted stance with 15, -15 degrees being perhaps the most common set-up.

The case in favor of a duck stance

Standing about shoulder width apart, pointing your toes a bit outward and bending your knees, while keeping your weight distributed equally on both feet puts you in an “athletic position” or “athletic stance”. This stance is widely used and teached throughout a variety of sports. The point of this stance is putting you in a position where you are ready to react to changes in the game and move whichever way needed. For example: tennis players waiting for a serve or a basketball player in defense mode, or just how most people stand when performing a heavy squat. When we use the duck stance on a snowboard we are in a strong position biomechanically and are “ready” to ride both goofy and regular, without feeling that we are backing up when riding switch.

Great! Everyone should ride with duck stance right?

It’s not that simple unfortunately.

Most sports adopting this stance are sports that are performed on feet where a change of direction needs to be made in a split second. When snowboarding you seldom need to start riding switch all of a sudden. Most of the time it’s a choice made by you in order to make your riding more varied. Being able to keep riding the way you do is much more stable than switching around all of a sudden, even if it is good to be able to ride well both goofy and regular if a situation like that should occur.

Another thing that sets us boarders apart from other sports is that we perform our sport standing sideways. Most sports and games performed on feet are performed with your chest facing the way you want to go, with some exceptions of course. Pointing our bodies in the direction we perform our sport is harder with a duck stance since your back foot is always turned away from the direction you are riding. This makes us a bit less agile and smooth in our riding. 

A duck stance aren’t as good to carve with as a stance with positive angles on both feet. This is because you can’t use your hips as much to tilt your board and create pressure on the board’s edges. This problem is most evident on the heelside turn. This is why alpine snowboarders have positive degrees on both of their bindings, to make the toeside turn and the heelside turn more alike. What they sacrifice with their bindings  being pointed a lot forward is stability. 

In conclusion: Duck stance is stable and strong but less agile. It is a compromise to make it easier riding both ways. 

Why did you do that?

I have a feeling that the duck stance have become the standard, go-to,  stance for snowboarders even though they rarely ride switch or even have a board that is not made for riding switch. 

Pictures from http://www.inlandet.se

I like the trend in snowboarding that has been going on some years with manufacturers experimenting with different board shapes and sizes and are moving away from having twelve different park boards in their lineup. However when I see these boards ridden at resorts they often are set up with a standard 15, -15 stance. This makes no sense at all! Firstly, these boards aren’t even made to be ridden switch, some don’t even have a tail to speak of. And secondly, if you ride switch you do it a fraction of the time you spend riding, do you even need to compromise to make it feel better?
(Most people who think they ride a lot switch probably rides 80% their natural way)

Compromising means that you give up something to make something else a bit better. It won’t be ideal for anything but it also wont straight up suck for anything either. If you have a super directional board and put a twin stance on it, you compromise your ability to turn efficiently and wont’t get as much out of the board as you could have. If you buy a board to carve with or to ride pow with, why wouldn’t you put a stance on there that makes the board perform well when carving, or that makes you more agile while slashing between trees?

If you have a race car you don’t put mud tires on it “just in case”. 

Your stance isn’t perfect for you

Many snowboarders seem to think that the stance they have chosen is the one best suited for them in all conditions. This is simply not true. Yes, if you have ridden a stance for a long while it might feel odd to change it and you might feel really comfortable riding everything with it. But it isn’t perfect for anything if you have a symmetrical duck stance. It is as “perfect” for you as the 64cm stances was for everyone ten years back.

Think about it like this: If you have the ability to change your performance to the better in less than five minutes (the time it takes to change your stance set-up), why wouldn’t you do it?

When it has dumped a meter of snow, why wouldn’t you take your powder board? Or if you have one snowboard: Why wouldn’t you set back your bindnings and go with a more directional stance?

As snowboarders we have a really good opportunity to change our set-up on the fly. We can make it suit a more park-oriented riding style where we compromise some performance to be able to ride switch more comfortably, and we can change our set-up to make monster carves, just by doing a bit of screwing.


Experiment and become a better snowboarder

I understand that it is a hassle to change your stance all the time but I think you should do it at least once in a while to become more comfortable with different stances.  This will not only give you the opportunity to move in different ways on your snowboard, but it will also make it feel good switching stance for a given purpose. “Now it’s carving time, so I’ll bring out my carving stance”.

Be creative, not only with your riding, but also with your equipment and reap the benefits of being a more allround snowboarder.

Side note:
I read or heard an interview with Scotty Wittlake once where he talked about stance and why having a positive angle on the back foot gives you the ability to do better methods. I can’t find it, but if anyone knows which one it is, please point me in the right direction

Anyway, Scotty is right. Stiff boots and duck stance is not a perfect set-up for a method which is why a lot of snowboarders perform the method differently than their forefathers. If you want to get that old school Chris Roach style of “grasser” method with a straighter back leg you will struggle if you have stiff boots, and duck stance. If you want to tweak with ease, you’ll have to  either untie your boots or put your back binding a bit more forward pointing to be able to kick the back leg out more. Or just have a knee that bends sideways, that works too.

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Pre-season gym program, for you!

Back to school, back to work. I’m excited for the passing of the seasons and that even this summer could come to an end. I look forward to a new season and plan on starting it by being fitter than ever. And I would like to share the training program with you so you can do the same.

So we’ve just started the preseason training here at the National Snowboard Academy, which includes strength training, acrobatics, coordination and cardio. As I wrote the strength program for the second graders (12th grade), I thought to myself: If I believe in this  program being one of the simplest ways to get my students stronger, why don’t I try it out for myself?

So I will. Starting today I will do the same strength program as my second graders and see where I end up in a couple of weeks. If you didn’t know it I’m a big fan of the KISS!-rule, which means Keep It Simple Stupid!, especially when strength training for sports. (You can read more about my views on strength training for snowboarding and sports here .) The program in itself is really simple and built up around two whole body sessions per week with quite moderate volume. This is because we do train a lot of other stuff during the weeks and adding extra volume in the gym would be detrimental for the quality of the other workouts. The aim for the program is getting stronger in the squat, the bench press, and the deadlift, so pretty standard powerlifting, just to keep it simple.

I started out by testing my max in the three lifts. I got a 135kg squat, a 95kg bench press and a 150kg deadlift. This is for evaluative purposes so I know if the program worked for me. You can start with a max if you want the opportunity to evaluate your progress. If you just want to try the program out you don’t have to.

If you are new to powerlifting you shouldn’t try to max out! This program is aimed towards intermediate lifters who know the proper technique. If you want to get proper technique, contact an educated trainer.

For the program, start out with weights around 70% of your max in the three powerlifting lifts and try to increase the weight a little each week. For the accessory lifts the percentage is less important, but you should be within 3-4 reps of failure. Try getting 48 hours of rest in between the two sessions and keep the quality of the sessions high. Good technique before adding weights.

 

The program:

(The set and reps are written in this manor: sets X reps)

Day one:                 

Warm up with open barbell

Overhead squats       3×5           (keep it light, this is for warmup and mobility)

Powerclean                 5×3           (light and fast, if you can’t clean you can do front squats)

Deadlift                       5×5            (main lift, keep it heavy)

Split squat                  4×5/per leg

Bench press                5×5             (main lift, keep it heavy)

Pull ups                        5×5            (add or remove weight so you can do 5×5)

Hanging legraises      3×10

 

 

Day two:

Warm up with open barbell

Overhead squats         3×5               (warm up and mobility, keep it light)

Powersnatch                5×3              (If you can’t snatch you can skip this, it’s for technique work)

Squat                             5×5               (main lift, keep it heavy)

Romanian deadlift      4×8

Bent over rows            3×8

Standing overhead press     3×8

Planche                         3×1 minute                    (superset with reverse planche)

Reverse planche (dry swimming) 3×1 minute      (superset with planche)

 

 

So, there you have it. A super simple strength training program that hopefully will get you stronger for the season. I’m not sure if there is enough volume in there if you are an experienced lifter. If so, you could probably do three sessions per week without being burnt out. I will try the original program out and see if I can hit my all time maxes later this autumn (Squat: 155kg, bench: 102,5kg, dead: 170kg).

 

Train hard, and take care.

Markus

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The Snowboarder Physique part 3 – Strength

As the level of competitive snowboarding reaches new heights the demands on the bodies of the riders who want to be in the game rises. Apart from having the coordination that is needed  to learn tricks, being strong is perhaps the most important quality to have as a snowboarder.

Even though you might not be on an international competitive level you probably could benefit from becoming stronger. Stay tuned to learn why and how.

First of all we must establish what we mean when we talk about strength. Is it the ability to do a lot of work at a high pace? Is it jumping really high? Or is it just a matter of how much you squat?

Actually it’s all of the three.

To get an overview I like to divide strength training in to three  categories:

Maximum strength – the maximum load you can perform a movement with.

Explosive strength – the ability to produce power quickly, loaded or unloaded.

Muscular endurance – the ability to do more repetitions with a given load.

You might, with all rights, argue for more types of strength but I like to keep it simple since I think that this is what we want to focus on in our training for snowboarding.

Strength and Conditioning Research has a good article on the relationship between maximum strength and strength endurance if you’re interested in further reading on the topic.

 

Let’s connect the different types of strength to snowboarding:

Maximum strength is what we need when we land. The stronger you are the better you will be att stomping heavy landings, simple as that. It also affects your ability to do multiple laps.

Explosive strength is what we need when we pop, turn quickly, initiate and stop rotations, etc..

Muscular endurance is what keeps you going through a banked slalom course or down a long powder run. It has a great influence on your ability to do multiple laps through the park.

So, how should we train strength for snowboarding?

As i discussed in my text on specificity it’s easy too fool yourself into doing a lot of weird activities that you think will have a large carryover to snowboarding but won’t actually get you better att much more than the specific activity.

In my opinion you should do strength exercises that are proven to get you stronger in a safe way. Even though the strength isn’t directly transferrable to snowboarding you will get a bigger buffer that you can adapt to snowboard-specific strength. It’s easier and safer to get strong by squatting in the gym than it is to bomb drop yourself strong with your snowboard on.

To make things as simple as possible I have chosen to do less technical movements with high loads to train maximum strength and technical movements with little or no load to train explosive strength.

Gym training for maximum strength:

For my athletes with less gym experience I often prescribe a simple powerlifting program. Powerlifting is a strength sport where you compete in lifting the maximum amount of weight in three movements; Squat, Bench Press and Deadlift. These are fairly simple movements that you can learn to do in a safe way quite quickly and that will get you hella strong if you stick to a program! In my opinion the more we can focus our time in the gym on building strength the better, so compound movements that require little technique work is preferable. Some might argue that olympic weightlifting has a greater carryover effect to sport, but looking at the complexity of that sport and the time you need to work on technical details I think you benefit more from doing the simple movements and getting good at them. However I often introduce my more experienced riders to the olympic lifts to diversify their training and introducing speed into their strength training. Keep reading to see how I implement the explosive training.

The powerlifting program will aim to get you stronger in the three exercises cited above. Of course you will do other exercises, but they will be aimed at assisting in getting you stronger in squats, bench press and deadlift. I argue that if you show good strength and form in these exercises you are pretty strong overall. Since we only focus on three exercises it’s also really easy to track our progress.

If you are new to the gym or to powerlifting, I suggest you first find a trainer who can show you the proper technique. This will minimize your risk of injury and maximize your gains. For sets and reps I suggest the following basic template for a two day per week program: (N.B. this is not a complete program, just a sketch up to get an idea of how to think)


Day 1:

Back squat 3 x 10

Romanian Deadlift 3 x 10

Bench press 3 x 10

Accessory exercise leg:  3 x 10-15

Accessory exercise shoulders:3 x 10-15

Core work

Day 2:

Deadlift 3 x 10

Front squat 3 x 10

Shoulder press 3 x 10

Accessory exercise pull: 3 x 10-15

Accessory exercise push: 3 x 10-15

Core work


This is a really simple sketch but the main point is that you keep the “goal exercises” (squat, bench, dead) quite heavy and the accessory exercises quite light. As your strength progresses you increase the load on the bar and when you feel comfortable in all the movements you can progress to heavier weights and fewer reps. I suggest a 5×5 set/rep approach to start with when working towards more maximum strength.

It might be wise to incorporate some rotational core work since we have to deal with a lot of rotational forces as snowboarders. A good approach here can be to practice both resisting rotational forces for example doing a deadlift with just one hand for resisting or throwing a medball sideways for producing force.

 

Sprint and agility for explosiveness:

Explosive strength is your ability to produce or absorb a large amount of force in a short time frame, in sports science it’s known as Rate of Force Development (RFD).

There is a correlation between RFD and maximum strength, however it’s is commonly thought that you need to train on applying the force you can produce in a short time frame for it to have a carryover effect to explosive strength.

A big part of the ability to produce force quickly is good neuromuscular control and coordination. So to become better at producing force quickly we need to learn how to move in a way that we can do so. In my opinion it’s always good to keep things simple and train on becoming better at things that you easily can fathom. In this case sprinting and jumping is my go to training to focus on RFD.

Most people know how to jump and sprint and can learn how to do it safely pretty quickly. Therefore they can progress to more complicated drills or increase the load and see their progress.

The possibilities are endless when it comes to sprint and jump drills but the main focus’ should be stability in the hip and knee joints, and maximum effort. This doesn’t mean that you should do maximum box jumps until your shins are bloody but that when you do a squat jump or a broad jump you focus on jumping as high or as far as possible, every single rep.

Working in different planes of movement is also a good idea here since it’s something you seldom do at the gym. For example you can practice jumping and landing sideways or you can try sprinting backwards to increase coordination and neuromuscular control.

Here is a little workout I did a while back that you can find some inspiration from:

 

Muscular endurance, for your banked slalom comp or your Japow trip:

We’ve all felt that burning sensation that you get during a great, long pow run. Well, here’s a way to keep that sensation on hold for a bit longer and, hopefully, recover quicker for the next run.

It’s quite simple really, do more work with less rest and push yourself to endure for longer. It’s not fun, it will suck, that’s kind of the point. However you can be really creative in designing your workouts so that they don’t become too repetitive. Look to Crossfit for inspiration, they’re pros at designing workouts that really suck but are quite fun as well.

A good test of endurance in your leg muscles is choosing a weight and see how many repetitions you can do before failing. A weight that you can do 3 sets of 10 or maybe 12 is pretty good to start with.

Another way of testing your endurance is to choose a time cap and see how many repetitions you can do within this time cap. Both of these tests requires you to have good form performing the exercises so be cautious of your form and don’t push yourself beyond your technical limit. If you’re in doubt, have a spotter to check your form and call you out for “technical failure”.

You can work your way up to really many reps in some cases but at some point you will lean over to more of a conditioning aerobic exercise where it’s not your muscular endurance limiting you, but your aerobic capacity. Training in the rep range of 20-50 reps is not uncommon for muscular endurance training, it’s also not uncommon to train to failure. In this case it’s quite safe since the load you need in order to do 20+ reps must be low.

For the muscular endurance training it might be beneficial to incorporate some isometric exercises, for example planches or wall sits. A caveat when performing isometric exercises: Try to keep the tension tight all the way through your set! Don’t try to make it as easy as possible just to last the time out. It’s better to do a 30 second planche with high tension than a 1 minute planche with sloppy tension. In the latter you might last longer but not due to getting better endurance but because you just found a more efficient way to do the exercise.

 

Don’t forget to rest!

As to how often you should train these three qualities it’s important to remember that the higher the load of the workout the more rest you need. You will need more rest after a workout where you’ve maxed out your squat than when you’ve done 3 sets of 10 at 60-70% of your max. This goes for the sprinting and jumping as well as plyometrics are pretty strenuous on your ligaments and joints.

A good rule of thumb is to rest at least 24h between the gym workouts and 48-72h between the sprint workouts.

The endurance workouts aren’t as strenuous on your joints and ligaments since you have to keep the load light, but you might experience muscle soreness since you do a lot of volume these workouts. Rest as needed and be aware that you can be subject to overtraining if you just push on through the pain for a long training period.

If you experience daily muscle soreness and a decline in performance on your workouts it’s probably a good idea to take a few days of and get a good amount of sleep and good food.

 

Conclusion:

The science of strength training is not easily fathomable but in this text I’ve tried to simplify and connect different areas of training to snowboarding qualities. As it’s a simplification there are a lot of exercises and types of training that aren’t mentioned that might be really good for snowboarding.

When you plan your training try to incorporate some of the following:

Lifting something that’s really heavy.

Sprinting and jumping far and high.

Doing something that makes your muscles burn.

It’s not as simple as that, but it’s a start and int will get you a long way and get you fitter before the upcoming season!

If you have any questions feel free to contact me at rehn.coaching@mail.com or via instagram @rehncoaching or on Facebook.

Thanks for reading,

Markus

 

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Season edit, a near lose and a win.

The snowboarding season is really over for this year. ‘Tis the season of champagne and beer.

Look I made a poem.

No seriously, it’s been a great, though challenging year. I’ve learned quite a few tricks, but I’ve also battled with lack of motivation and destructive thoughts.

Right after new year I caught the feeling that snowboarding just wasn’t fun anymore. My riding felt really off, even though I did tricks that I had never done before, and I just didn’t get happy from snowboarding. Which really sucked.

I am lucky enough to be able to work with something I love, and help other people as devoted to snowboarding as me to get better. So not only did it suck because it didn’t make me happy. I also felt ashamed and ungrateful that I had those feelings.

But what helped get me out of my funk was doing one of the things that got me into snowboarding in the first place, that I’ve neglected the pas years since it’s quite time consuming. And that was to get creative.

Since the times with the Quite Alright crew I’ve looked at spots and dreamt about what you could do there, where the camera angles should be and how you could edit it to make it look even better. I often point to spots and tell my students what I see. But I just never did anything with those thoughts.

So with my camera, my snowboard, a shovel and riding around my home town on my bike, I hit the streets and tried out the spots I had pointed out. It became like therapy for me.

Just focusing on the task, by myself, alone with my mind and my snowboard and the trick I wanted to get. Not to make a video project, but to make me feel good. It dawned on me that I had been doing the same thing over and over, waiting for the feeling to change. Becoming a slave to monotony and habit and the thing that broke me out of it was committing to creating something.

My solitary street missions lead to solitary hike missions up on the mountain and soon I started to enjoy the park riding as well. Riding with my girlfriend, my brother and my mother was fun and not boring or dull, the thing I dreaded to feel. I will keep on going back to my filming roots next season, and hopefully someone will join me this time around. If anything it saves a lot of space on the hard drive if you can help each other to press record on the camera.

I’ve put my clips together in a little edit, and recorded some lo-fi music to go with it, and I won a prize for creativity with it the film festival at the school. It means a lot to me since it was students voting for the film they liked the best.

So here you go. My, rather long, season story accompanied by my rather slow season edit and my rather bad singing. But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Markus

 

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The trick is not the trick

Have you ever failed to reach a goal? Maybe you planned on doing a trick this season, but the opportunity to try it never really seemed to appear? Maybe the conditions were shit every day of the season? Or perhaps you need to start focusing on the small steps you can take every day to master the trick.

Almost anyone who is involved in sports will tell you that it is important to set goals. And most people who are a bit serious with their riding will tell you their goals for the season if you ask them. But what people (both coaches and riders) have a harder time to explain is how you reach those goals and land those tricks.

In this post I will focus on trick goals. Trick goals for a season are pretty easy goals to work with since it’s easy to make them SMART . They are specific, binary (you either stomp or you don’t), easy to set within your limits, relevant to you and your creativity and since you often set them in the start of a season they’re time-bound.  What I will present here is a template to use to work towards your trick goals so that you won’t have to be disappointed in yourself at the end of the season and wonder why you didn’t reach your goal.

If you’re waiting for the perfect day, it won’t come.

This is not some sort of play on Murphy’s law but just a matter of mindset. If you’re walking around every day just trying to feel if everything has lined up in your favor for you to try that trick, you probably will find some sort of excuse not to try it. There might be wind, the landings aren’t slushy enough, and if they are you don’t get speed, or when the weather is great you have a loose binding or your feet are cold or you’re “just not feeling it”.

Just try harder, right?

Well, both yes and no.

In my line of work I’ve seen riders beat themselves up on hard tricks for 30+ tries without them landing the trick and I’ve seen riders who “only” have been training on 5’s and 7’s learn double corks all of a sudden. In my opinion you should be somewhere in between these two types. You need some of that do or die mentality to even try the hardest tricks, but you need to get to those tricks by working methodically and letting your body learn the movements in order to minimize the risk of injury when you try the biggest tricks.

What you need to do to get to the mentality that you can do it, and have the skills to back it up, is to become more process oriented in your day-to-day riding.

What is process oriented and where do I buy it?

A process oriented approach puts your focus here and now while maintaining the end goal in the back of your head. In short you will focus on doing the “right things” that will help you reach your goal every day, instead of waiting for the perfect day to practice on that big trick. A 30 min. dedicated training towards your goal every day will add up and make it easier for you to land that trick, just because you’ve actually trained for it and not just tried to send it.

To keep the process oriented approach going you should evaluate each day and think about what you did good that will help you reach your goal. And this is regardless of the result of the day! If you had a bad day but kept focus and worked in the right way, you should focus on that, because that’s what will get you to your goal. Every day can’t be a success but with a winning process your results will add up.

The sum of it’s parts.

To be able to work process oriented on a specific trick you will need to break down the trick into parts that you can work on and perfect even when conditions are sub par. For example if you want to do a backside double cork 1080; you have a backside takeoff, an open landing and two flips (basically a bs5 to a cab underflip).

So here we can start to think about what we can work on in order to eventually land the bs double 10.

Since you can divide a bs double 10 into a bs 5 to a cab underflip, those two moves is what I would try to perfect, and especially the cab underflip since that’s the landing trick.

Do cab underflips everywhere! If you haven’t done a bs double 10 you can’t be sure how you’re gonna come out of it, if you’re gonna flip it more or less. So if you know cab underflips off of everything and everywhere, with more cork, with less cork, off the toes, you will have a multitude of movements that you know and can use instinctively whilst in the air. When you can “cat” your way out of every cab underflip scenario you can be pretty sure that you wont mess up when doing the bs double 10.

Corked bs 3s might be really good to try aswell if you should find yourself in somewhat of a late dip in the trick.

The same goes with the bs 5. Do it with more cork and with less cork. And most importantly: know when you do what. Be in control of the cork, that will give you more air awareness when you want to step it up with another flip.

This is just an example trick that breaks down quite easily but to summarize:

Break down the trick into smaller parts

Identify what type of takeoff and landing you need to practice and make things challenging.

Practice those parts every day

If you do something every day the time spent practicing will add up. You don’t need to practice a whole day but set aside 30 minutes and do it every day, you will get results!

Build confidence in sub par conditions

Ride when it’s icy and do easier tricks. Do your “practice” tricks when the visibility is poor. Try the jump when it’s a bit windy. This will give you the confidence to try your trick even if the day isn’t prefect.

Acknowledge your work

Take the time to evaluate your day riding. Focus on what you did right and keep doing it!

 

So the trick is not to try the trick until you land, but to set yourself up for success by doing little bits every day.

 

Some last words for thought

I see a lot of people shying away from a challenge just because they feel uncomfortable. I’d like to urge you to embrace feeling uncomfortable. Not that you should feel that way all of the time, but when facing a challenge that is your body’s reaction to it. It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t do it, it just means you should step your game up and focus!

If you don’t accept feeling comfortable at times you won’t progress the way you have the ability to. Because even when the perfect conditions arrive, it won’t feel warm and cozy to do that trick. You will feel nervous and uncomfortable and think negative thoughts. But remember: that’s your body telling you to step it up and get your shit together and land this trick! Not an urge to you to back away.

 

 

 

 

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Intervju med Fat and Furious

Bröderna Abbe och Theo Hjellström bildar snowboardduon Fat and Furious som har skämt bort oss med kul och kreativa snowboardedits förra säsongen. I år är de tillbaka med ett nytt filmprojekt som kallas Full Party.

Både Abbe och Theo har åkt snowboard på skoltid under sina gymnasieår i Malung, Abbe på Freeridegymnasiet och Theo på Snowboardgymnasiet RIG. Jag tog ett snack med dem efter att de premiärvisat sin film för de nuvarande eleverna på Malungs gymnasieskola.

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Recommendation of the day

Today I want to give you a tip for a Youtube channel that I really enjoy. And if you’re in to weightlifting, powerlifting or strength training in general I think you will to!

The Youtube channel I’m talking about is that of Juggernaut Training Systems 

Here you can find a lot of technique tips for weightlifting from Max Aita, you’ll get a lot of mobility tips and learn about biomechanics from Dr. Quinn and you will get a lot of good practical advice from Chad Wesley.

One of my favorite videos is about the squat and hip structure with Dr. Quinn. He makes some really good points and explains why everyone can’t squat in the same manner, watch it here!

It’s just a great channel for those of you who coach others, or yourself, or just want to learn more!

So my advice for you today is to go to their channel and check out the content. I’m sure you will learn something or get some new ideas.

 

 

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Iceland part one

So, last weekend I went to Iceland for the first time in my life to carry out the first part of the Snowboard coaches course that I announced earlier.

The layout of the course was three seminars and two practical training sessions divided on two and a half days. I arrived in Reykjavik on Friday afternoon and held the first seminar that evening. The course ended on Sunday with a seminar in the morning and a practical training session with focus on body awareness and acrobatics in the afternoon.

 

I am very happy with how the whole thing turned out and especially with the participants. They were engaged, interested and offered insightful views on the topics we discussed. I am really looking forward to going there again this spring for the on-snow seminars!

This course was tailored by me for the Icelandic ski- and snowboard association but the topics we covered are topics that I tend to cover on this blog as well. So make sure to keep up with the blog or follow me on Instagram (@rehncoaching) or on Facebook  to get access to my latest thoughts about training for snowboarding, or in general.

If you have a request or any question whatsoever, please contact me on Rehn.coaching@mail.com

I am looking forward to hearing from you.

Markus

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Weightlifting

As some of you may know, weightlifting is kind of my hobby after snowboarding. It’s hard though to combine snowboarding and weightlifting during the season since I want to have as much energy left for snowboarding as possible.

In this video I wanted to show you a typical workout for me when I’m also snowboarding. I try to keep the volume low but the intensity quite high so I get good quality from every workout. It’s a mix of weightlifting squatting and some monkeybusiness. Enjoy!

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New collaboration!

I have great news!

I am happy to announce that I will be working together with the Icelandic ski- and snowboard association this year. My job is to design and carry out a course for snowboard coaches on Iceland.

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The Icelandic snowboarding scene is probably best known for the Helgason brothers, Eiki and Halldór. Who for the last couple of years have been some of the greatest influencers in street and contest snowboarding.

But Iceland has a simmering snowboard community with a lot of young riders coming in the wake of the Helgasons. The Icelandic ski- and snowboard association are keen on making the best of their possibilities and give these new snowboarders the best opportunities to develop their skills.

I am glad that the Icelandic ski- and snowboard association are willing to invest in the youth through investing in their snowboard coaches. I am honored for the opportunity to start this journey together with them and I think it will be great!

This year I will be going to Iceland twice. First for a three day seminar on preseason training for snowboarding and after new years for an on-snow seminar. I can’t wait to get there and start this new collaboration which hopefully will last into the future!

Let’s make Icelandic snowboarding even greater!

//Markus

PS. If you have any questions or inquiries feel free to contact me on rehn.coaching@mail.com, I look forward to hearing from you! DS.

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