You remember the day you first linked your turns on the snowboard. Not the turns where you were a little shaky and almost had it. The real deal. You went from one edge of the snowboard to the other edge smoothly. There was no catching an edge and no panic. It felt like you were flying down the mountain. That was probably the last time snowboarding lessons really made a big difference in your riding.
After that maybe you joined a clinic. You got a coach. You looked at videos. You rode more days. If someone asked you what exactly got better this season compared to last season you would probably have a hard time saying what. You are not falling down. You are not stuck on the slope. You are also not really sure you are improving.
This is not a talent issue. It is a design issue. Most snowboarding lessons are made for one goal: to help you go from never having used a board to being able to survive a run. Once you get past that point the system kind of stops working. Almost nobody explains why this happens.
This article is about the gap in snowboard lessons. It is not about how to carve better or nail your switch riding. The article is about why the usual way of teaching snowboarding lessons is not good for people who already know the basics and are trying to get better. It is about what's going on in your body and brain when you stop getting better at snowboarding. It is also about what kind of help you need to start getting better at snowboard lessons.
Two Different Games
Remember when you first started taking snowboarding lessons. What did your teacher tell you to do? They said things like "put your weight on your foot" and "look where you want to go" and "bend your knees even more". These things your teacher said have one thing in common: they are all meant to help you not fall down. When you are just starting out with snowboarding, the lessons are really about learning how to stay safe. The goal of snowboarding lessons is very simple and clear: you either fall or you do not fall. You know if you are doing it right or not in a half a second.
This model works well for the first part. The model gets you linking turns snowboarding with a lot of confidence. Then the model changes completely.
Once you get past the beginner stage, you are not doing things that are totally wrong and making you fall down. You are doing things that are a little bit off but you have done them so many times that they feel totally normal to you. Your turns are connected, yes. Maybe you start every turn on your toes a tiny bit late. Maybe your weight moves to your back foot in the middle of every turn, without you even realizing it. These small habits will not throw you into the snow. The snowboarding habits will just quietly limit how good you can get at snowboarding.
This is where the survival model does not work anymore. Your instructor cannot easily notice a delay of 0.2 seconds in the way you change your edge when you are from the lift. You cannot even feel this delay yourself because your brain thinks that what you are doing is correct. The thing that helped you learn at first, which is trying something and then seeing what happens right away is not working now. You are still learning. The way you were getting feedback is not working like it used to.
When Your Body Lies
This is really strange: your body often tells you things that're not true about what it is doing. The better you get at doing something the more you believe the untrue things your body tells you about it.
Motor learning has something called proprioceptive drift. When you repeat an action enough times, your brain starts to pay less attention to it. This is efficient because it helps your brain focus on other things like looking at the terrain or watching other people ride. There is a downside to this. After a while what you think your body is doing and what it is really doing can be very different. You might think you are doing a good job but when you watch a video of yourself you might be surprised. You might have thought you were making turns but the video shows that you were not turning as much as you thought. It means that your body's sense of what it's doing is not accurate anymore. The proprioceptive system is like a machine that needs to be calibrated. Sometimes it gets out of sync.
For someone who is just starting out, this is not a big deal. When you are trying to link turns without falling you have a lot of room to make mistakes. You can feel the snow right away. But for someone who's pretty good at this and wants to get even better, this becomes a major issue. The changes you need to make to your technique are really small. It is hard to tell if you are doing them right because they are smaller than what you can normally feel.
Think about what moving your weight forward means when you're turning. It's not about leaning your body towards the front of the board. That's what newbies do. It makes them lose balance. To really move your weight forward you need to push your shins into the tongues of your boots. At the same time, keep your hips aligned. The difference between doing it right and almost right is very small. It might be a few degrees of how you bend your ankles or a centimeter of how you position your hips. When you're in the middle of a turn, on a slope, your conscious mind can't really tell the difference.
So you keep taking snowboarding lessons. You hear the same tips over and over. You try to put them into practice. Nothing seems to improve. The instructor is not wrong. You are not unable to learn. The problem is that the information just isn't getting through to you in a way that makes a difference.
The Missing Archive
There is another part to this problem and it is one that almost nobody discusses in snowboard lessons: you have no record of your own snowboard progress.
When you were just starting out you had moments to remember, like the time you stood up on the board without falling down. The first time you did a heel-side traverse. The first time you made a turn without stopping. These were things you could really remember. You could say for sure what you did on any day.
Now think about this: what was really different about your riding last Tuesday compared to the Tuesday before that and the one before that? Can you say exactly what was better? Can you describe it in detail? You probably cannot. It is not because you did not get any better at riding; it’s because your brain is not made to remember every little thing you do when you are moving.
When you are on the mountain the mountain is using up all of your working memory. You have to think about the snow and how steep the slope is, how fast you are going and all the other people who are skiing. You also have to think about how tired you are. The mountain is making you make a lot of decisions every time you turn. You do not have any time to think about things like the angle of your front-side edge on the mountain. You get to the bottom of the mountain and all you can think is that it felt okay or that it felt a little scary.
This is really annoying. You ride all season. You think you are getting better. Then you take two weeks off. When you start again you feel like you have not ridden in months. The thing is you did not forget how to ride. What you forgot is what it feels like to ride well. Every time you start riding you have to start over a little bit. You have to remember how to do things. It is hard because you are only going by what you kind of remember and hoping you do it right. You have to rebuild your skills from the beginning using the memories of how things felt when you were riding well. That is not always easy.
The missing archive problem is a thing. When people are just starting out they can see they are getting better because the difference is really big. When you have been doing something for a while and you are trying to make small improvements in things like timing and pressure and how you control your edges, it is hard to know what you are doing without a record of what you have done before. This is like trying to find your way without a map. You are just going on feeling and feeling is not very good at details.
Chasing Objective Feedback
If you hang out with skilled riders, the ones who make riding look easy, you'll notice a thing. Lots of them record themselves. Not to post on social media. For self-improvement.
They'll do a lap, grab their phone at the end, and instantly review the footage. They're searching for stuff they couldn't sense while riding. Was the turn-in smooth? Did my back leg move out of place? Was my weight over the edge the whole time?
This is not about being vain. It is a solution. Riders who have been riding for a while know that they can't always trust their feelings. So they find a way to get help. One way is to use video to analyze their ride. Another way is to ride with someone who's better and can give them honest feedback. Both of these ways have problems. Video means you have to stop and watch it. You can't always find someone to ride with who is better than you.
What experienced riders are really looking for is something straightforward: information about their riding given to them when they can still use it.
The big improvements that riders make at this level usually do not come from learning a trick. They happen when riders finally notice and fix something that they had not seen before even after riding for a long time. This could be a problem with their timing. It could be that they are putting too much pressure on one side. It could be that their riding is not even, even though it feels that way when they are riding.
This is also where the idea of reference is important. When you are learning something people usually compare you to someone who is really good at it like a professional rider. For most people this is not very helpful and can be kind of sad. What really helps you keep going and get better is comparing yourself to how you were. So if you are riding today think about how you rode last week. Were you on the same turn, on the same hill and were the conditions the same? Did you get better at it? That is the thing that really matters.
Now some new tools are being developed to help with this. The Heygo sensor can track over 100 motion metrics in real time. It gives you audio feedback like "start changing direction earlier" through a Bluetooth earpiece. This feedback is compared to your last run. When riders get objective feedback, not just after the ride, it really helps them improve. They do not have to wait to review a video at the end of the ride. This immediate feedback helps them break through their performance plateau.
The main idea is bigger than one thing. The important thing to remember is this: if you have been stuck for a while it is probably not because you need to learn more things. It is because you need better information. You need to know things that are clear enough to help you notice what you might be missing. You need to know things that you can act on right away. You need to know things that are about you and your own life not about someone else’s life.
Beyond the Plateau
Your plateau is not a judgment about how good you are at something. It is just what happens when you use a system that helps you survive to try to get better. Lessons for beginners at snowboarding are good at what they do. They help you get down the mountain safely. You can even make turns and have fun. The things that work when you are first learning to do something big like snowboarding do not work when you are trying to get really good at the small details.
When you finally get this you will start to feel better. You are not failing to get better even though you are trying hard. The thing is, you have gotten too good for the kind of feedback you are getting now. To move forward, what you need to do is find sources of information that can help you where you are now. Information that is precise, personal and immediate.
You are not stuck because you are not good enough. You are stuck because the things that helped you get to where you are now are not helping you anymore. Better information changes everything.