Snowboarding jumps

We have entered a new era of extreme sports. No longer are we limited to snow skiing while on vacation during the winter. Those who have became bored with skiing invented a new style of snow sport called snowboarding. To a beginner, it may seem like a very scary experience to try. It looks very much like surfing. Fortunately, with snowboarding, your feet are attached to the board. You may be familiar with the water sport, wakeboarding. Snowboarding is basically the same concept, except the tricks are much more extreme and the boards are slightly different from one another.

Once you perfect snowboarding and you feel comfortable enough to venture on to something more advanced, then you should try jumps. Jumping tricks are in the freestyle category of snowboarding. You do not need to be a professional snowboarder in order to be able to perform jumps. Nor is it required for you to have a long experience with snowboarding. The important thing is that you are comfortable. If you become scared then you will lose your focus and you will not be able to continue through the jump.

Before you venture off for your first jump, there are a few preparations that you need to perform before trying the jump. You should first learn how to “ollie” the board. In snowboarding terms, that means that you jump up off of the ground with your snowboard. To try this, get strapped into your board on a flat surface of land. Bend your knees, and then jump up. You have just performed an ollie. Do this as many times as you can until you have perfected the ollie. It may seem like a simple thing to learn while reading the directions, but after having a large board strapped to your feet, it may not be so simple. The main thing about the ollie that you need to work on is making the front of the board, also called the nose, go up higher than the back of the board while you are in mid-air. After you become comfortable with the ollie on flat land, try it out on a very small slope of land. If you feel confident after trying that, then you are ready for the real jump.

Find a nice long hill that has a good slope to it. You want to make sure that you will not be landing on flat ground because it will be bad for your feet if you do. A slope is much better. Keep your board as flat as possible as you reach the top of your jumping destination. You may also want to ollie slightly to get a nice advance on the jump. Calculate where you are going to land and focus on staying as upright as possible while still landing with the board flat. As you land, bend your knees so that your will not feel the shock of the landing.