healthy active living

Freestyle, alpine and freeriding snowboarding styles

After deciding that snowboarding is the right sport to get your body fit and healthy, it's important you decide upon which style of snowboarding you wish to pursue before you buy any expensive gear. Here's the realbuzz guide to the different snowboarding disciplines of freestyle, alpine racing and freeriding.

If you are keen to learn lots of snowboarding tricks and learn to ride the half pipe, you will need a different type of board than if you want to get into downhill racing. Most new snowboarders are freeriders, in other words they like a bit of everything, but here are the different disciplines for you to consider before investing in any snowboarding kit...

Freestyle snowboarding
This includes all the tricks and half pipe snow riding. Generally speaking, freestyle snowboard riders ride the half pipe on occasion, but most of the time they make full use of all the quarter pipes, lumps and bumps on the slopes to jump off and do their tricks. They also use the flats on the slopes to do tricks such as ollies, nollies, jibbing, bonking and riding fakie. Freestyle riding has no real rules – it’s dymanic, acrobatic and is responsible for creating loads of snowboarding tricks that other boarders aspire to.

Alpine/racing snowboarding
A few snowboarders prefer to wear hard boots (similar to ski boots) and execute high speed carving turns on well-groomed slopes. This type of boarding is at the other end of the scale from freestyle riding. They use race boards to maximise speed and allow them to perform technical high speed slalom turns. Racing can be a huge buzz but it does require much snowboard training.

Freeriding snowboarding
Freeriding encompasses all aspects of snowboarding – freestyle, and just enjoying cruising down the wide open slopes. Beginner’s wanting to get their own board are best to get a freeriding board so they can easily try out all the styles of riding. These boards tend to be longer and narrower than freestyle boards, with more side cut. While many of us would love to perform some of the freestyle acrobatics that the 13-year olds pull off so well, the truth of the matter is, we are happier being freeriders. Freeriding is the pure essence of snowboarding and it’s the original adrenalin rush. It allows the rider to create their own style and explore the slopes both on and off-piste.