Starting out in snowboarding

Your snowboarding progress will be built upon the initial basic skills learnt when you first start riding; learning the proper technique from trained snowboarding instructors at the beginning will give you the foundations to work up.

You could take snowboarding lessons on a dry slope in the UK to kick-off, but you are best advised to go for the real thing from the start. In other words, go on a snowboarding vacation.

There are loads of tour operators that offer skiing and snowboarding holidays now and you can do a ‘learn to board’ course for around £150 for five days. Course lengths do vary but a five-day beginner course should set you up perfectly. It takes some longer than others to pick up the basic techniques, but by the end of a five-day course you will probably be turning confidently down blue runs (see below for piste ratings) and get yourself on and off lifts without too much bother. No matter what you achieve in your first week, we believe you will be hooked and gagging for your next boarding vacation...

Pistes are colour-coded so skiers and snowboarders know how easy or hard the slopes are likely to be before throwing themselves down them. The snowboard slope coding is as follows:

Green = very easy

Blue = easy

Red = difficult

Black = very difficult

Essentially, wherever there are skiers there are now snowboarders and virtually all resorts cater for both. However, although you can board at virtually all ski resorts around the world, some are better for boarders than others. A resort with big wide basins, not many drag lifts and a specialist board park are the best bets.