AUSTRIA Body Torsion Carving

By Jon Steel

Tuesday morning began with Austria’s on snow clinic. As soon as I saw the theme and content I was intrigued.

We were greeted by Daniel, Benji, Jürgen & Michael. The warm up was very entertaining; we started out of boards, slapping our quads with the focus of mimicking a horse’s gallop, with the intent of going faster and faster. From there we jumped into a rail trick position, back to galloping then jumping a 360. We did this for a few minutes and everyone was definitely warmer afterwards. From there we discussed the theme for the clinic being ‘Body Torsion Carving’ and split into two groups. Daniel & Benji led the group I was in. 

We headed up the chairlift and got into a static positioning drill, they used me as an example of the position we were trying to achieve. It felt quite similar to what we promote in Australia, the main difference was my hips and upper body were more open in the direction of travel. Daniel went into good detail about this position being influenced a bit by ski technique and their stance being double positive in the binding angles. The more open body position would definitely be more attainable with a more directional stance vs a freeride or freestyle stance. They explained the context behind this stance; it made it easier to use upper body angulation and they could direct more pressure to their working edge in this position.

 

From there we looked to use this stance in a Peter Bauer drill in more of a longer carved turn. The focus was driving the back hand forward to the front leg on heelside & the front hand to the front leg on the toeside. We weren’t focusing on any vertical range of movement yet, purely the stance & the upper body angulation. I found this fun & the snow was perfect for it. With the intent of getting the front hand closer to the front leg I found at times more of my balance was directed to my front foot, & I was starting to lose the tail of the board at times on the heelside turn. After a bit of mileage with that we then added in vertical movements. We focused on an up-unweight (or extending at initiation) for the movement pattern. The context behind this was they wanted us to be balanced closer to the edge through the middle and completion of the turn, which makes a lot of sense. After that we were encouraged to rise up and move forward, very similar to projecting our mass to the centre of the new turn.

    

We moved onto a carve grab drill next to encourage us to use more upper body angulation to keep our mass balanced over the working edge. Again, the snow conditions were very conducive to this and the drill was very fun at high speeds with high edge angles. Daniel did touch on the examination process & criteria at the Level 3 standard. Hard booting was still examined until very recently. It has now been removed from the exam process, mainly due to access to the equipment needed. They were in discussions within their examining staff to look at adding an SBX component to replace this.

 

Overall the clinic was very well presented, Daniel & Benji did a great job in explaining the content and we got plenty of riding in which was awesome. I have a higher appreciation of the influence Austria has had on snowboarding in Australia & I saw many similarities between our two riding styles.