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SPAIN Importance of Breathing on Snowboard Technical Work |
By Kylie Dwyer
This clinic was presented primarily by Paula Terra Navarro along with other members of the Demo Team from Spain. The goal of the workshop was to bring awareness to our breathing, transmit this to how it can affect the way we perform our turns, and see how it can boost our performance or help our students.
We used a variety of exercises to ultimately work on two concepts:
- Do we feel stronger and more balanced on the snowboard as we inhale or as we exhale?
- How can we use breath to aid in the timing of our turns?
We started with a warmup run simply bringing awareness to our breath while snowboarding. There was an array of responses from workshop attendees such as, sometimes I hold my breath and my breath was irregular.
Paula and the team then introduced the concept of exploring when we feel our strongest, on an inhale or on an exhale, and we did a static exercise at the bottom of the slope to find this. Most of the workshop attendees felt stronger on the exhale, but it did vary. We then explored this concept while doing up unweighted turns. Inhaling at the initiation, exhaling through the execution and completion, and then the opposite, exhaling at the initiation, inhaling through the execution and completion. We also used ollies and nollies to explore this concept. There was a mix of results from the workshop attendees. My personal experience was that the former allowed me to feel more strength and balance, but the latter gave me more rhythm in my turns.
We then took this concept to short turns and added the timing in. We explored timing the breath every turn, then every second turn, inhale on heelside, exhale on toeside, and the reverse. Some workshop attendees preferred to inhale and exhale every turn, I quickly learned that I benefitted from slowing my breath down, inhaling and exhaling every second turn. This allowed me to relax into the short turn and find a rhythm.
Our last challenge brought it all together. We took the two concepts into rollers, berms, and zipper line bumps. It was valuable to apply our personal preferences in this varied terrain and for me, having this focus gave me more rhythm and flow down the bumps.
To sum up the workshop, we each shared our experiences, it was interesting to see how the groups’ preferences varied. Paula also explained that the team is continuing to research this topic. I look forward to following their progress.
The breath is powerful, though, we need to bring awareness to it first to gain the full benefits. Once we have this awareness, we can start exploring different techniques of breathing and harness how this can help us flow on our snowboard.
