What happens if your board is too long

You can see a clip of some professional surfers riding a big shorebreak in Southern California below; no doubt you can see just how many years this could take off your surfboard and maybe your body, too! Taking good care of your surfboard is also key to getting the maximum use out of it over several years. Your board should be treated as best as you can to prolong its life and let you get more fun and enjoyment out of it.

Remembering that your surfboard is a fragile thing will go a long way to getting more fun out of it. I also have an in-depth guide with more tips on how to take care of your surfboard which will help you to keep riding your favorite board for many more years!

Fortunately, we now have removable surfboards, with FCS and Futures Fins at the forefront of the industry, although there are now many, many more companies making these fins. So, if you have a board with glassed on fins, expect them to ding and for you to have a few less years of use out of it.

With all of the points above comes a caveat. Generally, rogue waves would need to be big, powerful and land right on your board for them to break.

More likely, though, is an accident out of the surf. As some examples, I have seen surfboards come off roof racks , cars reverse over boards in the car park, or people just drop or step on a board on dry land. As such, remind yourself that no surfboard is indestructible, so treating it carefully will give you the best chance of having many good years out of it.

This is the classic surfboard. As you might have also noticed, these boards come in with the shortest expected life span, along with the foam soft top. This is because surfboard shapers can use heavier fiberglass for a stronger surfboard, but this kind of fiberglass also adds weight to the surfboard.

The heavier glassing options are usually a 6oz. The lighter 4oz fiberglass surfboard will be better for doing turns and maneuvers given its lack of weight, while a heavier surfboard with a 6oz fiberglass layer would likely last longer in bigger, more powerful waves. A PU surfboard with a 6oz. These dents come with general use of a PU board and can eventually lead to cracks and even the deck collapsing due to limited protection.

So, PU surfboards with a heavier layer of fiberglass should last longer while extremely lightweight boards will only last a few years. Epoxy surfboard constructions are a fairly modern innovation in surfing and have come into popular use more and more over the last 20 years. When Surftech, the main brand behind the first serious epoxy surfboards , first launched on a big scale, many people said that the boards were indestructible!

That said, I had an epoxy surfboard made by Santa Cruz that I had a lot of fun on and, after 4 years of solid use did not have as much as one pressure ding on it! If you are above the average weight, consider a longer or wider board, this will provide more stability when riding. You can tell that a board is too short for you when you feel your board chattering under your feet as you pick up speed or when you start to lose balance riding over the smallest bumps.

If you find yourself in deep powder, a shorter board means less surface area and less float to keep you on top of the snow. Overall, a board that is too short makes you much less stable and not perform to the best of your abilities. Check out the Bataleon Global Warmer Snowboard A narrower snowboard allows you to initiate your turns with less effort and also makes it easier to transition from heel edge to toe edge.

Wider snowboards on the other hand will give you more stability but requires more effort to control. Choosing the right snowboard width is important as if your board is too wide for you, you will experience some difficulty transitioning from one edge to another, making you movements slow and sluggish. If the board is too narrow though, you will often unintentionally drag your toes toe drag or heel heel drag of your boot in the snow when turning.

This slows you down, interrupts the flow of your turns and also damages your snowboard boots. Most frequently, toe drag occurs and this can be both irritating and dangerous when attempting turns at higher speeds.

For beginners, freestyle or all-mountain snowboards are what you should look out for because these boards would usually have a centred stance which is great for beginners to start with, and they are usually of soft to medium flex. All mountain boards work well on any terrain, so versatility is the key factor here.

For those thinking about venturing off-piste in search for better snow conditions, freeride boards will be your thing. These boards are usually stiffer in flex, have incredible edge hold for carving and are stable at high speeds on un-groomed, bumpy terrain.

The flex rating of a snowboard tells you how playful or stable a snowboard is. These softer boards are great for beginners to take onto the groomers on-piste , as well as freestyle riders for buttering, flat-land tricks, spins, and overall fun and breezy stuff. Also great for beginners, medium flex boards are still soft enough to making learning easy while maintaining enough stiffness to be stable at higher speeds as you progress and ride faster and harder. Medium flex snowboards are ideal for beginner to advanced riders and freestyle focused riders looking for an all-mountain board to take on groomers and into the terrain park.

We do not recommend these for beginners, stay away for now! Stiff snowboards are very stable at high speed and uneven, icy snow conditions but they require strong fundamentals and good technique to fully enjoy what the snowboard has to offer. The popular opinion in snowboarding is that a rocker profile for pure beginners will reduce your chance of catching an edge and this allows you to practice your C and S turns comfortably.

While this makes it easier for you to progress at early stages of snowboarding, it is not absolutely necessary to start with a rocker profile. I just found it exhausting to skid for speed control or maneuvering in tight spaces, so I'd have to switch back to softboot boards or head home early. I'll work on conditioning pre-season and technique once the season starts and see how it goes this winter.

I've been there quite recently still are sometimes. Also, if you skid the turns, just try to use you upper body instead of only your legs to turn your board.

Its like rotational move where you rotate your upper body shoulders, torso, hips instead of only your legs. It will help you a lot to save your energy. I don't need EC" BTW b.

Board is a good size then. Yeah it just takes practice and time to get used to the different ways of skidding and maneuvering in hardboots and on a longer board. It's foreign, uncomfortable, and exhausting at first. Realize that when you're really carving, you're not fighting the equipment or at least you're not supposed to be. As you get better you'll find yourself fighting the equipment less and less. Don't give up, it's worth it! I ride hard boots and soft boots using a similar technique movement patterns.

See the Sigi Grabner hard boot carving and Yumi Shimizu soft boot carving videos below for an example of how I like to ride and teach carving in hard and soft boots. Your cm Voyager is not too long.

The increased stiffness, weight, pressure and the reduced feeling of the board interacting with the snow due to hard boot equipment can cause people to struggle with swinging the board around to slow down or maneuver at low speed this can also happen when hard boot riders add a plate system under their bindings. I find that precision and finesse are more efficient than brute force or exaggerated movements - that's how most experts make things look easy.

Precision and Finesse come from Practice and Experience The best advise I got in my first season was from an L3 instructor and hard boot wizard. It was to lower my rear boot angle until I had low speeds control and was able to skid comfortably.

The difference was night and day. Get back to basics, finish the turn all the way, going perpendicular to the fall line or more to keep your speed in check You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

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