What Are The Snowboard Riding Styles?

There are three types of snowboard riding styles: Freeride, Freestyle and Alpine.

Freeride, also called All Mountain, is riding the mountain, cruising and doing tricks using the mountain’s obstacles and undulations. Most snowboarders are freeriders. Freeride boards are usually the more popular of most boards, somewhere between an Alpine board and a Freestyle board. They fit beginners as well as experts, and allow you to enjoy the All Mountain terrain. Usually they are soft, with both ends of the board turned upwards to allow a riding switch. All new boards, even the cheap ones, are quite good and outperform even an expensive board built 4-5 years ago.

 

 

 

 

Freestyle as in many other extreme sports is doing tricks with the board. It includes many jumps, spins, halfpipe tricks as well as many other things. Freestyle boards are shorter, lighter and more flexible than the Freeride board, which make them also a good choice for beginners as they are more forgiving than the Freeride boards. Though freestyle boards can be used to ride the whole mountain, they are not built for fast cruises and carving turns.

 

 

 

Alpine, also called Carve Style is riding at high speed and taking hard turns on groomed runs. This is definitely not recommended for beginners. Alpine boards are narrow, long and stiff to allow fast direction changes at high speed. This is not the board for doing tricks.