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Snowboarding Workout

February 25, 2006 Send this Article to a FriendPrint This Article

Author: Certified HyperStrike Trainers

The Sport

An extreme snow sport, snowboarding has increased in popularity over the years. The first snowboard can be traced back to 1929 as a crude, cut-out plank of plywood with clothes lines for foot straps and horse reigns for control. Advancement in material designs have taken snowboarding out of the dark-ages and hurled it into major recreational participations and international athletic events. One of the fastest-growing snow sports, competitive snowboarding has branched into five main disciplines: Slalom, Boardercross, Big Air, Slopestyle, and Halfpipe. Each of these disciplines requires varying skills and techniques, but all of them demand high levels of physical fitness and daring courage. Snowboarders push the limits of physical performance all the time, and to compete with the best, these athletes must prepare their bodies like all other serious athletes.

The Demand

Competitive snowboarding, with its speed, carves, turns, jumps, tricks and outrageous maneuvers, requires awesome physical fitness of its athletes. Regardless of which discipline, the rider must possess strength, power, quickness, and flexibility, because at one point or another each of these fitness qualities will be exploited. For example, the Halfpipe requires power with each jump off the lip to achieve big air and plenty of room to complete a variety of tricks. Slalom, although emphasizing high speed and precision, also requires power for quick balance corrections from unexpected terrain disruptions or from technical mistakes. Slopestyle requires a variety of back-to-back tricks over a course of obstacles that include jumps, halfpipes, hips, rails, and fun boxes, all of which require excellent leg strength and endurance. Boardercross, although different from Slopestyle, still demands exceptional leg strength and endurance to go over jumps, fly through banked turns, and survive other variations in the terrain. Every successful athlete in almost every sport must possess strength, power, speed and flexibility, and competitive snowboarding is one of those sports that no longer tolerate the casual athlete.

Injuries

A recent study (Donald, 2005) found that snowboarders sustain spinal injuries more frequently than skiers. Another study (Fukuda, 1999) found that snowboarders suffer more head injuries than skiers. A five-year study observed that the percentage of upper-extremity injuries, as compared to total injuries, are significantly higher in snowboarders than in skiers (Matsumoto, 2000). However, other studies found that snowboarders and skiers are equally prone to injuries, while some studies discovered that injury types and patterns differ between snowboarders and skiers. Essentially, injury statistics depend on which studies are looked at, but the one consistency that can’t be refuted is that injuries can and do occur in snowboarding. It is therefore a strength and conditioning program is employed as a training adjunct to training on the snow.

The Snowboarding Workout

Snowboarding is primarily a sport-specific skill, so time spent training on the snow should be of emphasis and large volume. But two factors make dry-land strength training important for the snowboarder: First, in most places on-snow training is limited to certain seasons, and on-snow training camps in the off-season are limited in numbers and accessibility. This makes dry-land training a necessary adjunct to actual snowboard training. Second, and perhaps more important, is that today’s snowboard competitor require superior physical conditioning in order to continue to push the performance envelop at all levels, especially at the elite level.

Although little scientific research has explored the physical demands of snowboarding (other than its injuries), observational analysis can offer insight into what kind of physical demands the snowboarder must meet.

Although the five main disciplines have variations in techniques, duration of competition, and body maneuvers, it is clear that all snowboarders must have strength, power, quickness, and flexibility. Possessing these physical qualities means bringing a much more athletic body to the slopes or the Halfpipe. The snowboarder must train for these qualities beyond the snow.

Take-offs and landings in snowboarding impose loading and unloading of the legs, therefore exercises such as the back squats and front squats should be used to increase leg strength. Take-offs in the Halfpipe and Big Air require explosive power to attain height, so exercises such as power cleans, power snatches, and box jumps are used to increase leg power. The above exercises greatly help in another important area: Landing from a jump, which can be stressful on the lower extremities. Legs must be strong and powerful -- jump height and air tricks themselves can depend significantly on the ability to land well. If the athlete cannot land well, then achieving bigger air and greater hang time is difficult, if not impossible!

We strongly believe that a good strength and conditioning program helps enhance snowboarding performance, but it’s especially important that it also enhances structural strength to support the body in the event of those inevitable crashes and falls. So it’s important to train for the hypertrophy of muscle, tendon, and ligament tissues, as well as for the increase in strength of joints and bone. Further, because of the force resulting from a misjudged landing, the entire backside of the body takes an eccentric pounding as the body caves forward; for this reason, HyperStrike emphasizes strengthening the posterior chain through the extensive use of exercises such as back extensions, deadlifts, and good mornings.

Many other exercises are recommended for the trunk and upper body, largely to enhance performance but mostly to prevent common snowboarding injuries such as spinal and upper-extremity injuries.

The HyperStrike Snowboarding Workout is mostly based on whole-body, multi-jointed, full-range-of-motion exercises in order to achieve the greatest training effect in the least amount of time, so that the athlete can spend more time with snowboard training and winning competitions!

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