i’ve always thought one board would be much easier to manage over two skiis. i’ve done skiing but never tried snowboarding.
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The amount of points of contact on the ground make this a little bit more difficult.
When skiing, you always have at least two points on the ground for the most part. Your feet. But you also have stability rods that you can use which makes it four.
In snowboarding you are controlling one single point of contact. So your movements have to be countered by your body for stability instead of adding an extra leg.
It’s the difference in balance and support.
Skiers have two edges (one on each ski) to dig into the snow to turn. They’re both directly on the skier’s body. A snowboarder only has one edge, and it’s outside of the body mass, so a snowboarder has to lean to dig in. This is why you see new snowboarders spending a lot of time trying to lean back and then balling on their butts.
Snowboarder since age 12 (37 now). They both take about the same time to learn. I’ve seen some people start carving on their first day. Snowboarding is physically more demanding because in order to maintain stability, you need to have your weight on either the balls of your feet or on your heels. This means that at any given moment, your calves or your thighs will be activated. Unlike skiing, if you try to distribute your weight evenly between the balls of your feet and your heels, you will “catch an edge” and fall over. This biomechanical fact is most evident on shallow sloping runs that curve either to the left or right. Depending on whether you ride goofy or regular, on runs like that, you will have to spend a long time with your calves or thighs flexed in order to stay upright and that will get tiring quickly.
It’s not. Who told you that it is?
Most people say snowboarding is harder on day 1, then gets easier to get better at. Skiing is much easier on day 1, but will be more of a challenge to pick up skill. This is just due to the nature of being able to stand up and using the lift. Being on two separate skis is much closer to natural than being strapped in to a single (mostly) rigid board.
That’s just to get to intermediate level. Both are probably equally difficult to get *very* good at.
As someone who’s mediocre at both, I would agree with the first thought.
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