Thinking ahead to the Pre season Tech clinic in Tignes…

Things are looking very wintery here in Chamonix and I’m starting to get very excited about getting out riding. If things carry on as they are I might head up the valley with my split and see what I can find.

My first courses in Tignes are fast approaching and things are starting to get quite white looking up in the mountains. My first course is a Technical clinic which is always a great way to kick off the season as it get me thinking about the finer details of riding and gets me in tune with my body and board for the rest of the winter.

The Tech clinic is all about exploring the finer details of riding. It’s about looking at the way you stand and move, it’s about setting your kit up just right, it’s about understanding and setting up the perfect stance for you, dialling in your kit so that you can work the board with your feet. It’s about understanding the way the board is designed to flex, bend and turn and exploring the pressure and body movements that allow us to steer, carve and flow, riding the board by design rather than by force.

We’ll work on the finer points of Snowboard technique in the morning and then explore these actions in the afternoon Freeride sessions. We’ll work on everything we need and chuck out anything we don’t, bad habits will be thrown out and replaced with flowing movements that work the board under your feet.

We’ll look at understanding the movements of pressure around the board, explore how it flows through the contact points as we steer our turns, we’ll look at the micro movements that are needed to control the board and keep us balanced as we charge down the mountain.

As our board control and our understanding progresses we’ll start to increase the demands of the ride, we’ll increase our speed, carve harder turns and demand more from the terrain.

Now every run has become part of the progression, every turn, every movement is an exploration of what is possible, what works and what doesn’t work.

Now the task is always increasing as we start to demand more and more from our riding and from the mountains constantly changing terrain.

Run by run our skill level develops and our riding becomes inspired by our creativity and our vision of what we can do with each and every feature that the mountain provides.

Yeah…I’m looking forward to the Tech clinic, it sets the foundations of all your future riding. You can’t build a solid future on dodgy foundation, at some point you’ll have to step back and sort them out and this is where that happens. Here we get stuck in and sort it all out working through everything step by step until the foundations are rock solid and your riding begins to flow.

Once the foundations are in place, the rest is easy, from a good natural stance the movements flow through your feet and the micro movements of pressure bend and flex the board to make it do what you want it to do.

The mountains becomes your blank canvas and the ride is your Art…McNab Snowboarding…The Fine Art of Riding Mountains since 1995

Bring it on!