For anyone reading, a reminder that I teach snowboarding (skiing too, but prefer the boarding). In the PSIA/AASI forum, I had written kind of a summary. Anyways, here is my input (part 1) between the two sports:
The third week of June 2006 was the best week of my life! Went from being the
instructor all winter to being the student. I saved up and for my
vacation I went to wakeboard camp
http://wakeboardingcamp.com
From the couple of tries at wakeboarding in 2005, as compared to what I learned by trained instructors at camp - well, there is no comparison. Before, I could get up, carve some, through trial and error taught myself surface 180's and could ride switch which came from the snowboarding experience, but beyond that I was more or less clueless on the physics and effective ways to wakeboard.
The liquidifed version of boarding certainly has many similarities to snowboarding. The way we use camber to pressure the board and make certain
movements such as in ollies, seems to similarly equivalate "rocker" on the board, with
different rocker designs affecting pop and IMO, a "reverse" type of
pressure distributing used when getting pop off the wake. Edging and
using basic flexion and extension and general riding seems to mimic "powder
riding". What really stood out for me as a snow instructor and now more engrained into my brain come winter time was the relationship of how the upper body movement's affect the performance down below. With the wakeboard, a bad habit I'm glad I broke early was the "breaking at the waist" (arms
way out and board one direction and rear end sticking way out- a bad
riding habit I've personally worked on breaking before in the snow.) Ollies still are not one of my stronger riding points, but do carry very similar movements as the snowboarding does.
Another thing I didn't realize prior but do now; when self-teaching myself on the water, I figured to keep the
nose of a wakeboard up, just pressure that rear leg and walla -- now I
see and feel the difference, much like snowboarding, tail weighting
that board is going to create less effective movements and slower
response. Distributing the weight equally (or close to) on the wakeboard is best. The rocker is going to help with keeping that nose from digging in too much.
Traditionally, at least based on my obsevations, wakeboards had
dual center fins on either end. I had the opportunity to demo a couple
of boards and this year a four fin model (with NO center fins) - the "Hyperlite Drive". One of these days when I get a digital camera to replace the old broken one, I'll have to take pictures of my favorite summer toy. Now if I just had the money for a boat so I didn't always have to mooch pulls.
