Korean Karving!

The Koreans love to carve and chose to focus their on snow session on sharing some of the movements they use to lay down those sweet arcs.

Interski truly is an international melting pot of cultures, languages, and snowboard techniques and this was very evident during this session. The Korean snowboard techniques and approaches are clearly a product of their environment. Dealing with mostly man made snow on slopes that are typically groomed to within an inch of their lives you can see why the Koreans love to carve, and why they are so good at it.

Despite the language challenges and some difficulty in understanding the nuances of their message at times the Korean session was very well attended and all of the attendees were keen to hear what they had to say and to try the movement patterns they are promoting.

The primary technical message was to create good loading of the snowboard through constant vertical movement in the lower joints. If you are static at any point throughout your turn then you lose the energy built up in the snowboard and your riding becomes less dynamic. They were promoting a very aggressive move into the next turn with the upper body across the board and down the slope using the energy that you had built in the previous turn. This aggressive move helped to set a strong platform on the new edge high in the arc and gave them the ability to begin to bend the board early in the turn.

One of their demo team riders has been riding a race board with plates and risers with hard boots all week showing their commitment to the carve. Beyond that though he has shown impressive versatility all over the mountain with short turns in formation on the demo slope and even a few laps over the jump.

Despite the language challenges the riding did the talking in this session! Very impressive. Kudos to the Korean team for stepping up in front of a huge group to share their ideas in a language that is not very easy for them!