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By Jimmy MacLeod

When a person uses a narrow board to descend down a snow covered slope this form of board-sport is called snowboarding. Though very like skiing, it is inspired by surfing as well as skateboarding and the sport was developed in the US in the ‘60s and 70s and reached culmination when it became a Winter Olympic Sport in 1998.

The snowboard was the handiwork of people like Sherman Poppen, Chuck Barfoot, Dimitri Mitrovitch, Tom Sims as well as Jake Burton Carpenter. Burton Snowboards, which is one of the largest and better known snowboard companies in the world, was founded by Jake Burton Carpenter.

Four sub-disciplines

Snowboarding can be sub categorized into four sub disciplines and each makes use of a slightly different snowboard design. The first sub-discipline is freeriding which is used on natural terrains of mountains and the aim is to perform it for recreation and does not really focus on any technical tricks or involve racing. Freeriders try and explore the mountain through trees, in powder bowls or in any other place where they feel comfortable. A variant to free-riding is extreme snowboarding or big mountain snowboarding.

The second sub-discipline is known as freestyle snowboarding which involves performing different tricks on a snowboard. The tricks may be performed on the ground and are called jibbing, bonking, grinding, pressing and buttering, to name a few or the tricks may be performed in the air such as spins, flips, and grabs. For freestyle snowboarding, the boards are often shorter and the rider uses softer boots as compared with other snowboarders.

The third sub-discipline is alpine snowboarding which is the practice of turning or carving the snowboard instead of skidding the snowboard. For alpine snowboarding the snowboard boots are hard plastic and look much like ski boots but are not as stiff in the ankles and the heel too is shortened to enable hanging over the edge of the snowboard. To make an analogy, free-rider snowboards and freestyle snowboards can be compared to dirt bikers while alpine snowboards are like road bikes.

The fourth sub-discipline is backcountry/powder which began as fresh powder-craving snowboarding because it was less expensive than using the upscale ski parks and before snowboarding was permitted at resorts, backcountry/powder snowboarding was the only form of snowboarding. Nowadays, backcountry snowboarding is affordable only to those who have enough cash to make trips to Alaska or the mountain ranges of the West in order to ride outside resorts.

Author Details:
Jimmy MacLeod, copywriter for various websites including, Snowboarding and The A to Z of.

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