How much weight should you have going through the front foot?

How much weight should you have going through the back foot?

Is it 60-40?

Is it 70-30?

Does it change through different parts of the turn?

My short answer is don't think about it too much and don't try and put numbers on it because trying to figure out exactly what percentage of weight you have going down through each foot is incredibly difficult to do, especially when you're sliding down the mountain on a plank of wood.

Instead, you can just follow a very simple and easy-to-implement rule that will have you standing on your board in a certain way.

Once you're stood on your board like that, you'll have your weight in your right place and you won't even need to think about how much weight you have going through the front or the back foot.

I'll give you that rule in just a moment.

Then after that, we'll get on to exactly when during the turn you might want more weight through the front of the board or more weight through the back of the board.

Then finally, we'll cover some specific scenarios where you really want to exaggerate how much weight you have to the front or how much weight you have to the back.

Let's get on to this one rule that you can implement.

When you put it into your riding, it's going to fix 99% of your weight distribution woes.

When we're talking about weight distribution, we're talking about weight over the front foot or weight over the back foot, or making a movement towards the nose or making a movement towards the tail to apply more pressure through the front of the board or the back of the board.

This is often referred to as fore and aft movement.

To do that, to get more pressure towards the nose or more pressure towards the tail, we're making a longitudinal movement where we shift our weight from tail to nose or nose to tail across the length of the board.

I think this obsession with weight distribution comes from when you're learning to snowboard.

The most common beginner mistake that everyone does when they're learning to make turns is that they have way too much weight over the back foot.

When your weight's over the back foot, you can't use your front knee and your hip and your front ankle effectively as a lever to turn the board from edge to edge.

What we say to beginners is put more weight on the front foot.

We might say, hey, put 60% of your weight on the front foot, but 70% of your weight on the front foot.

All of that is to do is simply to encourage them to get out of this position and shift them into this stacked position where their hips and knees are stacked vertically over their ankles, and that will allow them to make effective steering movements.

What is simpler than thinking 80%, 70% of weight on my front foot and 20% or 30% on my back foot?

It's really hard to actually quantify how much pressure you're putting through your feet.

What is much, much simpler is to follow this simple rule.

All that is, is to simply imagine your spine, the line of your spine down here, you just want to keep that at all times perpendicular, so at a right angle, to the angle of your board.

If your board is like that, my spine is like that.

As the board tilts, my spine is going to tilt with it.

What you can imagine even easier is like an upside down capital letter T.

If you maintain that position at all times during your riding, you'll have correct weight distribution through your feet, and you'll be able to ride well on slopes of any gradient.

Let's take a look.

Now, for most of you, simply maintaining that upside down capital letter T position with your spine perpendicular to the angle of the board at all times will have you riding much, much better, and it will have your weight in the right place.

It will have you balanced with your weight centered over the middle of the board, and most importantly, it will have your joints effectively stacked upon each other, so you can use them effectively to steer your board.

Some of you might be thinking, well, I've heard you want weight to the front of the board at the start of the turn to help use that top part of the side cut.

Through the middle of the turn, you might want your weight a bit more centered using the middle of the board.

At the end of the turn, I've heard that aft pressure, pressure through the tail, is really helpful.

Yes, that is really good advice because ideally, throughout the turn, as you work your way through the curve of the turn, through the arc of the turn, it's nice to have some pressure at the front of the board at the start of the turn, so it kind of grabs and pulls you in, and then you progressively work your weight along the side cut and finish with weight through the tail of the board at the end of the turn.

Often, when people think about this and they kind of overthink it, it ends up when they get into these kind of awkward positions.

At the start of the turn, they might be really kind of lent out like this, or at the end of the turn, they might be right back over the tail like this.

When you start doing that, it gets you into these strange positions where your leg might be straightened out, and if your leg's straightened out, suddenly you lose the ability to kind of use your knee and your hip over that front foot to steer the board.

The whole idea with maintaining this sort of upside down capital letter T position is because your joints are stacked, you can use your knees and your hips independently, really effectively, to steer the board.

If you use knee steering properly, the great thing about knee steering is that if you get it right, it actually gives you that weight shift that we want from fore progressively to aft, shifting your weight along the side cut of the board throughout the turn without you having to think about making any of these kind of weird movements that often get you out of shape.

Let me show you exactly how that works.

So, turning from toes to heels, my front knee and hip pass over the top of the board, I land my weight through the heel of my front foot right there, and that sends my weight to this top part of the side cut of the board here, and that will start pulling me into the turn.

My back knee is still over the board with a little bit of pressure on the toe edge, but as soon as that front foot is clicked in, I start to pull my back knee and hip across the board, and as I do that, that will start to apply pressure through the heel of my back foot, and that's going to slowly shift my weight from being over the nose of the board through the center of the board, and that is happening as I come through the middle part of the turn, which is putting my weight in the center of the board.

Then, at the end of the turn, as my back knee and hip has come fully over my back foot, that's going to give me more pressure through the back of the board, and that pressure is only going to increase as I start to roll my front knee and hip over the board to get onto the toe edge.

As that front foot's flattening, I've got more pressure through the back foot at the end of the heel side turn there, and then as my shin starts applying pressure into the front of the boot and my hip and knee are stacked vertically over the toe edge, over my front foot, suddenly that weight is shifting from the back of the board up to the nose of the board, now on the toe edge.

Once again, as my back knee and hip passes over the top of the board, that's going to draw my weight from the nose through the center, end of the toe side turn, maximum bend through my back knee, hip stacked vertically over the toe edge, pressure through the back of the board.

As that is happening, once again, my knee is now rolling from toes to heels over the board, ready to repeat the process.

If you're knee steering effectively, then you're going to get that weight shift through the turn fore to aft that we want.

Ta-da.

If that knee steering talk has left you a little bit confused, don't worry.

I'll put some video tutorials on knee steering in the video description down below that you can take a look at.

Before we finish, I want to quickly address some of the scenarios when you might want to break out of that upside down capital letter T with your spine perpendicular to the angle of the board.

Today, we've got some cruddy soft snow that I rode through earlier, and to help keep the nose afloat on that stuff, I definitely shifted more weight to the back foot and broke out of that perfect perpendicular position.

Powder is the other obvious example.

It's really going to help keep the nose up on the top of the snow if you shift more weight over the back foot.

Freestyle, another kind of simple one.

If you want to start doing butters, presses, really kind of bending the board, bending your weight over the nose of the tail, then obviously you're going to have to break out of that position.

Moguls, another one.

As you kind of absorb the bumps one leg at a time, then you might not be holding that perfect upside down capital letter T.

However, my point remains this.

If you can keep that position, if you can keep your spine perpendicular to the angle of the board on slopes you're riding of any given gradient, then it's going to properly stack your joints effectively over each other so that you can knee steer and use each leg independently to turn the board.

And if you can do that, you can create turns of any size and shape.

And if you're doing that, well, then you're riding pretty well.

And you probably don't need this advice and you're probably not worried about what percentage of weight is going through each foot because you're already riding well.

And it's a question I get so much.

So many people ask me about that and it usually comes from when you get onto steeper slopes, you really are kind of struggling to keep enough weight on the front foot.

But rather than trying to put a number on it, as I say, just keep your spine perpendicular to the angle of the board and you'll be good.

Once you've got that, then it's going to be easy to make small deviations from that perfect position and you'll feel what that does to your board.

For instance, you might want to keep a bit more weight over the front foot throughout the turn to let the back end kind of wash around if you need to quickly get through a tight spot in between moguls.

Or you might be carving and you're really driving a lot of weight into the board, a lot of pressure through the board and you feel the back end kind of going away from you a little bit.

Then yeah, you might want to shift a bit more weight through the back foot and that's where this kind of open carving position comes from that I've talked about in other videos that allows you to drive more weight through the back of the board.

But for 99% of what you need to do, spine perpendicular to the angle of the board and you're good.

All right, thank you for watching.

I'm going to shut up.

See you later.

Where am I going?

Over this way.