Carving is where you use the side cut of the board to pull you through the turn and it leaves a clean line in the snow behind you.

Skidding can be seen as the opposite of carving therefore step one is to remove the most common cause of a skidded turn, turning using counter rotation.

Counter rotation is where you twist your upper body in the opposite direction to your lower body and it's really common with beginner snowboarders and yes it is a somewhat effective way of quickly changing from one edge to the other but the result of it is that it always throws your back leg out into a skid therefore it's a bad habit and if you ever want to achieve a carved turn you need to get rid of it from your riding.

So if in counter rotation your upper body is twisted we need to bring your shoulders back in line with the board which brings us on to step two, good posture.

Simply put that means on your toe edge you need to have your knees bent, shins pushed into the front of your boot and my hips are pushed slightly forward, shoulders in line with the board.

Spinning around onto the heel edge, knees pushed out wide again, this time my hips are back, shoulders stacked over my hips, shoulders still in line with the board, this time it's a bit like i'm about to sit down on a bench.

So you've got good posture but how do you actually change from one edge to the other without swinging your arms about?

Well that brings us on to step three, crossing your hips over the board.

So we need to go from our heel edge position with our hips back to our toe edge position with our hips forward and most simply this is done by standing up to initiate the edge change in what we call an up unweighted turn.

Now this sounds really simple and that's because it is.

To change from one edge to another so long as you have good posture all you need to do is stand up and sink down.

Now you can start using knee steering which i'll go over in this video up here but for carve turns they are quite simple and this up unweighted movement is all you need to do.

So you're now riding with good technique but we're still a little ways from achieving a carve turn which brings us on to step number four, achieving an early edge change.

By starting your edge change in a traverse and using the exact same technique we did before albeit the movements are done slightly quicker, we can rock the board onto its new edge before it's in the full line and this is going to be essential technique for making a carve turn.

So we've got the fundamental movements needed to make a carve turn now it's time to work on some edge skills which brings us on to step number five, leaving a thin line.

We want to change our skidded traverse into this, a nice clean thin line across the slope.

Now we do this by changing our lateral movements that is how much we lean our body back into the slope, not enough like right now the board's still skidding a little bit more i get that thin line too much i'm not going to do that i'm going to fall over backwards so it's like a balancing act and you can really take a look back and check your own line as well is it skidded or is it nice and thin so let's have a look at that one i've just done that's what we want that nice clean thin line in the snow so the lateral movement the leaning into it that's the main thing you change but also you might want to adjust your vertical movements as well you can do it really tall like a pencil here but it's quite hard to balance so just bending your knees a little bit more sinking down into it that's just going to lower your center of mass close to the board and make it easier to find the right point where you leave that nice thin line carving across the slope had to quickly change location because we're running out of sun it's pretty much gone here but we will make do with the last light so you're carving across the slope but the turn itself is skidded which brings us on to step number six carving into the traverse so start off going down the side of the piece in a straight line and then just rock back onto your edge see if you can get the board to carve all the way back up the slope let's have a look leaving that thin line in the snow obviously we practice this on both edges so once again in a straight line down the side of the piece get a little bit of speed and at the start here just trust yourself don't kick that back leg out don't rush the start of the turn we're trying to achieve that thin line right from the full line all the way across the piece this is a little bit like riding a bike when you're going fast you can just lean into the turn and the bike will turn around a corner without you having to turn the handlebars we're doing the same thing here you hold that posture lean into the turn and if you get it right the side cut of the board will grip and it is going to pull you around so on to step number seven already this is carving before the full line now this combines exactly what we just did along with the early edge change exercise that we practiced in step number four so take some speed and a clean traverse across the slope and then simply rock over onto your new edge and it's all about finding balance here the faster you're going the more you can lean into the turn the slower you are the less so we can do the same thing on the heel edge as well so come across a edge change hold that heel edge and just let it pull you around step number eight we made it there's still a little bit of light left on the mountain and we can finish this off let's link it all together step eight is carving let's go last run of the day empty piece let's link it all together so rather than one turn at a time i'm going to rock onto my toe edge and then i'm just going to take it straight into the next one it's getting a little bit bumpy a little bit icy but hold onto that heel edge and the more you lean into the slope the tighter it's going to make the arc of your turn so if you're a bit lazy with it you'll end up doing really big turns if you rock back make a bigger lateral movement you're going to put more pressure through the board and it's going to how long you hold on to the carve so to slow myself down i'm actually bringing the board back up the slope a little bit that slows me down you see that again here hold on the toe side back up the piece slows me down as i get into the full line i start picking up more speed that's when i can lean my body more onto the inside of the turn this is getting really icy okay so just rolling from one edge into the other standing up to make the edge change holding my posture shoulders in line with the board going from one edge to the other piece bash is starting to come up which should give me a little bit of nice soft groomed snow to play with now he's probably going to get annoyed at me for this but here we go oh that's better nice rocking one edge to the other it's all about just crossing those hips over the board in front of the board behind the board in front of the board behind the board thank you for this mr groomer cool so there you have it take your turns from those real basic skidded turns into nice clean carve turns that was a good one we covered a lot today thank you for watching guys as always if you've got any topics you want me to cover drop them in the comments down below and who knows i could be making your video next but for today that's it we're done some people over there giving me a weird look and i shall see you next time oh yeah