Snowboard Freestyle Trick: How to Perform a Backflip Indy
ARTICLE BY: Daryl Marly
Everyone’s seen snowboard movies where experts hurl themselves off all kinds of terrain, all with effortless ease and in a ridiculously smooth style. You’d be forgiven for thinking such maneuvers are easy. The truth is very different, in some instances professional riders will have needed a whole truckload of attempts at a trick before it looked camera-worthy.
Advice here will hopefully help you to smooth out any difficulties you have with this trick, in the process helping you to avoid the hospital.
So to begin with, once you’ve mastered various forms of freestyle trick in the parks and on natural terrain you may be ready for a move that almost always guarantees high quantities of savage rubbernecking. Inverted aerials are potentially lethal if done wrong so you need to be of a fairly high standard and confident. Trying this trick initially in deep powder may be a great starting place since any crashes will be far less painful and physically damaging.
A great jump for this trick is a large wedge which follows on to a wide landing spot with a good degree of slope.
Approach the jump with a fair degree of velocity, don’t speed check as this has a nasty habit of reducing your height and therefore chances of performing this trick successfully. When the nose of your board reaches the tip of the wedge look up and shift your weight backwards. This movement acts to commence your rotation and provide you with some lift in the air.
At this point commitment is vital. You need to keep looking up and backwards so that the rotation continues. Often when people first try this maneuver their images become blurred. With continued practice their aerial awareness improves massively.
If you feel the need to grab your board, go ahead. The indy grab lies on the edge of the board between your two sets of toes and is a great grab to start with due to it being easy. Remember that grabs tend to make you body more compact and thus spin quicker! If you are rotating quicker than you’d like to its probably best not to grab.
If you’ve performed this backflip well you’ll be starting to spot your landing area. Although your body is still rotating it is important to keep your eyes fixed on the landing. This action slows your rotation, and as before practice will make this part easier each time.
When your rotation is finishing extend your legs and prepare for the landing. Try to keep your legs a little bent and nice and loose so as to absorb the impact and not cause any injuries.
Ride out feeling the respect of good friends and complete strangers alike, get on the lift and do it again, next time at an even faster pace. Enjoy.
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