During the hot summer months, snowboarders like myself have to retire from the slopes and enjoy time at the beach to relax and cool off. With so much time off, many people believe that we can go right into skateboarding as a substitute for snowboarding and sometimes that is not always the case. That is why I am here to answer the age-old question that many spectators have. “Is snowboarding like riding a skateboard?”
Keeping your balance is important
When it comes to snowboarding, there are different techniques that are required in order to maneuver the board while sliding down an icy hill. I would have to say that skateboarding is harder to pick up when learning the basics because the balance and basic tricks take extra time to get down. With snowboarding, you can spend a full day in a private lesson and figure out basic turning skills fairly quickly.
With skateboarding you have to have balance in order to get things going, not to mention you have to learn to ride basic transition like ramps and mini pipes pretty early on to be able to ride properly in a lot of skateparks (if that’s what you choose to do.
That’s not to say both don’t take a ton of time, skill and effort to master, but I find skateboarding takes a little more time for most people to get the basics down, whereas with snowboarding you can be zooming down ski runs in a day.
An overlapping sport
Both skateboarding and snowboarding consist of overlapping movements that are heavily influenced from one another. For example, when you spin backside, you turn back down the mountain in the direction of travel, similar to what you would do on a skateboard with a backside kick turn .
Be aware that just because you snowboard, doesn’t mean you’ll automatically be able to balance easily on a skateboard. As I mentioned before, it does take the time to get different movements down, even if you snowboard and have good balance.
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