TrickTip Tutorial: How to Backflip On A Snowboard

What up shredder. Today I’m going to teach you the easiest trick in snowboarding. I’m going to teach you how to back flip.

The back flip is the ultimate show off trick. It is the trick that’s going to get you the girls, impress your friends in, make you the most popular kid on the mountain, but how do you actually go out there and learn how to do it? If we’re all honest with ourselves, we can probably admit that we’ve seen someone lay out a huge back, the bundle, the lift, and thought.

I want to be that person, so I’m going to show you not only how you can backflip, no matter what your experience level is, but why backflipping is one of the easiest and the most fun tricks that you can do on a snowboard. A long time ago when I was 14 years old, I watched four one one volume one and Chad Otterstrom, who is an original snowboard gangster, said that backflip was quite possibly the easiest trick on a snowboard at the time.

I said, Chad, what are you talking about? But after hearing him out, I decided I was going to go out there and learn to back flip and decide for myself. Now at the time I got the crazy idea to go outside with my friend Alex and gather up a bunch of leads and back, flip off of a skateboard ramp into the leaves, and this is how I learned to back flip for the first time.

And I recommend you go out there and you learn to back flip on a trampoline. We’re going to back flip off of a diving board off of a cliff, into the water, onto a mattress, into a foam pit. Whatever you can find to go out there and back, flip onto, that’s not going to break your bones. Go out there and learn it there first before taking it to the mountain.

So I don’t recommend you go out there in backflip into leaves. Seems like a dumb idea in retrospect. Now after I went out there and learned tobacco leaves, Oh it’s an I drove up to our local mountain Tutty mountain in central Pennsylvania and it was the beginning of the season and they were blowing these big piles of snow.

So we just carved a backflip, jump right into this big pile of snow and went out there and I hooked my first one and a caught my toe edge and I smashed my face right off the ground. But the snow was soft and I got back up, hiked up the Hill and stomped the second one. And from that day forward, my life was never the same. I’ve been doing backflips ever since and that had to be about 15 years ago. I’ve had a long varied history with the backflip. I’ve done them off of everything.

I have even been disqualified from competitions for back flipping and mountains that don’t allow you to go upside down. Luckily Ben ended up winning this competition after I was kicked out. Now you don’t want to go out there and learn backflip for your first trick. So yes, beginners can learn back flips here. You can see my friends, Sam and Jess doing backflips after only snowboarding for about a year. But you want to have some basics in place before tackling this trick.

So let’s start with the Ollie. That’s the foundation of every snowboard trick. You should have all these on lockdown. You should also know how to front side three 60 how to backside three 60 you might even want to know how to team dog or front flip. So you’re used to going upside down and coming back around to your feet. Now the back flip is a very simple trick.

We go off the jump facing forward and we lay on facing forward in between. We just roll over backwards one time. So what you want to do is take a gradual heel-toe approach up to the jump. So you’re slightly on your toe edge when you’re taking off. No. A big mistake people make is they either Huck it too hard and they over-rotate or they hit their head off the jump when they take off or they don’t hook it hard enough and they end up upside down on the air.

So what you want to do is right up to the lip of the jump on your toes and just have a knife even pop off the jump. Now what you’re going to start to lean back a little bit at the very last minute, but you’re not going to Huck it in a way that you’re going to hit your head off the lip.

Okay? You’re not an amateur. Let’s get it together. Come off the jump pop, and then just heave your legs back over your head and look behind. You know, as soon as you get upside down, you’re going to see the landing. And that’s what makes this trick so easy and so much fun. Because as soon as your spot not landing, you can slow yourself down by spreading out your body and then just bring your legs around to land.

So avoid those mistakes of over hucking or underhooking. Now the number one thing you have to not do on a backflip is bail out after you’ve already started. The trick, and I don’t know why people do this because it’s a lot less scary to come around and stump a backflip than it is to bail out halfway through and dive into the ground. But I’ve seen it over and over again.

Okay, so if you’re going to backflip, the number one thing you have to do is commit and the number two thing you have to do is not to over Huck it or try and Huck it really fast. This isn’t a trick that you have to whip around. Okay? You need to pop and then just heave your legs over your head and then spot your landing. It’s really easy. Now there are a million different features you can back for upon. You can do it on anything from cut ups.

You can build a jump in your yard, you can do it off a powder jumps or cliff drops. You can do it over big tables, you can do it on quarter pipes to fakie like Danny here, he’s a master at it, but there are good jumps to backflip and there are bad jumps to back flip. So I recommend you start out with the jump with a big steep takeoff and a nice mellow landing.

So you don’t want to do this on a step down because you’re going to get hurt. You don’t want to do it off of rock drop to start because if you mess up, you’re going to break yourself. What you want to do is find a jump like this that has a nice steep ramp, does almost all the work for you and then a nice soft landing, and when you have a jump like this, you almost don’t have to do anything.

You just go out, you just lean your head back and then you spot that landing and you come around. Now I like to do my backflips kind of open up to the lip of the jump, but there are variations of the trick. You can do egg flips like Ben does here if used to play SSX tricky growing up. You know what I’m talking about?

You can do grabbed backflips. I like to grab Indy Alex grabs method that looks super cool. You can do laid out backflips. My friend Michael calls this the Jesus slip and it’s pretty much the best feeling you could possibly have on a snowboard. I mean, laying it out upside down, flying through the air. People are gonna love this. Okay? They absolutely go crazy for it.

Now some common things that are going to go wrong when you’re try back backflip is spinning to the side. So you, you want to do one straight loop in whatever way you do that. So you can see Kevin here does a loop over his back crate shoulder. That’s fine, right? You can see the egg flip, you do the loop kind of straight back, that’s fine. And I do mine where I kind of open up and loop the whole way back that way.

But what you don’t want to do is accidentally spin unless you’re trying to do a rodeo. Now once you’ve mastered the backflip and you can stomp it off anything, you’re going to want to try some variations. So a cool one is the backside rodeo. You can see Alex here, he’s a master of it. I’ve never been great at it. But here’s my best attempt. You can do Miller flips.

These started as a skateboard trick. It’s kind of like a front side invert where you flip over to fakie but on a snowboard you can do them over spines and things. So Ben is a master at these. I’ve done the occasional Miller flip in my life and then one of my favorite tricks of all times, which I first learned about in cool boarders is the crippler. The crippler is like a front side one 80 backflip on a quarter pipe.

You come up on your toe edge and you just slip it over your front shoulder and then come back down regular. We’ll cover this in another trick tip. So I ended up going out there. I learned to backflip. Now fast forward about 10 years and I’m a little tipsy in a bar downtown and by a little, I mean a lot. I had had too many to drink and I see Chad Otterstrom at a snowboard event and I went up to him and I told him how much that story meant to me. But in reality it probably just went up in, he couldn’t even understand what I’m saying.

So Chad, if you’re listening to this, sorry about that night in the bar dude, but you’re the man still are. So go out there if you want to get the chicks, if you want to impress people who are riding Lyft, if you want to be the man, go out there, learn to back flip, lay it out please ladies and gentlemen, lay that back for about and I will see you in the next video@treads.com is the number one place in the world to learn how to not suck at snowboarding.

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Peace out shredders.