What up shredder today you’re going to learn one of the most stylish, iconic and fun tricks you can do on a snowboard. It’s one that can make you look like a total G if you do it properly or like a total noob. If you can’t master it. Every true shatter needs to have this in their arsenal. The trick is front side three 60
I know some very good writers who still don’t have a respectable front side three 60 and I think it’s because popping up your heels can be a very foreign thing to a lot of writers and I can relate for a long time I could only do these off of side hits and I didn’t really understand how to pop off my heels.
The thing is once I learned how to properly pop off my heels, I learned how to really front side 360 and I learned a front side 540 and a front side 720 in the same exact day. Now I recently taught my friend Danny had a pop off his heels as well and he did the same thing. He went three to five to seven all in the same day. So today you’re going to learn how to properly front-side three 60 and if you can do that it’s really not hard to take it to the next level.
Now there are some prereqs for this trick. The first one, the foundation of most tricks is the Ali. You also learn how to front side 180 kind of backs at 180 how to switch backside 180 how do front side butter and how to do some grabs off of jumps.
Now a lot of people want to skip mastering the switch back, so 180 and go straight to the front side, 360 I can tell you that those people don’t have very good front side threes and they wreck a lot. Mastering the fundamentals, it’s what’s going to make you a serious shredder in starting with the basic building blocks is what’s going to get you the tricks you want. So don’t skip that switchbacks. A 180 so what is a front side? Three a front side, 360 is one full spin where in the first 90 degrees your body is going to turn to face down the mountain.
So that means you’re going to have a blind landing. It’s essentially the combination of a front side, 180 into a switchbacks, 180 in the air. Remember this, this is going to be important, so in order to frontside 360 we have to start with a proper approach to the jump. You’re going to use a toe to heel approach, which means we’re going to approach the jump on the left side.
If you’re regular coming in on our toes and then switched to our heels going up the right side of the jump. Now when you switch to your heels just before the ramp, you’ll want to bend down, wind up your arms by pulling them back like your pre spinning a windup top. When you reach the lip all the way off the jump and center on your heels, you want to jump hard with both legs.
Bend your back leg when you’re jumping and straighten out that front leg. And then as soon as you pop off the lip, I want you to pick up your legs into your chest. Don’t worry about your boards spinning here. Okay. You want to start spinning with your upper body like you can see here and force your board to go straight off the lip while you jump.
This is almost going to feel like a backside shifty with the top of your body twisting and your board and your leg stretching the other way. Now your back arm should come in line with the nose of your board so that your legs are going straight off the jump and your upper body is almost 180 once you’ve taken off, as you can see here, Ben’s upper body is a full 180 degrees before his board has started to spin at all, and this is the big problem most people have with front side three sixties is they try to spin with their board instead of with their shoulders.
You want to keep your board straight off the lip spin with the upper body. Now here’s the secret sauce. The secret is a straight front leg. When you pop, let’s look at what happens to Alex when he doesn’t straighten his front leg and keep his board straight off the lip like I recommend.
Now look what happens when his front leg is straight. He gets a clean pop. He levels out in the air to the land. Let’s take another look at how this works. On a cut up, no. A front side, 360 is just your lower body unwinding. Your upper body spins in your lower body follows in order for this to happen, don’t grab on this trick until your front arm has reached about 180 degrees. That means your front arm is pointing towards the lip that you took off of. If you’ve grabbed before that you’re going to have to whip the trick around and probably look ugly.
Some beginners grabbed too early and it stops their shoulders from rotating altogether or they have to wit the second half of the spin around like I do here when I tried to do a double grab and grabs too early. So it’s okay if your lower body hasn’t spun at all. Just try to get that upper body spinning so all you have to do is hold on and float down to the landing once you grab.
So you can see here my board is only about 90 degrees when I grabbed, but my front arm is the entire 180 degrees. That’s what you’re looking for before starting your gap. Now the entire spins should be taken care of just in the way that you popped off the lip. The rest of the trick, like most tricks on a snowboard, is just going along for the ride after takeoff.
The proper takeoff is everything here. So when you start to come around 270 degrees in the air, you want to look straight down at the ground and start to lower your landing gear. So if you have your legs pulled up into your chest, start to lower your legs down. If you’ve learned switchbacks on 180 is like I recommend this should feel very familiar.
You’re going to stare at your back foot and level out your base. Just look straight down here. If you try and open up your shoulders and look forward to where you’re going, you’re going to over-rotate catch an edge or land on your back. So be sure stare straight down at the ground, land the trick, and then look up to see where you’re going. If you’ve done this, boom, you just stomped your first pro level, front side three. Now if it didn’t work out as planned the first time, don’t worry.
There’s some common things that go wrong. Number one is people wash out on their heels. Usually this is because they’re trying to look where they’re riding out instead of staring straight down with the board until they lay in. The second thing people do is they pre spin off the jump. This is because they’re trying to spin with their legs instead of their upper body first.
So remember to straighten your front leg and pop hard because you’re on your heels. You have to pop harder than if you’re on your toes. When you do bring your legs up into your chest of it. Now sometimes people do this and they end up corking their spin and they land on their back or their butt or their stomach. So I guarantee if you do this, if you find that every fund side three, you’re corking out, your landing on your back is because you don’t know how to switch back.
So 80 once you learn that switchbacks, that one 80 even if you quirk your three sixties you’re still gonna land on your feet. Some people court their front threes so much they resemble a back flip but they still land on their feet. That’s cause they know how to land. A switchback said one 80 so once you learn this chick, you’re going to learn to look straight down at your landing and land on your tail spread evenly across your snowboard.
So what features can you do? A fun side three on? You can do them on the flat ground. You can do them on rollers, many jumps, cut, upside hits, medium jumps, big jumps and there are tons of variations of this trick. The easiest and most natural grabs for front side threes I think are indie grabs steal fish. And you can tweak this one out tail grabs because your hand just follows as you’re spinning.
Now it’s easier to grab without back in because your front shoulder is leading the spin but you can definitely grab with your front hand something like melon cause that’s going to open up that shoulder. Now a more advanced grab with this trick would be nose grabs or mute grabs because that stops your shoulders from rotating.
You can also bring the front three to the rails. So you can do a front side 360 out of a 50 50 you can do front side 360 caps where you tap your nose on something. You can frontside 270 onto a rail, which feels exactly like a fun side three 60 it has the same exact setup. And then of course you have your bigger spins, front side 540 fun side, 720 and fund side 900 and beyond that. Now you can also do a tow side, front side 360 as you can see here.
But we’re going to save that for another trick tip because that’s a completely different trick. So that’s it. That’s the front side, 360 it’s one of the most fun tricks you can do on a snowboard and it’s a building block for everything else that you want to do. Go out there, learn to switch back. So 180 as I said, I know a lot of people are going to skip that, so I’m going to tell you right now, go do it. Then follow these tips and you’re going to rock that front side three, go out there, learn the front side, 360 let me know what you want to see next. That’s all for now. Peace out shredder.
I know this trick today was a bit advanced in be glossed over some of the pre-recs like the Ali front side, 180 switchbacks, 180 butter and graphs. If you want to learn the step by step process to master all of these tricks starting from the very beginning to go from carving to killing it from bunny slope to backflips and from strapping in for the very first time to a true shredder. We’ve got it all laid out for you in a step by step process.
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