8 Snowboard Tricks you can pick up right away

Anyone wanting to take their riding to the next level needs to develop an arsenal of snowboard tricks. Not only do they make you look like a legend, but they’re super fun and very challenging.

Getting down a snowboard trick that you’ve been working on for a while is immensely satisfying, and the buzz of pulling it off for the first time lasts for hours, if not days. Here’s a list of some of the most achievable and most enjoyable snowboard tricks for you to add to your repertoire.

Snowboarding Tricks

Ollie

One of the first tricks you should learn, I have no doubt that you’ve all heard of this one. The ollie requires you to get a little bit of air by jumping off the tail of the board. Not too tricky, but an essential one for your group of tricks.

Nollie

This one is not unlike to the ollie and is a good example of when snowboard trick names get pretty straightforward.

Like the ollie, this requires you to get a little air, but instead of jumping off the tail of the board, you jump off the nose. You might say it’s a nose ollie. A no-llie.

The beauty of the above two is that you don’t need any extra equipment to do them. Just grab your board, find some snow, a little bit of space, and you’re set.

Shifty

This is a fun one which can really help to develop your board control. In a shifty, the rider jumps into the air and rotates the board about 90 degrees, so that it’s facing perpendicular to the direction he or she is moving.

Prior to landing, twist the board back round to its initial position, land soft, and keep riding! Easy, fun, looks good – what more could you want?

The above three are pretty straightforward airs. Let’s get a bit more technical, and touch on some grabs.

Nose Grab

Unsurprisingly, this trick involves grabbing the nose of your board. As you jump in the air, straighten your back leg and lift up your front leg.

This will bring the nose of your board towards you, and allow you to easily reach down with your front hand and grab your nose.

Mute Grab

The mute grab requires you to grab the toe edge of the board in between the bindings. Simply jump, and unlike in the nose grab, bring both of your legs upwards so that your board remains parallel to the ground.

Then, grab the toe edge of the board with your front hand, and you’ve completed a mute grab.

Melon grab

In terms of explanation, this is pretty similar to the mute grab, but if you can do them both you’ll know they require pretty different skills. The melon grab also involves grabbing the board in between the bindings with your front hand, though this time it’s the heel side of your board which you’ll want to be grabbing.

At this point in time, the word grab starts to sound more and more ridiculous, so let’s move on to flips. If you’re in the early stages of your snowboarding career, these may be a little out of your league, but they’re definitely something challenging you can work towards.

Backflip and front flip

Easy to explain, hard to do. A backflip occurs when a rider, obviously, flips backward off a jump, while a front flip is the same thing with the opposite rotation.

McTwist

This is getting seriously advanced now. The McTwist involves a rider riding backside in a halfpipe or similar. In the air, the rider flips forward, generally 540 degrees. The best of the best can go more than 540 degrees though, and this is where it becomes useful to understand a little more about snowboard trick names.

Snowboard tricks are generally referred to in their most basic form, and there are many variations to each trick. For spins and flips, simply add the amount of rotations to the name of the trick and it takes on a whole different meaning. While a standard McTwist might be 540 degrees, you can also perform a McTwist 720, for example, and obviously this is significantly more challenging.

So while this may be an incomplete list of snowboarding tricks, it can easily be be added to by understanding the basics of snowboard trick names. For example, the term switch is used when a snowboarder is riding in reverse to the way they normally ride. That is, if you’re a goofy footer (right foot forward), then you’re riding switch when your left foot is in the front. A switch ollie, logically, is a regular ollie performed while the rider is riding switch.

Then we have frontside and backside. Imagine you’re performing a 180 in a halfpipe – this description in itself isn’t enough to properly envision the trick, because you could have rotated in one of two ways. A frontside 180 for a regular stance rider would involve rotating counterclockwise through the air, while a backside would require you to rotate clockwise. Switch that terminology around for a goofy rider.

So as you can see, snowboard trick names are generally pretty logical, and if you commit a few of the basic names to memory, you can expand on these with supplementary terms. Presumably you’re more interested in actually being able to perform the tricks than remember their names though, so get out there and practice!

8 Snowboard Tricks you can pick up right away