Trampolining and snowboarding – Wk 1

I know the topic of trampolining and snowboarding has come up a few times before but I thought I’d document the next 5 weeks while I give it a go to see how these skills can transfer into freestyle snowboarding.

The main focus being on improving my level of proprioception, writing a short post each week (Thursdays), outlining what I did and how it went, highlighting any benefits.

Week 1:

Background:Last week was the first. It’s been a while since I step foot on a trampoline so this should be fun interesting.

Location: Tolworth Recreation Centre. My local big recreation centre where they pretty much do every indoor sport under the sun (apart from indoor skiing and snowboarding..!).

I had spoken to the head trampoline coach on the phone before coming down about what direction I would like to take the trampolining, explaining all about what I do and that I just didn’t want to come down to ‘bounce around’.

Times and Dates: Wednesday evenings at Tolworth Recreational Centre 8.30 – 10.00.
More information: Tolworth Recreation Website

The Coaches: There were two coaches on hand, Mark (Head Coach) and Warren, both extremely helpful and immediately made me feel at ease.

I have forgotten what is was like the be ‘the student’ – ‘the first timer’. Slightly nervous, not knowing what to expect but at the same time excited to be trying something new. I feel it’s good to, as an instructor or coach, try a new sport once in a while to re-enforce the feelings that a beginner may feel.

The Session and what was covered:

After paying my £5.00 for the evening class which goes from 8.30 – 10.00, I headed off down the corridor to the hall. I’m not sure why, but I had expected 10-12 trampolines and about 20- 30 people, but instead was presented with a medium sized room with a tall sealing and 4 trampolines set back to back. It appeared to be a fairly quiet class, only 6 other people using the equipment, but soon became apparent that this was the normal attendance for a Wednesday evening class.

Within minutes after arriving and being greeted by both Mark and Warren, a quick chat about my ‘history’ of trampolining and safety, Mark had me straight up on the trampoline getting use to the feeling. (I even had to ask whether to keep my socks on or off – this is how much of a newbie I am, this should be fun!) but even with questions like that, the atmosphere in the hall was one of openness and I soon started to feel right at home.

Mark got me to focus solely on the red cross in the middle of the trampoline, working on good posture, core strength and trying not looking down to much.

Throughout the rest of the evening I covered half turns, seat drops and even mixed it up with half turn to seat drop and back to back seat drops with a half turn in between. Check me out!

The transfer to snowboarding

I found the seat drop to half turn to seat drop really working my core muscles, but saying that I could really feel my whole body having to work to stabilise myself (great for working those inner core muscles when on your snowboard). So much for sit ups at the gym. Just do 50 of these! I’m a strong believer of doing a sport to keep fit rather than hitting the gym.

That’s all I covered for my first session and felt a lot more confident even though I had probably only spend the best part of 10 minutes in total on the trampoline – looking forward to next weeks session!

Week 2: Trampolining and snowboarding – Week 2