EC on Dual with soft-boots -technique and settings questions

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slayer
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Rank 5
Posts: 172
Joined: Friday 17 January 2014, 1:34

EC on Dual with soft-boots -technique and settings questions

Post by slayer » Sunday 1 March 2015, 4:47

Hi,
I have my Swoard Dual 175 and am still learning.

I watched this video with Petr with interest:

As I try and emulate this I am learning more and more subtlety about body positioning and weighting. I met some hard-booters last weekend, and learned how loose they ride with their rear-boot, and some of them ride a softer rear boot, all which I found amazing. I had always thought hardboots were way stiffer than softies, but apparently not, and they showed me so. They are Pure Boarders, so I expected their technique to be different, but it got me thinking about my own centre of gravity issues, in particular, getting low down without bending at the waist. I also recall other posts (by hardbooters here: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=12060) about 'bending the rear leg 90 degrees' which I don't quite understand - do they mean as in 2:13 in Petr's video?

If so, how loose do people ride with softboots when doing EC, specifically the rear foot? Looking at the video at 1:46 for example, Petr's rear boot or binding seems pretty loose to get that forward lean. I ride with Burton Driver X boots, which are fairly stiff, but I also have some very old Salomon F1's which have no stiffness at all anymore due to their age. Up to now, my rear boot has been fairly stiff, which means getting my weight down while retaining posture is pretty difficult! :-) What is best/safest option here:
1) Burton boot done up loosely
2) Binding done up loosely
3) Use Salomon boot for rear foot done up normally

I have searched the forum, but I haven't found that much on softboot advice. I did see some other posts on the Internet, where one rider got better results with the bindings set back from centre? But I think I saw a post from Petr saying he rode dead centre. What is general feeling on this?

The good part is my general carving is way better, especially on heel-side, due to more practice at using 'plus' and 'minus' positions and rotation for turning, so I am still enjoying that. I am at the stage where I need to let myself do that 'controlled fall' and take that leap of faith, but up to now, the few times I have had the courage, I have ended up over-rotating and eating snow..The pure boarding guys said that was because I was loading my nose too much, which makes sense, but I also feel my stiff boots are not helping here either.

cheers,
Slay.
Soft: Dual 175, Burton Driver-X, Flux CV
Hard: Gen4 175M, UPZ RC10, F2 Race Titanium

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