> Not true. Mentally you'll be riding reverse even with full duck stance
But the difference is with duck when you ride switch everything feels the same stance-wise because your two feet are still at the same angle they always where.
If you ride with 30 on the front and 15 on the back, when you ride switch you will feel like your front foot doesn't have enough angle (because it only has 15 when you are used to 30) and your back foot has stupidly too much angle (because it's 30.... which is plain stupid for your back foot).
You never, ever want to ride with 30 on your back foot, which means if you have that 30/15 stance, you're locking yourself out of switch riding.
And you might say "who cares, I hate switch anyway", which is a perfectly valid thing to say, but riding switch even for just one or two runs a day is an excellent, excellent way to improve your all around riding. So if you don't do it, you're severely limiting your potential.
The truth is that while people are exposed to a lot of snowboarding that shows a lot of park and jumps the majority of snowboarders simply enjoys going down groomers at moderate to fast speed.
If you set up your binding angles for stuff they don't do at all or not very often you're taking out the fun of what they're actually doing in favor of something they might feel they should be to fulfill the image of what a snowboarder does.
And all I'm saying is that riding reverse / fakie is more of a mental thing than something that you should reflect in your bindings. I regularly saw people and alpine bindings carving down steep slopes on race boards that have no rear tip at all. I can ride reverse on a simple blue slope, not carving yet but I really didn't try that hard yet.
One of the prime reasons skiing took off again is that you'll rent a pair of hard boots with carve ski's for going down groomers and they're way easier because they're optimized for what people actually do all day on the mountain: going down groomers at moderate to fast speed.
I agree 100%. In fact, I almost never go near the park, except when I'm forced to in a training course. I don't enjoy it at all.
Riding switch is still a fantastic way to improve your riding - yes, even just "going down" groomers. And a more balanced stance allows you to do that.
It also keeps more of your body more balanced over the board when things go wrong, so you stand a better chance of regaining control because more of your body (hips, knees) are symmetrical.
I'm not even really talking about my personal opinion here, this is straight from CASI.
But the difference is with duck when you ride switch everything feels the same stance-wise because your two feet are still at the same angle they always where.
If you ride with 30 on the front and 15 on the back, when you ride switch you will feel like your front foot doesn't have enough angle (because it only has 15 when you are used to 30) and your back foot has stupidly too much angle (because it's 30.... which is plain stupid for your back foot).
You never, ever want to ride with 30 on your back foot, which means if you have that 30/15 stance, you're locking yourself out of switch riding.
And you might say "who cares, I hate switch anyway", which is a perfectly valid thing to say, but riding switch even for just one or two runs a day is an excellent, excellent way to improve your all around riding. So if you don't do it, you're severely limiting your potential.