Can Snowboarding Build Muscle? | Effects On Your Body


Snowboarding is a hobby that involves a lot of physical movement as you swerve down and around mountains. Like all physical activities, snowboarding leads people to wonder whether there’s any way to build muscle from it and gain good health.

Snowboarding can help you build and strengthen muscles in your quadriceps, calves, core, arms, shoulders, and heart! Indirect assistance to muscle building includes increasing joint health and mobility and allowing for a greater range of flexibility while burning hundreds of calories.

As snowboarding is a rigorous workout that utilizes the entire body, it is an easy way to build muscle. But there is also a lot to learn about its specific health benefits and how it can help you.

Why Is Snowboarding A Good Workout?

There’s a lot that goes into building muscle with snowboarding. Let’s take a look and see just how snowboarding works for your benefit.

1. Full Body Workout

Snowboarding is a phenomenal way to get regular exercise into your life.

To snowboard, you have to train your stamina, muscle power, and balance to accommodate riding down slopes at high speeds.

With snowboarding, you can use all different sorts of muscle groups to build cardio as effectively as possible.

Full Body Workout

2. Tones Your Calves

Snowboarding is a whole body workout, as it puts stress on your entire body. The sport works in different ways depending on your body part.

For instance, your calves get a good workout from their constant use to turn the board.

Snowboarding requires you to put pressure on your toes and heels to control the board effectively. This puts quite a bit of strain on your calf muscles, keeping them constantly busy.

3. Exercises Your Core

Snowboarding also gives your core a thorough workout. Your core is just as, if not more important, for balancing as your legs.

When shredding, you can feel quite a bit of energy exerted upon your core as you use it to help your general balance and turn around sharp corners.

The core is an essential part of snowboarding and gets a heavy workout when you snowboard.

4. Strengthens Your Quads

Not only does snowboarding work your core and calves, but it works your quads too.

Your quads take your entire body’s weight as you shift it when going down the mountain and naturally experience the toils of working out your quad muscles when shredding.

The squatting stance you adopt works extremely powerfully on your quads and knees when snowboarding.

Your quads will feel incredibly sore after snowboarding, as they take on a great deal of pressure from balancing and swerving down the mountain.

The squatting stance you adopt when riding down the mountain spreads across your legs and culminates in pressure placed upon your quads, so you’re sure to feel its effects the next day.

5. Exercises Your Arms

The arms also play a crucial element in controlling your balance.

Without proper control of your arms, you lack a secondary counterbalance when snowboarding, potentially leading to mishaps with balance.

Additionally, when you fall, you use your arms to help you get back up. Therefore, whenever you fall, you give your arms an excellent workout.

Your shoulders also receive a healthy bit of exercise on the mountain. After all, they’re the initial source of your turning motion.

By generating the motion to move your whole body, they receive quite a bit of exercise, which helps your shoulder muscles be built and toned.

6. Helps Your Heart Muscles

Snowboarding is also highly beneficial to the heart.

Snowboarding strengthens your entire cardiovascular system, allowing your heart to function better and maintain good health.

It lowers your risk of health issues such as heart disease and helps to decrease your blood pressure.

Studies show that your weekly health targets for heart fitness can be met in just a handful of hours spent shredding down mountains.

Snowboarding works to get your heart in better health because it’s a heavy cardio exercise.

This means that when you’re shredding down mountains, your heart has to exert more energy to meet the physical demands in place for it.

When it does this, it has to pump more oxygen through your body at a quicker rate, which increases your heart’s endurance and its ability to function in your day-to-day life.

This will then lower your risk of disease and cardiovascular health issues.

How Does Snowboarding Build Muscle?

Snowboarding is a great way to build muscle, and it works by putting continuous strain on your muscles every time you shred down the mountain.

You turn the board using your calves, feet, and your core, putting different types of strain on individual parts of your body.

Your quadriceps help absorb a lot of the impact when you’re squatting as you speed down the mountain, allowing for a safer and easier effect on parts of your body like your knees.

Your arms and shoulders help maintain your balance on the board and absorb the impact of falling. Your entire body works in conjunction to help you build and maintain muscle.

Here are some other things which ultimately contribute to muscle building through snowboarding:

1. You’ll Need To Have A Stretching and Warm-Up Regime

Snowboarding isn’t just about riding down the mountain – you have to train to do it effectively.

The best way to do this is to work on building up your muscles to better handle the strain and stress that comes with shredding.

Stretching before you go snowboarding is crucial, and you’ll want to focus on building up the muscles in your core, quads, arms, and the health of your joints while you move.

Some exercises that you can do to increase your endurance before you shred include squatting, lunges, and planks.

You’ll Need To Have A Stretching and Warm-Up Regime

2. Burns Calories And Fat To Enhance Muscle Visibility 

While it depends on the individual, someone who weighs around 185 pounds can burn approximately 266 calories if they were to snowboard for 30 minutes.

Riding down slopes of different difficulties can burn calories at different rates, and walking uphill can burn even more calories.

Being in the cold weather also works to help you burn many more calories. You can expect to burn between 300 to 600 calories hourly when you’re shredding.

Going down the mountain repeatedly will help you lose weight, as snowboarding provides a similar physiological benefit to exercises like cycling.

It’s also possible to burn upwards of 750 calories per hour, depending on the intensity of the mountain, the speed at which you’re going, and the quality of the slope and snow.

3. Effects On Your Joints

Snowboarding also has significant effects on your joints. With all the moving and swaying you do when shredding down the mountain, your joints bear a lot of stress.

The continuous range of motion builds up the strength of your joints over time, increasing not only the overall health of your joints but also their flexibility.

Final Thoughts

Snowboarding is a great sport to build muscle. It provides a fantastic all-body cardio workout, giving rigorous exercise to each part of your body.

Your core, arms, legs, and calves will get a thorough workout from snowboarding while maintaining good heart and joint health.

To achieve this safely and preserve the muscles you have gained, you need to train your muscles before snowboarding.

Shailen Vandeyar

A proud Indian origin Kiwi who loves to plant trees and play with my pet bunny when not digging my head deep into the world of snowboarding, tricks, techniques, and related safety measures.

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