Hi! I am Adam Chase and I am here to talk about snowshoeing. I am Captain of Team Atlas and I have been at this sport for 15 years. So, I want to talk to you little bit about technique. Snowshoeing, as I said is you can walk, you can snowshoe, so it's fairly basic. Because of the frames, you are going to have to take a wider stance, which definitely affects both your hip flexors and your abductors and the abductors.
So that's going to be an area of your body. You are going to be feeling a little bit more when you snowshoe. You have to lift your knees up a little higher to get over the snow. In deep pattern, you are going to be lifting your knees very high and that's a lot of effort. So you will see your heart rate rise dramatically when you are in a deep pattern.
When you are on a packed surface or just a little bit of snow, it's a lot more of just like regular walking, and then you approach a hill and you fortunately have a rather hefty crampon under your feet. So you want to engage that and really use the traction to propel you forward. On a down hill, you use that same crampon and so you are going to have to lean forward a little bit into each step and that's going to be crucial as far as getting that purchase with the snow.
A lot of people tend to lean back and then they slide. So you want to make sure that you lean forward a little bit which is almost counterintuitive. Then when you are reversing across a hill, you want to point your toes up a little bit and the tails of the snowshoes will kind of fall you backwards a bit. And that allows you again to gain that purchase with the snow and keep your traction as you cross the hill. And that's pretty much it. So next time, I will talk about a gear.
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