Learning to Snowboard as an Adult (After a Lifetime on Skis)

Last Updated on August 3, 2026 by Charlotte

Learning to snowboard as an adult at age 30 was not exactly on my bingo card, but there we were, on the side of the mountain under the glorious big blue sky in Furano, Hokkaido. As a child, I’d grown up skiing with my family, my dad and uncle and grandpa all excellent backcountry skiers, exploring the Northeast USA, and the grander mountains in the American West. But after packing up my life in my teens and moving to Hawaii, I grew rusty at skiing and my skills atrophied, and despite skiing black diamonds in my teens, I’d never really reached those same off-piste highs as my family. Snowboarding was new to me, and a curious opportunity to learn something new. Here’s everything we learned from our first professional snowboarding lesson, our progression, and what to expect when you try to teach an old dog new tricks!

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My First Snowboarding Lesson as an Adult

With over 40% of the mountain at Furano being green-level runs, the Furano Ski Resort seemed like the perfect place to spend a day learning how to snowboard. We met our friendly instructor and one other adult student in the shop at the Sportpia snow school, and trekked up to the flats near the base of the Kitanomine Gondola.

In all honesty, there was a lump in the back of my throat, and I was a bit nervous. Would I really be able to snowboard in my “old age”? It hurts to fall now! I’d only ever tried snowboarding once before in my life, fifteen years prior, at Spring Mountain, the “highest point in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania”, where I’d spent a painful evening catching edges and faceplanting. For snowboarding, Travel Buddy had more experience than me, as he’d done two lessons in Hakuba on a previous Japan snow trip.

Learning Skills from the Ground Up

Sitting on flats, our instructor showed us how to properly strap into our bindings, and we started with the first skills: skating on flat ground, and gliding with our front foot strapped in with our back foot on the board. Our instructor walked us up the base of the hill a few paces, and we sat in the cold snow, to strap in both of our feet. As a lifelong skier, this was the weirdest part for me, the feeling of my legs being stuck in place. I felt so uncomfortable with not being able to take a step out if it felt like I was losing my balance.

From here, we learned how to get up on two feet from sitting, and this was so much harder than I thought it would be. It felt like my knee tendons were being stretched, my legs were literally quaking, and my balance was wobbly, like I had the legs of a newborn colt. Next, our instructor drilled us through the skills like heel-side slipping, where you flex your ankles and lift your toes to control your speed as you scoot through the snow forward, and before we knew it, we were learning the “falling leafs”, making a graceful zig-zag down the gentle slope.

For Travel Buddy, the “falling leafs” were the culmination of his previous snowboarding lesson experience. In Hakuba, he’d been able to keep up with me on my skis using the falling leaf technique, but for this trip to Hokkaido, he really wanted to progress further. Since all three of us were doing so well, and because our group was so small, our instructor thought that we were ready to take on the next skills, the turns.

For me, J-turns were where snowboarding became a lot more intimidating! In a J-turn, you start facing straight, and use the edge of the board to complete a turn, either toe-side or heel-side to the mountain. My heel-side J-turns were great, but for some reason, toe-side turns just scared the crap out of me. It just felt unnatural.

Then, it was finally time to link all these skills together. With Travel Buddy in the lead, our instructor beckoned us to snowboard down to him, one at a time, linking our heel-side and toe-side turns into a serpentine S down the hill. Travel Buddy sent it, and our instructor praised his “exceptionally good balance” and then I was up.

The first heel-side turn felt natural, but as I began the next turn, the board picked up speed, pointed straight down the hill, but I shifted my weight, and the toe edge grabbed, and I completed the turns! It was exhilarating! I felt like I was going SO FAST but when I watched the video of my run later, I was moving at a snail’s pace!

With every pass, our instructor gave us feedback on our posture, positioning, and weight distribution, and I think that this personalized feedback, along with the small group, all at a similar skill level, really helped us to progress quickly. At the end of the lesson, our instructor said that we were ready to take the chairlift to the top of the green run!

Completing My First Green Run

Out of all the skills we did that day, I think the getting off the chairlift was the scariest thing! On skis, it is no problem, you just point them straight and stand up. But on the snowboards, we were wobbling, and my back foot kept slipping off the board. By some miracle, we didn’t crash getting off the lift, and we scooted out of the way to latch into our bindings.

To my relief, the main green run at the Kitanomine ski area is incredibly wide, and quite mellow. I needed to stop a few times to catch my breath, but we made it down, and had a fun time doing it.

What You Can Expect to Learn in Your First Snowboard Lesson

Every snowboard lesson progresses differently depending on the students, instructor, snow conditions, and amount of time available. However, this was the general progression of our beginner lesson:

Getting Comfortable With Your Board and Bindings

Our instructor first showed us how to carry our snowboards and properly fasten the bindings.

Skating and Gliding With One Foot Attached

We learned to move across flat ground with our front foot strapped into the board while pushing with the back foot. We also practiced gliding with our back foot resting loosely on the board, which is an important skill for getting on and off chairlifts.

Controlling Your Heel-Side and Toe-Side Edges

Once both feet were attached, we practiced sliding down a gentle slope while controlling our speed with either the heel-side or toe-side edge.

Practicing the Falling Leaf

The falling leaf allowed us to zigzag across the slope without fully pointing the snowboard downhill. This helped us become more comfortable controlling our speed and direction on both edges.

Learning J-Turns

For a J-turn, we allowed the snowboard to point downhill before using one edge to curve back across the slope. This was the first skill that required us to accept a little speed and fully commit to the turn.

Linking S-Turns

Once we could complete J-turns in both directions, we began linking heel-side and toe-side turns into a continuous S-shaped path down the mountain.

Both of us managed to link turns during our lesson, although beginners progress at very different speeds. Some students may spend their entire first lesson becoming comfortable with edge control and the falling-leaf technique.

Riding a Beginner Run*

Because we could turn, stop, and control our speed, our instructor finished the lesson by taking us up a chairlift for a complete green run. Your instructor will probably not okay going on the chairlift unless you’ve mastered all the prior skills, and for some people, that can take a few days of lessons.

Our Snowboarding Progression and How Fast We Learned

Skills I Could Do After One Lesson

By the end of my first lesson, I could confidently get up independently, control my speed on both edges, link S-turns, ride a chairlift, and make my way down a wide green run. I still felt cautious and rode pretty slow and needed to stop several times, but I felt in control of my snowboard and accustomed to having my feet stuck together.

Travel Buddy’s Snowboarding Progress Over Three Days

On our second day in Furano, I switched back to skis because my butt was extremely sore. Travel Buddy, however, stuck with the snowboard. By lunchtime, on his second full day, he was riding blue runs through calf-deep powder while I skied alongside, and by the end of the second day, he was carving past me and waiting farther down the mountain for me to catch up! I was miffed!

I know that some people just pick up sports really fast, but this was honestly demoralizing! It felt like he’d caught up to my lifetime of skiing in just a few days. By lunch on his third day, Travel Buddy was attempting flat-ground 360s and generally getting groovy with it, carving wide turns. This gave me some serious FOMO and I began wondering whether I should have stayed on my snowboard too!

Things That Might Have Made Snowboarding Easier to Learn

Our snowboarding instructor shared that our progress appears to have been faster than the typical adult beginner experience, and that Travel Buddy apparently has “incredible balance” (please sir, don’t stoke his ego any more). But anyways, here’s some things that I think helped us with learning to snowboard.

Surfing and Surfskating

Both Travel Buddy and I are avid surfers, and he is definitely the “better” surfer of the two of us, who has a lot more experience with carving and shortboarding. Because of surfing, the sideways stance already felt familiar, along with shifting our weight across a board and transitioning between heel-side and toe-side pressure. For making turns, I think that our surfskating experience was actually more helpful, because the feeling of linking a turn on a surfskate and on a snowboard are pretty similar.

The only weird mental block is that your weight distribution for surfing vs. snowboarding is opposite. On a surfboard, you tend to keep most of your weight on your back foot, whereas on a snowboard, you really need to have your weight on your front foot, or the snowboard will shoot out from under you.

Travel Buddy had never skied, yet he progressed with snowboarding even faster than I did. That makes me suspect our shared surfing and surfskating experience played a larger role than my skiing background alone.

My Previous Skiing Experience

I also think that my skiing background helped me understand the fall line, read the terrain, and feel comfortable moving at speed on snow. The thing that still feels a bit crazy to me, is that on skis, you have to worry about two sets of edges, and on a snowboard, you only have to worry about one. But, the sideways stance and the feeling of having both feet attached to one board were totally foreign to me.

Baseline Fitness and Endurance

Both Travel Buddy and I run and lift weights regularly, so we have pretty good cardio and muscular endurance. On our past few snow trips, we did full first lift to last lift eight-hour days, which was so much fun, but completely exhausting.

Snowboarding still awakened muscles we apparently did not know existed, but our general fitness allowed us to stay on the mountain for more than eight hours a day. We stopped only for water breaks, lunch, and the occasional ice cream parfait.

Learning in a Small Group

Our Sportpia adult snowboarding lesson group had only three students, including us two, which gave us almost an individual level of attention. We also got extremely lucky that our classmate was at an almost identical skill level, so we could progress through the lesson plan together.

When you’re learning to snowboard for the first time, I think that a lesson with an experienced instructor is more than worth the money if your goal is to progress. Our instructor watched our every attempt at each skill and immediately corrected problems with our posture, balance, and weight distribution. That helped us adjust before those mistakes became habits, and caught errors before they turned into full-on wipe outs or faceplants.

Practicing in Soft Snow

Compared to the icy Pennsylvania slope where I first tried snowboarding as a teenager, falling into the fresh Hokkaido powder was like tipping over onto a feather bed! Of course, falling on my butt still hurt, but it made getting back up and trying again much easier, and I was less scared of wipeouts.

Is Snowboarding Harder Than Skiing?

I began skiing when I was three and spent much of my childhood in ski school, so this is not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison. Still, based on my experience, skiing is easier to begin, while snowboarding may offer a faster path from basic turns to feeling relatively competent.

Most beginner skiers can use a wedge, or “pizza”, to control their speed and make it down an easy slope fairly quickly without falling. In comparison, I think that snowboarding has a steeper and more painful learning curve. Many new snowboarders spend their first days repeatedly falling onto their knees, wrists, and bottoms, or faceplanting, while learning to balance and control their edges.

Personally, I think that standing up on a snowboard with both feet attached, committing to a downhill turn, and avoiding a catching edges is way harder than pizza-ing down the bunny slope. For skiers, the difficult transition often comes later, when they need to transition from wedge turns to parallel skiing, and this is especially relevant in Hokkaido, because of all the powder snow. My friend who was a professional ski instructor in Montana shared that a lot of beginner skiing techniques like pizza style skiing just don’t work in powder snow, whereas beginner snowboarders can still kind of make it work.

Tips for Booking Your First Snowboarding Lesson

Before planning your lesson, read my in-depth Furano Ski Resort guide for advice on beginner terrain, ski schools, equipment rentals, lift tickets and which base area to start from.

How Far in Advance Should You Book a Snowboard Lesson?

This trip to Furano was my third snow trip in Japan, and because we’d been to Niseko and Hakuba previously, I knew what to expect with booking lessons. For more popular ski destinations, ski and snowboard school lessons fill up well before winter. We got lucky and were able to nab a same-day, walk-in lesson from Sportpia, but if snowboarding lessons are something you really want to do, try to do your research beforehand and book in advance!

Group Lessons vs. Private Lessons

Our group snowboarding lesson included only three adult students, so we received frequent individual feedback without paying for a private lesson. In comparison, Travel Buddy’s previous snowboarding group lessons in Hakuba had around 10-12 students in the group. This meant that he spent a lot of time waiting around, especially if everyone was not progressing at the same pace.

In the future, we both really want to try out private lessons, both for skiing, and snowboarding. I enjoyed the close attention, and I think that I had kind of underestimated how valuable it could be to have someone coach me through skills, especially when I tend to get stuck in my head and anxiously overthink things.

Renting Snowboarding Gear For Your Lesson

We booked our lesson with Sportpia Furano, and while they offer gear rentals too, we rented from K-Sports in Furano Town because they were next to our hotel, La Vista Furano Hills, and they had a complimentary shuttle to the Kitanomine Zone.

Depending on where in the world you are taking your first adult snowboarding lesson, you can often get a better deal if you book the gear and lesson together as a package.

Why Japan Was the Perfect Place to Learn to Snowboard

One reason I had never seriously tried snowboarding as an adult was the cost. Simply, I did not want to spend thousands of dollars on flights, accommodation, lift passes, lessons, and rental equipment in some pricy place like Colorado only to spend the trip being terrible at something. That sounds horrible to me!

What I love about Japan, is that the Japanese ski resorts gave us room to experiment. Everything from the lift passes, lessons, to the rental equipment in Furano felt affordable enough that I did not need to spend every day on the mountain trying to maximize skills. I felt like I had an out, and that if snowboarding absolutely sucked, or if I hated it, I could just laugh about wasting a hundred dollars. But as it turns out, I really enjoyed it! And I want to try it again on our next trip to Japan.

My First-Time Snowboarding Tips for Adults

If I leave you with any advice for your own journey of learning to snowboard as an adult, let it be this:

Expect to Fall

This is, I think, the scariest part about learning to snowboard as an adult. The falls. As kids, we’re lighter, and closer to the ground, and I think our bones are a lot more bendy, so falls left me unfazed. Now that I am almost six feet tall, and a lot heavier, falling feels more like being an ancient tree in a forest bellowing “TIMMMMBERRRRRRR” as I tip over.

But the good thing, is that falling well is a skill that you can learn! In fact, our snowboarding instructor showed us a few techniques to fall safely and avoid snapping our wrists or concussing ourselves if we did lose balance. In my lesson, I think I really only had two or three hard falls on my butt.

Wear Clothing That Can Handle Sitting in Snow

We rented the majority of our snowboarding gear in Hokkaido, including our jackets, snow pants, helmets, boots, and snowboard as a package. Travel Buddy somehow lost his gloves and goggles our first day, so he ended up having to rent those too. One thing I didn’t expect with snowboarding, is that because you spend so much more of your time learning sitting on your butt in the snow, you really really want waterproof snow pants and a parka. During my lesson, I was overheating from walking up the bunny slope with my snowboard, so I boarded in my fleece pullover, and the sleeves got soaked as the snow melted. Meanwhile, my butt was nice and dry.

Look into Wrist Guards and Protective Bum Gear

While we didn’t use wrist or bum guards in Furano, Travel Buddy had used them previously in Hakuba during his snowboarding lessons, and he said they help a lot.

Rent Equipment Before Buying It

One thing our snowboarding instructor emphasized was to rent gear before buying. You might take a snowboarding lesson, and learn it’s really just not for you. You could also blow a lot of money on high-end boards and bindings and find that they won’t miraculously improve your skill level, until you put in the time and practice.

Do Not Compare Your Progress With Other Beginners

There’s a lot of different variables which will influence how quickly you pick up snowboarding. Some people like Travel Buddy will be shredding in less than a week, and other people will spend a week in lessons and not do a single turn. This is totally natural, so just stay focused on your own journey, and celebrate your own little wins.

Is Learning to Snowboard as an Adult Worth It?

100% Yes! I think that as adults, we can just fall into this pattern of sticking to sports and experiences that are familiar rather than trying something new. But for me, learning to snowboard as an adult was one of the highlights of my whole year! I’ve really never seen myself as a snowboarder, but I feel like I am drawn to the artistic potential of snowboarding and carving. The next time we’re in Japan, I want to dedicate a whole week to snowboarding, with multiple lessons. If I learned anything from this experience, it’s that getting good at something, like snowboarding, takes a lot of time being bad at it, and the persistence to keep trying anyways. And in the end, it’s all gonna be worth it, when you’re on the side of a mountain, cruising through powder with your friends.

Ready to Plan Your Trip to Hokkaido?

If this blog post has gotten you all hyped up to learn how to snowboard in Japan, be sure to check out my guide to skiing Niseko VS Furano VS Hakuba, and my guide on the best places to stay in Furano.