Extreme sports are still fairly new to the general population, but lately we’ve seen more and more women breaking down the barrier between extreme and traditional sports. Not just professionally, but women are also enjoying extreme sports recreationally. What’s the attraction?
Being involved in extreme sports can empower women with a sense of independence and self-confidence. Unlike team sports, extreme sports are individual and self-directed. When you’re successful, the rewards are all yours. You can take pride that it was only you that accomplished the goal. Think of the joy you get when you make it down to the bottom of a hard ski run in record time. Or how capable and empowered you feel when you climb a 100-foot rock face.
In addition, women now have plenty of role models. Young girls can look up to women like Anne-Caroline Chausson, the first ever Olympic gold medal winner in BMX racing. The sport made its debut at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing and since the Women’s Final Event Medal Round was staged before the Men’s, she became the very first person to win a medal in that sport. How cool is that?
Of course there are lots of other role models such as Lisa Anderson in surfing or Shannon Dunn in snowboarding. The media is covering extreme sports more widely which exposes young girls to all kinds of possibilities. In fact, these sports, which were first referred to as extreme, are often now referred to as “alternative sports.”
Many women are attracted to extreme sports because of the camaraderie. Some women don’t like team sports because of its competitive nature. But extreme sports can help build friendships. Since you’re only competing against yourself, you can enjoy hanging out with friends who are working toward the same goal. This allows you to support, encourage, and learn from each other without worrying about competing against each other.
Some like the intense physicality of the sport. Despite the potential hazards and expense, women enjoy the chance to be outdoors and extreme sports require that you pay constant attention to your surroundings. It’s also a chance to push your body’s limits and decompress from all the daily stresses of life.
Another motivation is the chance to prove women can be as strong and as determined as any of their male counterparts. Many women feel like it’s time to break the stereotypes that men are the only ones who like to get a rush of adrenaline.
Finally, women earn more money and that has led them to wanting to make their own decisions. They often want to try something new and exciting and now they have the funds to do so.
Guest post by Martin Longreen, a fitness buff and writer for the popular self defense techniques website Hertao.
So you’ve got your snowboard (you exercised due diligence in trying out several to find the one that was right for you) and now that you’ve done a few runs down the mountain, you’re starting to get bored. After all, you can only get so much air on the bunny hill! Jumps and turns aside, you’re itching to get your board on a half-pipe and see what it’s really made of. You may not be Shaun White (yet), but you’re pretty sure you could pull some sweet moves…if only you knew some. To get you started, here are a few of the best tricks for you to try, or maybe just aspire to.
Don’t fall! This is the number-one best trick any snowboarder can pull, so keep your feet under you if you want to look cool (instead of ice-cold at the bottom of the pipe).
Air. Maybe the best move for beginners, catching air is also one of the easiest maneuvers since all it requires you to do is get your board into the air (riding forwards) and land back on the pipe in virtually the same position.
Alley oop. Same as getting air, but with a 180-degree turn that lets you land facing forward. Come to think of it, this may actually be an easier first trick to try (since you’re facing forward the whole time) if you can avoid over-steering.
Grab. There are many types of grabs and they can get pretty complex if done in tandem with other tricks, but the basic move involves grabbing either side of your board with one hand.
Front handplant. In this move, the rider plants their forward hand on the lip of the pipe as they go into a 180, releasing as they land and continue down into the pipe. It looks cool and requires some upper body strength.
And now that we’ve listed some for the newbies, here are a few moves for the experienced rider!
Gay twist. This move is a combo which includes a cab (Caballerial) and a grab. The cab is a 360-degree turn that starts with the rider fakie (riding backwards) and ends with a forward landing.
Rewind. If you thought starting a trick was hard, just try stopping and reversing it in the middle. That is precisely what this trick entails, so beginners should probably learn the actual move before trying to rewind it.
Rock and roll. A crowd-pleaser, this move is similar to one seen in skate parks aplenty and it requires a decent amount of balance to complete effectively. The rider basically pops their snowboard up onto the lip of the pipe, slides along the edge for a distance, and then drops back in with one smooth motion.
Seatbelt. This is a seriously difficult grab unless you’re pretty flexible. While in the air, the rider must reach across their body with the forward hand to grab the back of the board (with the forward leg boned, or stretched out for style and effect).
900. The mother of all turns, this requires the snowboarder to ride forward, rotate 900 degrees in air (that’s two full rotations plus a half) before landing fakie.
Julia Hammond is a writer for the popular health website Nutritionist World where you can find a degree in nutrition or browse career listings in the health and fitness industry.
Whether you’ve been riding for years or you’re getting on a bike for the first time, you need to observe certain safety precautions to ensure that you have fun and come out the other end in one piece. This is especially important for those interested in motocross because of the extreme nature of the sport. Riding a motorcycle can be dangerous even if you’re cruising down the road, but throw in rough and rugged terrain, jumps, (even mid-air stunts, if you go that way) and a competitive atmosphere, and you’ve got a whole other world of things that could go wrong, resulting in injury and even death. So it’s important to pay attention to safety tips if you want to excel in motocross.
1.) Know the risks. To begin with, motorcycles can be difficult to control. Even dirt bikes, while smaller than some street bikes, are heavy and cumbersome. They can behave like an extension of your body and your will or they can act as a lead weight and a liability. Besides that, you will be moving at high speeds, more or less unprotected. And in motocross in particular, you are careening around the course with several other riders, any of whom could foul up the party at any time. But as long as you are aware of the risks, you can take precautions to avoid accident and injury.
2.) Use proper safety gear. This one is not too hard to figure out. There are many resources available online and in bike shops to help you select the proper suiting, booting, elbow and knee guards, helmets, gloves, goggles and various other protective pieces to ensure that you’re outfitted for the utmost safety.
3.) Maintain your equipment. Your bike is a machine that requires regular inspection and maintenance, especially if you’re entrusting it with your life. So be diligent about keeping it clean and in good working order, make an effort to learn how it works and how to care for it, and don’t ignore warning signs that could herald problems, such as cracks, leaks, excessive wear, or strange noises.
4.) Practice. Unfortunately, practice does not make perfect in a sport where so many outside factors can affect your performance, but it certainly minimizes the risks involved. So know the ins and outs of riding your bike, be aware of any hiccups (or try to work them out), run a new bike through the paces before you take it on the track, and take your time in practice runs to learn the course like the back of your hand. Run it on the inside, the outside, and through the middle. If you know that bump is coming, you can brace for it instead of being caught off guard and slipping or going down.
5.) Don’t take unnecessary risks. Sure you want to win, otherwise you wouldn’t be competing. But don’t push yourself into unnecessarily risky situations that could spell trouble for you or other riders in pursuit of that brass ring. If you want to go on to race another day, always practice safety first.
Most of these sports started in backyards all around the world. They grew to popularity because they were both fun and challenging. Some extreme sports have never really caught on with the masses though. It could be that they are too dangerous, or difficult, or it might be because they are just too bizarre for your average person to try.
Here is a list of the top 6 weirdest extreme sports:
Chess Boxing
Here is the concept of this new hybrid sport:
“The basic idea of chess boxing is to combine the number one thinking sport with the number one fighting sport into a hybrid that demands the most its competitors – both mentally and physically.”
The chess portion might not fit into the category of extreme sports but those are real punches that leave real black eyes.
Wingsuit Base Jumping
This is the definition of extreme sports.
It’s also the definition of fear for anyone that is even slightly afraid of heights. These guys are literally flying down a mountain at 100 miles an hour. They are so close to the rock face that they could reach out and touch it. Wikipidia has a some great information about the history of wingsuit flying.
Catfish Grabblin’
This is about a redneck as you get.
Catfish Grabblin’ is the art of catching fish using only your hands. In the Southern US, the catfish move to shallower waters in the spring in order to lay their eggs. That means that you can grab the slippery ol’ fish.
I don’t think the fish enjoy this sport as much as the competitors but being “grabbled” probably feels better than getting a hook in the mouth.
Ladder Racing
The speed at which a ladder-racing competitor climbs up their ladder is pretty impressive. You have to watch some of the videos on YouTube to fully appreciate their climbing ability.
Wife Carrying
This sport is pretty self-explanatory. The man must carry his female teammate through a tricky obstacle course in the fastest time. It was first introduce in Sonkajärvi, Finland.
The best part of this sport is the fact that the prize for winning the competition is the woman’s total weight in beer!
Zorb
Zorbing (also known as globe-riding, sphereing, or orbing) is basically the idea that you ride down a hill inside a glorified Bubble Boy suit.
It was in 1994 that Andrew Akers and Dwane van der Sluis first conceived the idea for a type of sphere in Auckland, New Zealand. They called it the Zorb and have since set to work commercializing sphereing.
New sports are born almost every single day. Some will become popular, some will be enjoyed by a very small group of loyal enthusiasts, and some will fade away but it doesn’t really matter as long as people are having fun doing them.
Looking forward to your next holiday abroad, or is it set to be the same old beach, swim, sleep, and cheap cocktails combination?
For many people, holidays are about a whole lot more than taking time off; what extreme sports fans want is time on! With busy working lives it’s not easy to indulge your love of adventure sports. So, with a week or two to spare, people are packing up their gear and searching out the best adventures around.
Now, thanks to cheap air travel the world is an increasingly small oyster. And for the price of a ticket and accommodation, you really can get ‘out there’ and to the finest sporting spots in only a few hours.
Added to this is the rise of Extreme Sports – it seems as if everyone is talking about it nowadays. Parkour has grabbed the imagination of millions of young people, the big brands are pushing less conventional sports and even the Olympics has opened its door to snowboarding.
All this has helped develop the Adventure Travel market. So, instead of booking your standard package trip there’s zip-lining, surfing holidays, overland trekking holidays and dogsledding weeks: you name it, it can be done.
Competing with regular activities, we have a whole new generation of hybrid sports. There’s kitesurfing, wakeboarding, skibiking, jetbiking, the list goes on. And what these all have in common is they need natural spaces. Now, unless you are lucky enough to live in a climate that helps support such adventure sports, you have to travel for your fun.
Extreme Sports Travel has a further, educational spin-off: it supports society’s newfound respect for nature. Once you’ve surfed with the winds, climbed the planet’s mountains and dived its seas, you soon realize you have a new responsibility: to protect our natural playground.
So do your bit, get your kit, and get out there and explore; there really is a sport for everyone
Guest Post By: Mark Pawlak, Media Manager, Adventure Sports Holidays
Despite what you may have heard about extreme sports “junkies” and their reckless, thrill-seeking, adrenaline-fueled adventures, most people who are interested in taking sports to the extreme also tend to take their activities seriously. They employ all possible safety precautions, enroll in the proper training, and stay focused to ensure that accidents do not occur. But these sports are called extreme for a reason. By engaging in activities like surfing, snowboarding, bungee jumping, sky-diving, base jumping, cave diving, white-water rafting, and other risky ventures, proponents are, in many cases, taking their life into their own hands (no matter how many safety measures they may have put in place). So it’s no surprise, with all the allegations of juicing in the major sports, that people are beginning to question the role of prescriptions drug use and it’s repercussions in all sports, including extreme sporting.
Injuries can occur in any type of athletic training, but participating in extreme sports can really up the ante. At the very least, people who engage in these dangerous activities are inevitably going to encounter some aches and pains that they just can’t shake, and at the worst, they may incur injuries that trouble them for their entire lives. And once a doctor prescribes pain killers like Vicodin and Percocet, it doesn’t take a leap in logic to figure out how people get hooked on them. They are terribly addictive, make the user feel great, and will almost certainly cause harsh withdrawal following extended use. Even worse, they’re readily available. It sometimes seems like doctors are handing them out like candy. And to those who face constant bodily aches from their sports (even aside from outright injuries), prescription medication can become a crutch, and eventually, a necessity.
But doctors are not entirely responsible for what people do with the pills they prescribe. And they certainly aren’t to blame for those who abuse their prescription medication. By the same token, they are not the ones who will have to suffer from the inevitable struggle of breaking an addiction. So like athletes in any other sport, those who practice extreme sporting must be wary of taking any prescription drug as a result of injuries sustained in the course of their activities or even in concord with their sport. Performance-enhancing drugs can have just as much allure to those who paddle over a waterfall as for those who swing a bat. Finding a way to be stronger and faster can sound like a great idea when your life could depend on how your body performs. But even herbal supplements, which can be obtained legally (but are often not FDA approved) can have unanticipated side effects. It’s probably better to avoid them, no matter what they promise, and simply know your body’s limitations.
While extreme sports have largely escaped the scrutiny applied to major sports like football, baseball, and basketball, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the people who practice them are any more immune to the challenges and temptations that other athletes face. However, if they take their goals seriously, and strive to reach the heights of their sport and see what they are personally capable of, it is not hard to stay away from prescription medications and avoid both the stigma attached to taking them and the inevitable damage they can cause (for both body and reputation).
Guest Post: This post was written by Alicia Witt of Abusing Adderall. Browse the website to find out more about Adderall dependence and what symptoms to look for.
Even extreme sports nuts may not have heard of this one. Although the origins of motoball are a bit murky, one thing is certain; it may just be the craziest sport you ever saw. Supposedly originating in France in the 1920s or 30s, motoball rose to some notoriety in Russia during the late 80s, no surprise considering it’s a country where favored sports include hockey and bear-fighting (I’ve got one weirder – how about the obscure Finnish sport of wife-carrying?) Motoball is now played in several European countries, as well, including Germany, France, and the Netherlands. It is an interesting oddity in the arena of extreme sports, as it boasts a mixture of soccer and polo and it is all carried out, you guessed it, on motorcycles. Dangerous? Definitely. Death-defying? Undoubtedly. And yet, it is an utterly awesome sport.
Here’s how it works. Two teams of four players (plus one goalie, sadly relegated to the ranks of the un-motorized) mount up their motorcycles and face off in a large (generally open) arena and attempt to ‘push’ a 16-inch ball into the goal at the other end. This involves some amount of skill in terms of balance and coordination if you don’t want to end up eating dirt (or ice – leave it to Russia to make this crazy sport even more astounding). The ball is handled with the feet, as in kicked around the ring, and bikes are not allowed within 5.5 meters of the goal. There are four periods lasting twenty minutes each (with 10-minute breaks in between), with the possibility of two 10-minute overtime periods (separated by a 5-minute break) for a tie-breaker. Other than that, it’s pretty much just soccer on motorbikes. I know it sounds like a gimmick, but let me tell you what’s really great about this game.
For one thing, there’s the noise. The bikes used in game-play can vary, but they tend to be dirt bikes (lower weight, better traction and handling) of various sizes. This lends itself to an absolute smorgasbord of sound once the players get moving, and the audience revs up right along with their engines (although organized European leagues do require silencers to keep the noise level under 100dB ). Also, there are serious accidents. You might see a hockey player take a puck to the face or watch a quarterback fall under half a ton of offensive linemen, but imagine those sports with the addition of motorcycles and you begin to imagine the scope of utter mayhem that can occur. Now, I like a good spectacle as much as the next person, but I’m glad to note that any team found to have caused a long delay in the form of an accident will be forced to reimburse the expenses of the match. That’s enough to make most teams avoid possibly-fatal cheap shots. Aside from that, it’s just a tire-spinning, dirt-flying, skidding, sliding, kicking good time.
And why, I ask, has this extreme sport stayed overseas? It seems like the perfect mix of athletics and machinery, right up America’s alley, but for some reason, no one here ever heard of it! If I could, I’d blame the Cold War, but I think the fault lies more in the marketing. For one thing, it’s touted as a soccer spin-off, so already you’ve lost interest. Beyond that, there’s no push to organize a U.S. League. Too bad, really. If anyone had the impetus to coordinate this sport stateside, it would probably sell like hotcakes (just look at the success of motocross).
Guest Post by Sarah Davis of www.discountvouchers.org where you can find Apple discount codes
Extreme sports are as popular as ever right now and there is such a fantastic variety of sports to choose from these days that literally everyone can get involved in some way or another. Unlike a lot of sports however, those of an extreme nature often require specialised equipment to take part (think snowboarding, kitesurfing, mountain biking etc), and this can pose an issue for some people. Maybe there are no local shops selling what they need, or maybe they are new to a sport and haven’t a clue about what size, style or make of equipment is best for them.
Thankfully, help is at hand on the wonderful internet. A century ago it might have been the case that people were too cautious to buy expensive equipment on the net, or didn’t trust the authority of the website on a given sport. However, the net has evolved rapidly and is now without doubt the best place to buy quality equipment and accessories, that are amazingly good value for money.
Not only are there now some very large and well respected websites selling all manner of new equipment, but there are also some very good sites dedicated to selling more niche products, and are considered experts in their fields. Also, the issue of knowing which equipment is best has largely been solved by the vast amount of user reviews and tests that can be found on the net. Once upon a time you used to have to go to shop and test all the equipment yourself before you even thought about making a choice. But these days, if you wanted to buy a snowboard for example, you could check out some snowboarding forums for advice, read up on snowboarding blogs, watch user testing videos on YouTube or even ask your mates on Twitter what they think.
Buying equipment online really is the future for extreme sports, and all other sports for that matter. And if you can’t find what you’re looking for or it’s too expensive to buy new, then Extreme Sports Trader is here to help with that.
Extreme sports enthusiasts are never happy with doing things the normal way. They are masters of innovation and if something can be done differently, chances are someone will attempt it. In extreme sports terms, snowboarding and surfing are two sports that are very well established, but perhaps a little old hat for some people now. Is it any wonder then that some bright spark decided to see what would happen if they took the fin off their shortboard and tried carving down a snowy mountain on it?
The sport of snow surfing is thought to have first been conceived in New Zealand when a visiting Australian surfer decided to see if he could ride his board on the white stuff. Since then, crazy folk all over the world have been talking up this new sport. Enthusiasts say that it requires a huge amount of skill and confidence. Unlike snowboards, riders do not have any bindings to attach themselves to the board, but instead rely on aggressive carving and the use of the hands to ensure that the board stays under their feet. Stopping has also proved something of a challenge due to the lack of sharp ‘edges’ on a surfboard, but most runs incorporate a run-off area where riders can slow down.
As with all emerging extreme sports, sponsors and industry brands have been paying close attention to see if it is worth their while getting involved. Apparently both Rip Curl and Burton have shown interest in the sport and have been following the most promising individuals. However, as the sport is still so new, it is likely to be a little while before formal events start taking place and stars are given the publicity that some of the more mainstream sport professionals receive. That said, given the early growth of the sport, you might soon be seeing some snow surfers at a resort new you.
A selection of amateur and pro racers lined up last week for the 8th race in the Florida State Championship Series in Tallahassee. Some of those involved take part just for a bit of fun, for charity or as a team building event, whilst others are seriously competitive and pull out all the stops to win.
As you imagine this makes for quite an entertaining race, and the last battle that took place at Tom Brown Park proved to be exactly this. Most people chose to ride mountain bikes, but there were some on racing bikes and hybrids. The mountain bikes dominated as the course was largely off-road, but the faster racing bikes caught up on the flats. Needless to say there were plenty of crashes and falls, although thankfully no one was hurt.
Ryan Woodhall is leading the serious and hopes to claim back the title after winning the championship in 2007. However, in a major upset he picked up a flat whilst crossing a stream and lost 15 minutes repairing the tire. Edsall, another favorite, had a small crash which put him out of the running and left the door wide open for Shawn Smith (Gator Cycle/Trek) to claim the victory.
