Buyers Guide - Snowboard Bindings

A couple of weeks ago Tobi aka Zoryfl, Snowboard-Review’s forum guru and snowboarding gear aficionado emailed me from his native Deutschland about putting together a product guide for snowboard bindings. It appears 7 hours stuck on a train back to Berlin can drive a man to be pretty productive! With people asking more-and-more ‘what bindings should I be buying for the perfect set-up’ it’s about time I put a guide on the site, so here it is.

First off, it is important to consider bindings as part of your complete snowboard setup; equally as important as your board and boots. Fortunately buying new bindings is also the one area where if you follow the rules, you are unlikely to make a booboo. Essentially if you keep the kind of terrain, riding style and your ability in mind you can’t really go wrong.

I popped down to The Snowboard Asylum in Covent Garden, London and filmed a quick piece of different types of bindings (Apologies about the sound going a bit around 50 secs in, we had a slight microphone malfunction)

To keep it simple, you can pigeon-hole bindings into 3 categories:

Soft & Forgiving bindings - Soft and forgiving bindings are designed to meet the needs of freestylers and by doing so meet the requirements of beginner riders too. The highbacks are generally fairly soft with minimal forward lean adjustment, the straps are lightweight but comfortable and in most cases the spec is fairly basic which means there are fewer parts to go wrong. Softer flexing bindings hide a multitude of riding mistakes, dodgy landings and enable you to tweak grabs and presses.

Union Flite
Union Contact
Salomon The Boss
Ride Contraband
K2 Hurrithane
Burton Malavita

Stiff & Responsive bindings - The stiffer the binding the more response the rider gets because little energy is lost between the riders boot and the board. This is great if you are on your game and looking for extra power through carves and firmer edge hold up halfpipe walls, but if your ability doesn’t match the bindings it could be a bad mix and having a hard highback banging against your calf constantly can ruin a good days riding. It’s kind of like tuning up your family estate car’s suspension with race springs and carbon fibre bucket seats, sure you might be able go round corners a little bit faster, but you’ll have sore buttocks by the end of the day. Stiffer bindings also tend to be a little less durable and more expensive than softer bindings. To make the bindings stiffer, manufacturers increase the quantity of glass in the base plate and often use materials like Carbon Fibre in the highback, these materials are naturally more brittle than low fibre nylon composites so if you forget to fold them down and they get clipped by a chairlift your mates find you that evening slumped in a bar drinking your sorrows away.

Union Force MC
Drake Radar X
Burton C60
Ride Double Agent
Salomon Caliber
Nitro Raiden Machine

Do everything ‘All-mountain’ bindings – So you don’t want to restrict yourself to just carvings pistes and pipe walls because you like hitting the odd jib and rail, but most of the riding you do is cruising around the groomers and dipping into some pow when it’s there. Well in that case an all-mountain bindings is a great choice. The features are a halfway house between the two previous types. A medium/firm flexing highback; extremely customisable foot beds, straps and forward lean meet underfoot dampening and plenty of other bells and whistles. Supportive and versatile and most importantly comfortable, all mountain bindings should be your default choice.

Rome 390 Boss
Drake Supersport
Nitro Raiden Blackhawk
Burton Mission
Salomon Code
Union Force / Force SL

Almost more important than the binding its self is the fit of your boot within the bindings. To get the best fit, firstly avoid buying bindings without checking the compatibility of your boots with the binding you are looking at. Now when you have the two together, make sure there is no pinching between the boot and the binding baseplate, check that the boot’s heel pushes to the back of the heel loop with little or no gap (fig 1.), when the boot’s heel is back against the heel loop make sure that there isn’t too much toe overhang, an inch is perfect (fig 2.). If you are unsure about what binding size to buy, choose within the manufacturer’s guidelines and invest in bindings with an adjustable heel loop, most of the time you’ll be able to tell just by looking. Most straps fit universally with different types of boot, however there are two types of toe strap; a conventional (old school) strap which pulls down over the top of the boot applying pressure to the top of the foot (fig 4.); or the more ‘in Vogue’ Cap-strap which pulls the boot into the back of the binding for a great, pressure free fit (fig 3.). However, you don’t need to worry about making a choice, just make sure you buy bindings with hybrid staps… most bindings come with these.

Finally some people ask about step-in bindings. Gone are the days of Switch and Blax step-in bindings; ridiculously heavy and stupid creations that meant there were millions of recreational riders mincing around Apres Ski bars with ski / snowboard boot crossovers. Today it’s all about rear entry bindings. The high back is pulled down, your foot is kicked in and the binding’s highback is pulled up and clipped into place. You can either go with Flows or a more hybrid binding like the Apo Expresso, SP Fastec and K2 Cinch which look more like conventional strap bindings and allow independent strap adjustment once you’re firmly strapped in.

If you need any further guidance, feel free to post a thread on our forum, our users and Tobi and the Team will get back to you as soon as possible. Big thanks to Tobi for all of his help!

Posted by Rich Ewbank in Features.