If you’re looking at board reviews and wondering what that ‘W’ means on the size charts, it indicates a wider waist. As you might have guessed, they’re for those with bigger feet. Ride a board too narrow and you’ll find yourself catching your toes and heels in the snow – whether you like park, powder or piste, you’re at a massive disadvantage right from the off. Fortunately most boards are available with a bit more girth these days, so even the Sasquatch-esque riders out there can get an easier ride.
“Ride a board too narrow and you’ll find yourself catching your toes and heels in the snow”
Before you crack on, it’s important to ask yourself if you definitely need a wide snowboard. With advancements in boot tech, footprints are shrinking all the time, so if your shoe size is on the borderline (around UK9 or UK10) then it might be worth checking out what you can get away with. It’s great to have the option to go wide, but if you don’t need to then it’ll just mean excess weight and slower edge changes.
As usual, we’ve left out the ones that have been made deliberately wide to compensate for their short length. Those are definitely worth a look as well though, and you can find most of them in our Best Snowboard Shapes list.
For now, here are the big-foot-friendly boards that we rate for this year.
Scroll down to view all the best wide snowboards, or skip to a particular model using the links below
Bataleon Stallion | Burton Deep Thinker | Endeavor Archetype | GNU Money | Jones Flagship | K2 Manifest | Lib Tech Skate Banana | Lobster Stomper | Rome Gang Plank | Salomon Assassin | YES Standard
Jones Flagship Snowboard 2018-2019
