I’m incredible thankful for all those long Summer days spent at the Trampoline of the AFSA Freestyle Waterramp in Vienna together with the super motivating Claudia Klobasa. I wasn’t ashamed to try out stuff, to fall and at some point I learned something.

Luckily the WS Crew owns a bounceboard, which is a foam board for the trampoline. The foam is pretty soft, so you can’t actually hurt yourself. I was able to borrow one of those for a couple of days, right after I dared to do a normal back flip on the trampoline. It took me a while to actually get over the fear of being upside down over somewhat solid ground, especially since one of my last attempts during snowboarding sent me straight to hospital with a massive concussion. And although I like to refer to myself as having ‘big balls’ I’m more of a scared little mouse every now and then. Like everybody else on this planet. And I’m also quite aware of the fact, that I’m not specifically talented regarding balance and coordination.

That was my way of tricking myself into learning backflips…starting the roation from a seated position was much less stressful for me.

It’s all about air awareness, the feeling for sticking to a axis through the rotation. Not loosing orientation, and most important: Train the body to react right if something goes wrong.

Besides that: Jumping around on a trampoline makes me super happy, and is pretty good core training. It’s also great for all those reflexes which take care of the stabilization of movement. Did I mention already, that it’s a lot of FUN?

In the beginning of summer I was a total beginner, wreck less and sometimes stupid. I had a sore neck and sore shoulders from landings which went wrong. At some point I learned to kind-of control my rotations. I’m still a beginner. I’m still not doing really straight rotations, but you know: More than 10 Years of Snowboarding shaped my body, with the consequence, that I’m much more aware of my right side than of my left. So just right now, I’m super proud of myself, that I dared to do back-flips and front-flips with the bounceboard within an hour.