Snowboard Boots - Laces VS. Boa

Traditional Standard Lacing 

Traditional laces have been featured on snowboard boots since the 90s and they still hold up today having some pretty solid benefits.

So what are traditional laced snowboard boots? Laced boots feature a lace up feature that looks almost identical to normal shoes on the outside. On the inside they usually feature a separate system to do up the inner part of the boot with a pull string - this gets the inside of the inside of the boot and liner nice and tight.

Benefits of Traditional Laces

  1. You get to control how tight or loose you want your boot to feel and can usually make one part of the boot tighter and one looser if thats your jam. This can really beneficial to preventing pressure points.
  2. If a lace breaks - it's super easy to fix and you can find replacement laces in almost every snowboard shop ever.

Cons of Traditional Laces

  1. Some people find traditional laces hard to get super tight 
  2. Usually you need to take a break in order to tighten your boot (can't just do it on the run like BOA boots

Since BOA hit the market and people realised how easy they are - we have definitely seen BOA become more popular. But to honest traditional laces definitely have their benefits and I won't write them off. There's a lot of people that would never ride anything other than laced boots. Speaking from experience I've recently gone from BOA back to laces and don't see myself getting anything but traditional laced boots anytime soon. 

BOA

There are two main types of boa systems – Single Boa and Double Boa.

These systems often have an inner tightening system similar to traditional lacing systems but the outer boot is tightened using a knob that you twist to pull a system of wires tight across the boot.

Single boa systems have one knob for the whole boot. Double boa systems have one knob which controls the lower boot and one knob that controls the upper boot.

Typically double boa system snowboard boots are a bit better for controling pressure points. Like traditional laces you can control the bottom tightness with one BOA and top tightness with the other BOA. 

Benefits of BOA

  1. Can get your boot super tight without much effort
  2. Easy to adjust tightness on "the run" or the lift

Cons of BOA

  1. Can cause pressure points if you don't find the right fit for you or you tighten the boot too much
  2. If you break a BOA you will need to find a snowboard shop to fix it for you. Most shops carry the replacement parts for BOA nowadays but it will take some time out of your day.