Sports that can help you improve surfing.
To improve your surfing the best thing you can do is spend as much time as you can in the water, riding waves. For sure many of us do not have the privilege to ride waves everyday. The conditions of surfing can also be quite bad or flat for many days. In this article we advise you a few sports that are fun to practice and help you surf.
First let’s try to understand what are the fundamentals to practice surfing on a good level.
It is going to be my 10th year that I am surfing and the 6th that I am actually teaching people and sharing the stoke. During this time talking from experience I have seen many people succeed and also few of them who struggled. The number one thing that makes people fail is being overweight. To lose weight we can do basically any sport that comes with lots of movement to burn calories. This isn’t necessarily just running but we can play ball sports like basketball,football or even volleyball. This makes you social and while you make yourself surf fit actually you are having fun in a team.
If it is not possible to find a team or get your friends up from the couch you can still do some running, swimming,gym or even hiking. The important thing is to move!
Another thing that makes surfing hard is the lack of flexibility.
Especially when people want to drive their front foot ahead to under the chest. If we are not flexible by nature we must work on it ! Do regular stretches during the morning , try out yoga and pilates . Make sure you stretch your hips , that is the most critical area that needs to be loose when we talk about surfing.
Few people can also lack strength.
Just imagine if you cannot do a push up at home how would you push yourself up in a second while a wave is breaking under you. Try sports that require upper body strength such as swimming, kayaking , climbing or calisthenics workouts.
It can also help if you can make yourself used to a board .
Luckily there are other board sports we can practice like skateboarding, snowboarding or if you have any water near by practice SUP, wakeboarding, or simply paddling around on a surf board. This will not help you to get up on your board but it gives you confidence and balance while you are up and riding.
A pro tip ! We also have to be extremely focused during our surf session to help with that , introduce yourself to slacklining which also improves your balance and lower body strength including legs, core and abs.
