Surfing 301: Master the Aerial Approach | Pro Tips with Josh Kerr

Hey everyone, this is Josh Kerr with Surfer, and today I'm going to help you with your aerial approach. So your aerial approach is basically your angle of attack, the way you take off from the lip to give yourself your best chances of making an air. If you don't have that aerial approach down, you're never going to have a chance of making Alright, so I'm going to show you a couple of different styles of waves with different approach airs, and I'm even going to show you a mistake in this video that I made that a lot of people make when it comes to taking off from the lip and the level of commitment you have when you hit a section. So this first one is a very simple forward straight air, which is obviously one of my favourites, and a lot of people that do airs, they're favourites. Rotations are fun, but straight airs are really fun. But they both all have very similar things when it comes to the approach you take at it and the little tricks of the trade to help you, giving yourself the best chance of making your air. Alright, so this wave right here, as you can see my eyes have already identified a section. As I'm racing down the line. One of the main things as well to take into account when you're going to take off and do the air is to make sure you are gaining speed. This is like one of the biggest tricks with surfing. They always talk about pop, the people that they get their pop from surfing. Pop all comes from making sure you're going from a slower speed to a faster speed as you're coming off the lip. So that's a major thing when it comes to your airs. Make sure you're gaining momentum before you hit your section, not decelerating, hence when you hit the lip. Your board has a much harder job getting out of the water than it would if it's actually gaining momentum at that lip. So right here I've identified a section on this one. Right here. One of the main things before the bottom turn is to make sure your eyes are looking up here. Make sure this board doesn't dip out and start facing too far out to the front of the wave. If that happens and you have to wrench your bottom turn too much, you're going to have to come up on too steep of an angle at the section, which will entail you getting stuck into the lip and losing your board. You want your momentum to all be going in one direction. So right here you can see I'm taking this bottom turn pretty shallow. I'm not looking up here trying to whip it up into that section. I've orchestrated a very smooth line going into this section right here. And one of the biggest things is to make sure you hit the section as it's breaking. So you don't want to be hitting the section back here before it's broken. You want to make sure you're hitting off that little bit of breaking part of the lip. I guess it's kind of similar to a skateboarding maneuver where you want to have that little bit of coping that'll kick you out. Because if the wave hasn't quite broken yet, as you're kicking through the lip here, there'll be no feedback. So having that little bit of breaking lip right there will help that board get kicked back in. Alright, so I'll show you with one of the mistakes that I was talking about, where if you hit the lip too early you're going to land off the back of the wave. So this one right here, same thing. Everything's done right. I'm compressed. I've identified the section. I'm taking a very smooth approach up towards it. Not trying to do a steep bottom turn up into that lip. You'll see I'm just tracking towards that section. And as I'm uncompressing, like I said, when you hit the lip you want to stay uncompressed. But at this one you can see there's no breaking lip right here. So I've identified the wrong section when it looks like I should have been more identified over here. As I come out of the section, there's no breaking lip right there. So I've hit it too early and at that point I'm up in the air and my landing point should be down here. But because I hit it too early, it didn't kick back and push me out. So now I'm going to land off the back of the wave and I can guarantee I landed that thing and went, okay, you hit that too early. That was stupid. Thanks for watching this video on the aerial approach. I really hope all this info gets you punting and going higher and landing many more airs in the future. Any more of my how-to videos, please check them out on Surfer and hopefully I get to see you in the waves.