This TAKEOFF Will Change Your Surfing! From Beginner to Advanced - The Sunday Glide #86

So it's been a little while since I've considered the takeoff. There's so much to focus on in surfing that sometimes it can just be easy to forget about some of the fundamentals. We all know how important the takeoff can be, but today I wanted to share the secret to moving your takeoff game from beginner to advanced and then show you how I'm still working on this to improve my own surfing today. Having coached surfers for a fair few years now, one of the most common things that I see is people not adapting their takeoff as they move out of popping up in the whitewater, which limits their ability to position themselves correctly on the wave and makes it 10 times more difficult to pop successfully in critical sections. So I suppose if we start with the problem here, it's that when we learn to pop up, we do learn to pop up with our feet coming underneath our hips and our chest, which is quite far forward on the board. And this is really important if you are surfing in the whitewater or you're popping up on the shoulder of the wave because we need as much speed and drive that we can get. And obviously the more weight that we have onto the tail, the less drive and momentum we're able to have in terms of maintaining our speed on the wave because we're causing too much drag to happen. What this does, however, is it does limit us further down the track when we want to take off in more critical sections. So in the beginning when I'm coaching people, I do have them pop up and try to bring their feet fairly far forward, but this is something we need to try and adapt as people progress through to more critical sections. So popping up in the middle of the board can raise a few problems, especially as we're trying to progress. Firstly, the reason for this is that if we're popping up in the middle of the board and we're trying to take off in more critical, steep sections, then we're unable to place the correct amount of weight onto the tail to help lift the nose up so that we don't nosedive. So unfortunately, people will likely nosedive on their attempts of popping up. They can't filter that weight onto the tail appropriately and so they'll probably nosedive and then what happens is they tend to avoid the critical sections and they try to paddle onto waves that are a lot flatter or further out onto the shoulder and so they're not progressing as much as they could because they're not able to position themselves in those critical parts of the wave. The second part of this is thinking about how important that tail is to turning and the fact that if we are popping up in the middle of the board, we're not in the correct position to turn because we've got too much rail engaged and not enough weight onto the tail and if we're thinking about popping up in a critical section as well, not only do we need to place weight onto the tail to prevent from nosediving, but we need to turn straight away. Unless you're thinking about just angling your board a lot as you're paddling into the waves so that you don't need to turn or you're just trying to take a straight hander into the beach, I think we need to make sure that we are on the tail so that we can really quickly and as soon as we pop up, place our feet in the correct position to engage the rail on the tail on the inside rail depending on which side we're turning and commit that turn to happen because otherwise the wave will race off in front of you and we won't be able to follow that section well enough. So as you might have guessed, what we need to do instead is try to pop up in a position where our feet are immediately in the correct position to place weight onto the tail and commit the turn. So let's dive into how we do this. So land practice can be a really really good way to focus on this. Do a hundred of these on the land and I ensure you that you'll feel a lot better about it when you're in the water. If you're going to practice this in the water, there's so many variables that are hard to keep track of so I do like to make sure that you're at least practicing this a few times a day on land so that we can get the muscle memory for how we're going to position the feet when we are doing this. So what we want to figure out first is exactly where our feet need to land. So this will be the normal position that you'd usually try and commit a pretty critical turn with. So the back foot will obviously be further back, potentially on the inside rail. I recommend actually taking some footage and filming yourself with this as well so you can see whether your feet are landing in the right position. But let's get into it. So the first thing that you want to be doing is making sure that you're popping up and getting the back foot where it needs to be in order to commit the turn straight away. If we have any delay in this, this is where we're going to have to recorrect or adjust our feet positioning which is going to delay how quickly we're able to commit that turn and it's also going to provide a little bit more wobble. So to keep as stable as possible, it's best if we can get that pop-up position happening straight away. The second thing that we do want to do is making sure we're shifting our weight back onto the tail. You'll notice it's a lot easier through some of the examples in the footage you can see. It's a lot easier when you're on the board because we've actually got a downwards trajectory on the face of that wave and so it's actually a lot easier to bring ourselves over the back foot when we're going down the wave. But for the purpose of our land practice, we can still try and make sure we're getting that position of the back foot and then also that initial weight transference onto the inside rail. Something which we want to try and avoid is just placing weight straight onto that back foot without also placing weight on the toe or that inside rail. The reason being is if we place too much weight just on the tail, then again we're going to cause that nose to flip up and create way too much drag and that's when we're going to stall and instead of actually carving along the wave, creating that bottom turn to project us down the face of the wave, we're just going to stall completely and that's when we're likely to either really slow down ourselves and mess up the wave or fall off the wave entirely. Now you'll notice with what I'm doing here as well is I'm not placing weight all the way back. I'm actually not standing up tall because we want to slowly filter weight onto that back foot as we need to. Unfortunately if we are in the correct position and we do land our feet where they need to be to turn and then we go and place the weight back and then turn, it's likely that we're going to stall too much already and so this will again inhibit what we're doing on the wave. So committing that or keeping that weight forwards and slowly filtering back as we ease more weight onto that inside rail will be the way to go. Something else that can be really important here is making sure that our eyes are directed towards where we're going. So always looking down the line so that we know what's in front of us or at least taking a glance to know exactly what sections we're getting into. I hope that makes a little bit of sense and that just to reiterate the main things that we're going for here is to make sure that we can pop up in more critical steep sections which again is the ideal or what we want to try and get to in our surfing and we do this by making sure that we're placing weight onto the tail and in the correct position to turn immediately. So again this will really help us be more agile on the wave so that we can react quicker and again we're not going to be avoiding those critical sections because the pop-up that we're doing doesn't allow us to be there. So stay committed to it, give it a go and hopefully it helps in the coming weeks. This take-off style is extremely beneficial to being able to alter and manipulate your position on the wave from the pop-up. Like I said at the start this pop-up is something that has taken a back seat for my surfing for a little while. So what I thought I'd do today is utilize this take-off to improve some of the aspects of surfing that I've been working on recently using it to take off and position myself as quickly as possible in the hook of the wave to become nice and critical of my hang turns. Let's get into the edit. Okay so that was a pretty tricky session so the conditions were pretty messy but it was a good test for the take-off because I needed to try and make sure that I could put myself in the most critical positions as possible for the nose rise and there wasn't a whole lot in terms of those critical sections out there. What I was happy with was how I was able to manipulate my position on wave and I guess take my time in putting myself in the right spots with that take-off. Again you can be very quick and reactive when you're using that take-off from the tail so I think that really helped out there to try and put myself in the critical sections when they did present themselves. The only real thing I did want to note is that there are a few different sort of variations of that take-off or take-offs that I used out there. There was the first one which is my favorite which is the faded take-off. I find this is not only really really functional but it just feels so good. That swooping action off the bottom projecting yourself away from and then into the face of the wave feels really good and it's a great way to I guess get a little bit more critical and I guess you can be used as a bit of a stall or a fading maneuver to put yourself in that critical section which I think worked pretty well on some occasions or a few occasions out there. The second one was where I actually just placed weight straight onto the tail without engaging that rail. So again this can be something that if we do it when it's not the right time for it we can lose the wave but if you're exactly where you need to be to get that nose ride to happen then you can stamp on that tail, stall it, anchor down and then project yourself or walk up to the nose which I think can be a really really good thing to do as well. And then thirdly or the last one is just going to be where I actually didn't pop up on the tail I popped up in the middle of the board and this is in an instance where I thought okay I need to project myself down the line pretty quickly so in conjunction with that I angle my board further towards the side of or side onto the wave so that I don't have to commit a steep turn to begin with and I can just jump straight through to the middle try to project or get myself into the middle of the board so I can get as much speed as possible to make it down the line. Okay so I hope that was useful for everyone. If you have any questions about anything we covered in this session at all just let me know in the description below. As some of you might know already I do do one-on-one coaching both online and face-to-face so if there's any assistance you feel like you need in implementing any of those methods or anything like that please feel free to get in touch. If you are finding this useful and enjoying what's happening here and you do want to help out in another way there's some links in the description below to check out just if you wanted to. But other than that we've got the Sunday Glide coming up in a week's time, Tip Time coming up on Wednesday. If you have any suggestions for Tip Time please leave them in the description below. We'll get through those in a few days time. But yeah other than that I hope everyone's getting their waves and we'll see you on the next one. you