Surf Your Best Ep. #3: How To Get The Perfect Surf Stance

Okay gang, this one's about what we like to call the balanced stance. To really carry your surfing board you need to surf with both feet, not just one of them. So let's just expand that for a moment. Okay, the back foot stance developed thanks to the flat bottom single pin surfboards of 40 years back. That type of board with its single pivot point based under the tail encouraged a surfer to swing it almost solely around the back foot. This was how you locked yourself into turns and this was how you stopped your blunt instrument from nose diving, catching rails and generally kind of running things. In many cases a skilled modern surfers stance has actually reversed this order. They put it the other way around. The front foot is the security foot. It's the lockdown. That's the first to land on the deck in takeoffs and the last to leave during crazy air or foam tail slide hacks. It makes sense because the front foot after all is planted over the widest, thickest, most stable and least sensitive part of your board. The back foot these days is where all the subtle control in surfing lies. It's always waiting and unweighting and it's always ready to shift in response to a turn's needs. If you need to change a cutback that's where the change happens. Just a little bit of an adjustment of heel or toe in that sensitive little area of the board will make all the tricky, weird, uneven turns a lot easier and smoother. So board design is fed back into this. It's pushed rocker into the back half of the board and it's running concaves back through the center of the board lifting and driving so effectively the whole old back foot power plant is kind of run past as used by. But it lives on. It's kind of like it's a myth and it's a real issue for many surfers who've come to rely on a back foot stance as a comfortable go-to, a kind of security blanket left over from their beginning days. Which sucks because every single thing you do on a wave comes back to weight and where you put it. And if you're only putting your body weight in one place you're stuck. So do you feel like you're waving your arms around a bit too much trying to make turns happen with your upper body? Do you feel like you're struggling with getting any turn to run smoothly on a rail or go past 90 degrees so you can do the first bit of a turn but the second bit gets harder? Sometimes catching a knee in the face of a wave when doing frontside bottom turns? It's such a tell that one of almost everything that can be wrong with this style really. Surfing inconsistently wave to wave in any session doing great on one wave blowing the next. Rarely making barrels you can get in them but you don't make them even the easy ones. You tick any of those boxes you know you're a little bit stuck with your stance. So to work on a balanced stance here's a few things. If you put your body weight on a curve the board will turn. If you put your body weight on a flat or an edge the board will run. So you want to imagine and practice a balanced stance which allows you to shift your body weight to every part of the board. It lets either foot be the control or the security point or even both at once. My tip for you here is to practice this on land before you take it into the water. Put your board down onto a soft surface so the fins aren't bothered. So now stand on your board and take notice of how you've set your back foot. Pretty much guaranteed it's square to the string at like 90 degrees across the string. So try turning that back foot so the toes are facing half forward. Kind of 45 degree angles toes in front of heels. Try now rocking your back foot heel to toe toe to heel. See how your knee falls toward the deck of the board then rises back up. That's what the longboard guys call a drop knee. And by the way that's the origin of the first really good backside turns. So shift your foot back now square to the stringer. Sometimes it's good to have it that way. Roll the foot heel to toe then side to side big toe to little toe. See how this imitates the drop knee movement and it allows you to shift some weight along and across the board. What's most important here is to learn mobility. The idea that your back foot can and should make slight movements to control turns better. You can move up down and across the board and that you can lean on the front foot while that's happening. So yeah let's go to the front foot now. So put your weight mostly onto that front foot and try those back foot shifts again. See how much easier they are when the front foot is carrying most of the weight. Now steady rock back and forth from foot to foot. Feel the board rocking slightly with your shifts. Feel how when you've rolled forward slightly onto the front foot the back foot gets an instant to shift if it needs to. Work on this till you've got a good feel for how your feet can relate to each other and how you can transfer weight from one to the other in exchange for fine control. So here's a classic stance shift. This is a lesson I think that comes with this kind of work. It's a classic stance shift for the newly liberated balanced surfer. Turn your back foot so it's closer to parallel with the stringer. Toes forward appeal in relation to the nose. It takes a bit of concentration the first few times but the effort will pay off. All of a sudden you'll find you've automatically turned your upper body as well so you're facing more in the direction of travel. Just a slight turn of the head from here and you'll be able to see the pocket and lip quite clearly and be able to aim your turn with way more finesse. So a surfer who gets this resetting dialed in will often look as if the back knee is tucked in behind the front instead of squared out to the side and possibly dragging a bit in front side bottom turns. If you start thinking about weight rather than feet this whole thing gets a lot clearer.