4 signs you're still an intermediate surfer

Hey what's up guys, I'm just off the back of running a bunch of retreats at the wave pool in Melbourne. It was an absolute blast and the most exciting part of it was seeing people's insane progression when it came to their surfing. It's just always so fulfilling for me to see the surfer's roadmap at work in other people's surfing. It's really exciting. We're actually pretty much full for the rest of 2023 in terms of coaching opportunities to work with me but I encourage you guys to check out our incredible opportunities that we are listing and to make sure that you stay up to date with the listings that we're going to offer for next year as well so that hopefully you can come along and join us. All right well let's talk about four signs that you're still an intermediate surfer. Today we're going to be using lessons and examples from the intermediate surfers roadmap curriculum. It's my online course designed to help surfers progress out of intermediate and into advanced. You can join almost 10,000 students smashing their surfing goals over at thesurfersroadmap.com Okay number one, you surf horizontally instead of vertically. Having a vertical approach in your repertoire is definitely a hallmark of an advanced surfer and there's a couple of reasons why you mightn't quite be getting there with your vertical turns. We're going to cover them here. Now firstly you might be coming off the bottom of the wave targeting a too soft part of the wave to allow a vertical approach. Now remember we almost need like a breaking lip to rebound off when we approach a turn vertically. This means vertical turns need to be done in the steepest part of the wave which is generally right back here close to the pocket. So if we try a vertical turn out here away from that steepness on the sort of flattish section there we're not going to have as much lip to actively push or kick against with our back foot and generally this results in the surfer instinctively approaching it more horizontally than vertically. Now second, and this is connected to the first point, you might be going into neutral too early off the bottom of the wave. Remember our shoulders are our rotation source, our compass and if we cash that in to move through the early arc of our bottom turn within that smile arc it's going to make it more difficult to approach the lip vertically because it's that last minute pull that changes directions really quickly and gets us going up the wave in a more vertical direction. We save that final change in direction from let's just say two o'clock and we rip it up to 12 o'clock with that pull. This puts us closer to the pocket of the wave where a steeper lip is and allows for us to kick harder with our back leg extension rapidly rotating the surfboard from say 12 o'clock to six o'clock back into the On the back end, a vertical approach is generally unavailable if a surfer doesn't lift with their leading arm. We've talked about this a lot, this is the equivalent neutral position on the on the back end now before going through the re-entry. That rotate, that sequence on the back end again, low rotate which a lot of people do but they don't get the lift which tilts the shoulders gets us ready to then punch back down and across the body. Number two, your flow isn't quite on point. Flow is something we might describe as the in-between movements that link a surfer from one maneuver to the next and generally speaking the less movement the better the flow. Flow can be inhibited by over committing to single maneuvers which spends too many speed points, misreading a wave or just simply poor wave entry. From a maneuver perspective though, and that's what we'll focus on here, flow is most heavily impacted by how much speed you can finish a turn with and the most important feature of that is the back leg extension. Extending the back leg either up at the lip vertically as covered in point number one or at the conclusion of a horizontal turn ensures maximum exit speed out of that turn and it also has the added benefit of throwing lots of spray. It also flattens the surfboard allowing for a more seamless transition onto the opposite rail to basically go into the next maneuver which again translates to cleaner flow. Now for maximum repetition here and good practice with your back leg extensions the surfskates are really unparalleled in this regard so that's something really good to focus on. Oh a quick note, flow is massively impacted by maneuver placement and that's something that we'll actually be covering in the advanced surfer's roadmap coming soon. I'm working on it and number three you can't quite nail the bottom turn just yet. I mean I've said it before and I'll say it again I'm basically just a bottom turn coach to the degree to which you can bottom turn expect the same to happen up at the top of the wave. If you have a mediocre bottom turn you're going to have a mediocre maneuver. A good bottom turn requires strong compression and extension combined with well-timed and executed rotation. One without the other will always hinder your approach and you'll always sort of implement a bottleneck there if you can't integrate them together healthily. So that's why it's something that we work on so heavily in the intermediate surfer's roadmap to become an advanced surfer you really need to learn how to adjust your bottom turn according to the specific section that you're approaching on the wave. How does the bottom turn need to change for a vertical approach versus a horizontal approach? What if you don't need speed and instead need to approach a section more conservatively? These are all things that you will slowly learn kinesthetically for sure but only if you can perfect the fundamentals of the bottom turn itself and that means you'll need to find adequate compression and extension and this needs to be well-timed with your rotation. I know I sound like a broken record here but put simply as you extend off the bottom of the wave like this you should also be pulling with the back arm in order to find neutral. This neutral position should be held for a moment with good shoulder orientation. So that means the shoulder should be kind of leading upwards in this angle up the wave ideally before committing to the maneuver itself and you know just by tweaking things slightly with the bottom turn even great surfers like the surfer you can see here can expect huge changes in their turns at the top of the wave. So worth putting some time into. And number four you don't actually know that you're an intermediate surfer. It's amazing how many surfers come up to me or even the ones that I coach who simply don't know where they sit in terms of the category of ability levels. And although more broadly speaking the category doesn't really matter we're all just surfing because we want to it does matter from a progression point of view and this is because it dictates where you are exactly on the roadmap and will give you an indication of the skills you should be looking to progress at this time. You know I've said it before surfing has for many many years suffered from a lack of a clear pathway and that's why we call it the surfer's roadmap which offers insights to as to where to put your focus. Okay so you're you're at this level you're trying top turns and re-entries here's how we perfect them and then here's what's next. Because there is no tangible metric which defines success in surfing it can be hard to know if you're doing it right and this starts to blur lines for sure about why we surf as I've said but from a strictly from a progression point of view we need to start defining those a little bit more clearly and that begins with defining where you are specifically on that spectrum of abilities as a surfer. If you think you are an advanced surfer you know maybe you've surfed for 20 years and you just kind of assume that you must be after surfing for so long then you won't be surfing with a progression mindset. Again not a major problem if progression isn't a part of your priority list but often it becomes one when you see yourself on camera because when I coach on retreats we use detailed video analysis right it's one of the most powerful tools you can you can use for for progression and I see many surfers humbled or even upset literally upset when they finally see themselves on camera but but here's the big thing although painful at times for everybody me included it's actually one of the most helpful things you can do to progress because it gives us those very real and tangible goal posts to shoot for. Hey here's your surfing here's someone who surfs better than you what's different about that and how can we move you closer to what they're doing you know pretty simple sort of stuff and that's how we do it footage doesn't lie okay so I'm going to challenge you guys to to get some footage of yourself surfing and put in the work to make it look like how you want it to or how you thought it looked like before you actually saw it. Alrighty that's it for me thanks so much for tuning in I hope this video helped with four signs that you're an intermediate surfer and of course four potential solutions to get you from intermediate to advanced if you enjoyed this sort of info we've got plenty more in-depth info even more in-depth than we go here on youtube in the intermediate surfers roadmap on the surfersroadmap.com so make sure you check it out in the link in the description below you can also join me on instagram at kalesbroccoli hit the like button leave a comment all that sort of stuff I appreciate you guys time and for being here and of course I look forward to the opportunity to work with you one day if possible thanks again see you soon