My Surfing Skyrocketed when I learnt THIS! (And yours will too!) The Sunday Glide #138

Today, we're going to be covering an aspect of our longboarding that I believe is one of the easiest things to change, which will have profound effects on progressing our surfing ability quickly, and it has to do with the misconceptions around what we do with our eyes and vision on the wave and board. We're going to be covering how to make these adjustments for the take-off, turns, as well as cross-stepping and nose riding. And I also have a big announcement to make that I'll go into more depth with at the end of this video, but I have just qualified for this year's 2023 World Longboard Tour, which means I'll be competing with the world's best at the upcoming events, including Huntington, Bells, El Salvador, the potential of Malibu as well. And I'm just so, so stoked and incredibly thankful for all your support as well to help celebrate as well as get me over there, because it's not going to be cheap by any means. I'm actually doing a sale for the GlideSurf Collective apparel. You can use the code THEGLIDEONTOUR for a 10% discount, and I'll have that on for the next few days as well. I'll go into more details as to what this means, how you can stay up to date and things like that at the end of the video, but let's get into it. And if you are new here, my name's Ben Considine, and I'm a longboard enthusiast, a competitor, coach, and I'm here to share my learnings and experiences like this one today with you all. So if you do enjoy the video and you find it valuable, then feel free to subscribe. And if you know of anyone else who might find it useful as well, feel free to share it with them. But let's get straight into the edit. So one of the biggest problems we see for surfers is not knowing what to do with our eyes. For beginner surfers, this is a problem because we tend to go where we look, and so this can lead to lots of wipeouts, nosedives, and not being able to turn correctly. For intermediate to experienced surfers, our eyes hold us back from being in the correct position on the wave, because as we look where we are on the wave, or at our feet when we're turning, or even more commonly as we cross step forwards, we lose some extremely valuable feedback on our positioning on the wave. Now if there's one thing we must know as surfers is that we need to be on the right part of the wave for the maneuver that we're trying to execute. And so if we are looking downwards, then we become so focused on our body position and the position of our feet on the board that we forget to look and see where we are on the wave. Opening this conversation up a little bit, we also see this a lot for people who are going from their beginner to intermediate phases in their surfing, when we might not have learned about the importance of positioning on the wave correctly, and so we're just focusing on our turning or cross stepping in the complete wrong sections. Well, if we use our eyes correctly, it's about to get a whole lot easier. Now I've seen what we're about to discuss provide instant results for people all along their spectrum of longboarding progression, from people just learning to execute their first turns, being able to use their eyes correctly, providing some instant feedback and therefore progression. And the same thing for people who are learning to cross step, making their transition smoother and having more success with this as well. I do like to liken this to having our focus like we're going down the ski slopes, where we actually, when we're going through a bunch of trees, we're looking at the clear path rather than the trees in front of us. And this is how we're going to be able to give ourselves the feedback of where we need to be going. If we're looking down at our board, we haven't got that feedback that we need. So the solution here is knowing how to use our eyes correctly across all aspects of our longboarding. But by correctly, I do want to emphasize something pretty heavily here. A lot of the time we might see a surfer who has been told they're looking down too much, and so the obvious correction is to never look down. This is commonly transferred from shortboard coaching, where the feet remain planted in the same position for the most part, and therefore all of our attention should be drawn to the wave. But we are a bit more dynamic in how we move along the board as longboarders, and so we need to rethink about how we're going to do this. It's also very difficult to never look down at our feet or at the bottom of the wave for example, and this can sometimes just be a level of complexity that the surfer isn't ready for. What's more is we can look at the professional surfing and there will be elements that we might consider to be incorrect use of the eyes, looking at their feet for example, which is actually necessary. So that being said, let's delve into the two concepts of using our eyes correctly when longboarding and how this applies for the pop-up turns and our cross-stepping. The first principle is to always be looking where we're going but not where we are, and we'll speak more about this as we explain the maneuvers as well. But the second principle is going to be the check but don't stare principle, where we can check things out like our position on the board, but we don't want to look at this for too long or stare because this is where we do run into a lot of problems. We want to make sure we've got a broad overview and vision of what's happening around us and in front of us, but we can use these checks to quickly refine our positioning on the board. Okay, so as promised, let's go through this for the pop-up and paddle in. So when we're first going for our paddle in, sometimes I do actually cue that it's okay to look where you want that front foot to land if that is going to be underneath your chest. We can do this nice and early as we're setting ourselves up on the position of the board. We don't want to do this as we're commencing our takeoff on the wave because again if we try to pop up there, we are going to have our momentum come forwards and we are likely to nosedive or fall. The other thing that will happen here if we keep our eyes down is the next place that we want to be looking is probably at the bottom of the wave, and if we come there too late then again we're going to be delaying our transition of our eyesight down the line and so this is where we're likely to actually travel all the way down to the bottom of the wave, which isn't what we want either because we know the bottom third is where we're going to lose all of our speed and all of our momentum. What we instead want to make sure that we're doing is we check our position as we're paddling or beforehand as we're just setting up for the board. Paddle into the wave and as we start to paddle into the wave, we can look at the bottom of the wave to identify and see the steepness and what's happening there to make sure that we're not at risk of nosediving, but then as soon as that happens we want to make sure we're looking to where we want to go. So as I was paddling we want to make sure that we have an idea of what's happening in front of us, but then we're going to be looking down the line straight away as we're about to pop up because once again the key problem that I do see here is that people are looking where they are not where they're going and so they're paddling into the wave and they're looking at the bottom of the board and then they're about to pop up and now they look to the bottom of the wave and you're going to go where you're looking so now you're going to lose all your momentum because you're dropping down to the bottom of the wave and then you try to think about turning and now when you want to turn that's when you look to the side of the wave which again is not going to work because we're not preemptively looking at where we want to be going. So again it's going to be we're checking our position looking down as we're paddling to the bottom of the wave and then we're looking across to the shoulder as we're about to pop up and then we can pop up and execute that turn straight away which is really really important. So remember those three things and remember we're looking where we're going not where we are and now let's go through what we're going to do with the turns. So you can see in that prior example we were checking each point off before we moved our attention down the line so we're checking the front foot position bottom of wave and then we moved our attention to down the line. The turning what really happens is we definitely come into more of an approach of making sure we're looking to where we want to be going. We'll start with the bottom turn because this is really really important but for the bottom turn as we're going and committing that bottom turn our focus should be at the top of the wave where we notice that our attention stays either where the water is beside our rail or too low on the wave our bottom turn isn't going to go nearly high enough and we do want to get high from that bottom turn so that we can firstly bring ourselves into the power source of the wave where the critical nature of the wave is and where we're going to get all of our speed and this is also where we can actually allow ourselves to draw a really big large canvas with our turn as well if we're stuck down the bottom of the wave we've not got as much power not got as much drive and we've got less space to commit that turn as well. So as we're committing that bottom turn so we're at the bottom of the wave we're looking up to the top of the wave and then about halfway up the wave we do actually want to transition this and then we want to be looking where we're going to go so we're going to be looking from where we were going from that bottom turn into where we're planning on ending up after we've committed our turn. The important thing that I often see go wrong here is that the eyes move to where we're going first and then the body will react in response to that our body responds to what we see as we were talking about with the ski slope if we can see the path that's clearest that's where we're going to go if we can see where we're going to end up that's where we're going to go if we do a turn and we're still looking at the top of the wave and we're expecting to go backwards it's not going to be easy and we're probably not going to go to the optimal position on the wave either so we've got to make sure we're looking at where we're going not where we are for the bottom turn at the top of the wave and then way before we even commit that actual turn that's going to be happening we need to make sure that we're looking at where we're landing and then we just rinse and repeat that process now lastly for the cross-stepping this is a really really interesting one and probably the one that a lot of you here have waited to see because it is where a lot of our issues do come from so the initial issues with our cross-stepping is that we want to make sure our step positioning and placement and spacing is all correct and so we do something like this and i've definitely been a culprit of this in the past where we're looking down looking down looking down and then we get to the nose and we're still looking down looking at our feet we've got no idea of what's actually happening in front of us so this is where we can actually use our check but don't stare system we want to make sure all of our attention is to the wave in front of us and this helps instantly because if we've got our attention on what's happening in front of us then we can actually see when the wave starts to flatten out a little bit or when it starts to steepen up and this is actually what causes our problems if then we continue to the nose that's when we're going to nose dive or that's when we're going to not be able to adjust correctly but our body's actually going to be really good at repositioning naturally if we give it that feedback so to help out with knowing where you're going to put the feet but also help out with where we're going to be positioned on the wave i like to stare down the take our first two steps and this is where we can do a quick check to see how the nose is positioned and how far we are away so we can get our spacing and everything right if you're someone who uses a line across the top third of the board so that you know where to put that back foot then that that's something that you can do so we quickly check but don't stare we're going to check out the the front of the board and then we're going to redirect our eye positioning to in front of us as well so again what we do is we've got our eyes forwards one two check and then coming forwards and this is going to be a really good way to make sure we're maximizing our understanding of our position on the board but keeping a good understanding of where we are on the wave as well so i hope that's helped to correct and modify i guess how you were thinking about what to do with the eyes at these different points of our surfing i do think it's really important to understand that we're not actually doing something wrong if we are checking out our positioning on the board and oftentimes if we're told that we're looking down too much and that we shouldn't be looking at our board at all it can feel a little bit not quite right and that we're doing something massively wrong but it is okay to check out this position as long as we don't linger and stare for too long there because that's where we run into a lot of problems so if you have any questions please feel free to leave those in the description below to clarify anything and if you do want any video analysis from myself then feel free to check that out down below as well but let's step into the last part of today's video all right so i'll keep this pretty brief but i did want to speak a little bit about i guess getting on tour and how this happened and i will uh put this into another video as well but essentially earlier this week i did find out that i got a wild card into the 2023 season for the world longboard tour which is just awesome and it came off the back of the results i had in the qualifying series this year and i'm super super excited to give it a go the way that it will work is there's going to be four events and so there'll be hungerton at the end of july there'll be bells beach at the end of august early september el salvador in mid-september and then depending on the results the top guys from the tour are going to go through to malibu in kind of early to mid-october so it's going to be a bunch of fun i'm training a lot at the moment and yeah i suppose the only other thing i wanted to mention as i said quickly at the start is there will be a little bit of a discount on the glide surf collective product at the moment just to help me kind of raise some funds to get over there because it is going to be quite expensive to get the flights and accommodation and stuff sorted for that so absolutely no stress at all but if you were looking to uh i suppose support in some way um there'll be the discount code the and if you feel like you want to support but you don't want any of the the product as well i have set up a buy me a coffee link down below to help donate so we'll leave it there for today if you did want to see anything specifically from my time on tour um could do a little bit of a tour diaries or something like that which would be fun but i'll also do a bit more of an in-depth uh video soon as to how all this happened and how it came to be and everything like that because yeah it's pretty uh pretty big news for me and uh something that i'm really really excited for um can't wait to get into that but we will leave that there for today but i hope everyone's getting waves and we'll catch you in the next one