7 steps to intermediate surfing | The Surfer's Roadmap

With so many people surfing now, there's never been a greater need for a clear pathway, a roadmap to higher levels of riding waves. But if you're like most of the surfing population, you find yourself plateauing in your abilities, feeling frustrated at a lack of progress, and struggling to really move forward. But you still remain obsessed with surfing as a hobby. Well today, in this video, I'm going to help you break through those plateaus, particularly if you're at that upper beginner level looking to transition through to intermediate. Make sure you watch all the way through because step number seven is going to underpin all the others. It's really important. This video is brought to you by thesurfersroadmap.com, my online surfing university designed to progress your surfing faster than ever, just like these surfers here. Join over 10,000 students via the link in the description below. To start today, we need to categorize a beginner surfer. And to do that, we need to categorize an intermediate surfer. Within the surfers roadmap ecosystem, we consider someone an intermediate surfer when they are cutting across the face of a wave regularly and trying maneuvers. So naturally, all levels before that, we would consider beginner. If that's you, let's help you cross that bridge today. The first thing that we need to look at is actually catching the wave. Basically, everything that happens before you pop up. Step number one on our roadmap to intermediate surfing is to optimize our positioning for cutting across the face of a wave. I've done videos on this before. I'll link it up in the corner now. Basically though, we need to position ourselves in relation to the wave so that we can find the time and space to cut across that wave. This will open up the possibility of trying maneuvers. So to do that, we need to orient ourselves to the peak of that wave. That is the part of the wave that will break first. This section clearly identified here by the highest point of the wave will offer us the most speed and power to take off from. And it's that speed and power that'll actually help us find stability and control as we pop up. In this beginner stage, we want to position ourselves just to the side of the peak for an easy entry into the wave. We're going to give ourselves a little bit of angle now. This is step number two. Now, if we take off too straight on the wave, we're going to end up surfing ourselves out of what we call the power zone. If we surf all the way into the flats, we're going to lose speed and struggle to keep up with the wave. So in order to give ourselves more time to do this, we're actually going to angle our surfboard as we're paddling in, in the direction that the wave is breaking. There's no strict number here, but generally, if you think about angling at 45 degrees, then you should find a sweet spot depending on that specific wave. And what this does, it allows us to glide into the upper half of the wave for a longer period of time and allows us the opportunity to pop up within the power zone, or at least on the face of the wave, making speed and control more attainable and almost cheating our way out and across the face a little before we even stand up. Step three on our roadmap is to pop up nice and low. Remember, compression equals stability and power. Many beginner surfers will pop up into a tall position with straight legs, which leads to instability and a lack of turning capacity. It's important that when we pop up, we do so into a nice compressed position with the knees bent. This is basically in preparation for our speed flow or bottom turn and is a must-do habit if we want to progress to intermediate. So if you find yourself popping up and immediately feeling unstable or wobbly and unable to turn your surfboard, try focusing on the bend in your knees and see if this helps you regain stability and control. Okay, step number four, you've got to point and look. The point and look principle carries through to all of our surfing skills. Basically, and you would have heard me say this before, where you look is where you go. As you pop up into a nice low compressed position, we're now going to get you up the wave face into the power zone. Rather than overcomplicate this approach, I just want you to think about pointing and looking to the lip of the wave. This simple idea will subsequently weight you onto the toes on the forehand or the heels on the back end, which will lead to rail engagement and a turning surfboard. Now don't worry if you end up turning yourself right off the back of a wave here. It's a sign that what you're doing is working and we can actually save you with step number six. Step number five now on your journey to intermediate surfing success is to perfect the pull and jump method from the surfer's roadmap. This is actually done in conjunction with step number four that we just covered, the point and look. This basically describes a bottom turn and it's this movement that will start to enable you to learn speed flow and then eventually try maneuvers. Surfing biomechanics can be described really simply as rotation coupled with compression and extension. Rotation or direction comes from our upper body and compression and extension or power comes from our lower body. The pull and jump method combines these perfectly as we come off the bottom of a wave and it is the technique used by all professional surfers. So after we pop up into our low position we're going to take our back arm and almost grab onto the wave face. We're going to pull that arm backwards as if we're literally pulling ourselves forward using our grip on the wave and as we do that we're also going to jump out of the lower body. We're going to extend our legs as if we're jumping quite literally from the lower part of the wave up to the top. One fantastic way to practice this is to do it repetitively on the surfskates which is what I'll teach you inside my ultimate surfskate program on TSR. On the back end the movement sequence is more of a low rotate and lift with the leading arm movement which again is covered more inside TSR beginner and intermediate. Step number six rotation. Once we've performed our pull and jump bottom turn or speed flow we need to apply that look and point principle again but it's more helpful now to think of it as a rotation. If we continue to look and point to the top of the wave without changing direction we'll simply surf our way off the back of a wave. So to catch this and continue riding we need simply to turn and look back down the wave now. On the forehand this will look like you're almost throwing your back arm up to the ear and twisting the head back down the wave. Whilst on the back end it'll look like you're first lifting the leading arm and then kind of punching it or shoving it back down and across the body. So we've covered off the technical aspects of our roadmap to intermediate surfing now but now we need to talk about equipment. That's right we need to start looking at different kinds of surfboards. Typically beginner surfers will ride boards with thick rails lots of foam which leads to stability but this often comes at the sacrifice of maneuverability making it hard for the surfer to change directions on a wave. As we begin to progress it's important for the beginner surfer to transition to a board with a more refined rail so that they can start to engage that rail more and feel the kinesthetics of changing directions. Now this doesn't mean you should immediately jump on a short board in fact you'd probably struggle to paddle and catch waves on a board that's too short. So try to find something in the middle like a performance mid-length. I do actually have a signature surfboard coming in this category so stay tuned for that. In the meantime though do some research and consider trying out a new more refined shape than a big foamy. Well I'm excited to be on this journey with you to intermediate surfing. If you guys enjoyed those tips and you want to go even more in depth on them make sure you check out the beginner surfers roadmap at thesurfersroadmap.com. That particular course has helped thousands of surfers transition from beginner to intermediate. I'm really excited for you to check it out. If you enjoyed this video make sure you subscribe to the channel, hit the like button, hit that notification bell and let me know in the comments which tip was most helpful for you. I will see you guys very soon. Thanks for watching!