SURF PRO TIPS | 01: How to frontside carve with Leonardo Fioravanti

Hey guys, my name is Leonardo Ferravanti. I'm a world tour surfer and this is the first episode of a series that will help you improve your surfing. Today we'll be working on how to do a frontside carve. The frontside carve is a maneuver for intermediate to expert surfers and above. Still to this day for me I'm trying to improve the carve because it is an easy maneuver but really hard to become perfect. There's a few key points that are super important. The bottom turn obviously that's where everything starts and the angle that you come on the wave. The rotation of your head to make sure that your body follows your rotation. The compression throughout the carve to make sure that you're stable and strong on your legs. And the arm placement to make sure that you're doing the rotation quite perfect as it's a mechanical movement. Let's watch this carve from Mexico together and go through step by step on how you know I can give you some tips and some common mistakes that usual surfers make. The most important part is the angle that you come into the carve and that really comes from the bottom turn. Some common mistakes that people make are not doing a bottom turn or going too low off the bottom. It is important to start your bottom turn but cut through the wave halfway because if you go too low then you lose your speed. A lot of the surfers they come off the wave where there's no power they come up with zero speed and that is too hard to do your rotation. And obviously if you don't do a bottom turn then you cannot put your board at the angle of doing a frontside carve. Here you see me off the bottom quite low which is very important but also cutting through half of the wave to make sure that I come up at the right angle. If I went any lower than this I think I would have come to the top of the wave with not enough speed to you know do my rotation of the carve. When your bottom turn is ending and you're coming up the wave you have to make sure you extend a little bit to get that you know strength of your whole body. And this is where another common mistake at this point of the wave a lot of people lean too forward and if you're leaning too much forward which even myself I do sometimes you lose that ability to get your whole rotation and come across while gaining speed throughout the carve. It is important to lean back at the top of your wave so that your back arm can start coming across. Here's where the head starts turning. If you're looking backwards and your eyes are watching where you're gonna go your body will follow like anything in you know any movement in life your body usually follows your eyes. A common mistake is people want to look at their spray and it's normal you want to see how much spray you're throwing. But that's okay you will see it after the wave or your friends will tell you that you threw a gigantic amount of spray. This is where you get your speed and power throughout the carve. You know you have to make sure that your head is turning, your back arm comes across quite hard, your core is engaged, your eyes are looking to the bottom of the wave where you want to end your carve which is very close to the whitewash and you're pushing quite hard in this point in this part. Towards the end of the carve that is where your back arm has to come low to make sure that the front arm comes across and gives you that stability and compression throughout the end of the carve so that you don't lose your balance. If you finish your carve and this is a common mistake that you know many people finish the carve standing up you lose your balance and you're not strong on your legs so you have to make sure that you're compressed throughout the end of the carve and also a main reason why you have to be compressed is because the whitewash is right behind you. So if you see here I finished my carve right next to the whitewash which is very important to do but I had to be very compressed otherwise the whitewash would have just made me lose balance. So let's go through it step by step a little bit faster here's a slow motion off the bottom I'm compressed I'm coming down I extend here's my back arm coming across eyes looking down push forward compress down next to the whitewash and make sure that I follow through into another maneuver. I hope that with these tips I can help you guys achieve a decent to amazing carve and in a few years you'll keep improving like I'm still trying to do and get better at it. Once you've worked on a standard carve and you're getting better at it there's a few variations that you can keep trying. If your level of surfing is improving you can work on different varieties of a type of carve which is the tightness of it and the drift so there's a few carves that you can start drifting throughout the end and get that control of your board. You push with your back tail a little bit harder and try and get that drift off the board but you have to make sure that your board flattens out a little bit so that your tail can come backwards and then come across with the wave. That is so important to be compressed and low at the end of it because there again you're even less stable and you have less balance. Another one that I absolutely love is starting the carve with the arms behind my back and having my back arm come across halfway through the carve. Instead of coming across like this you're starting almost like this you start your carve and right at the end you get this tweak of strength to make sure that you follow through the carve and that one feels amazing because right at the end of your carve you have this very fast movement of your whole torso and body that follows through. That maneuver to me is insane. One of the best surfers to do it I think is Jon Jon. I love the way he does it but I think I'm pretty good at it too and I love to mix it in during competitions to make sure that I got some variety in there. Nobody does it perfect, nobody does it the same. You know there's a few key points but everybody has their own style and I think that's the best part about a carve. To keep working on your carve on land I think the gym is a huge tool to get stronger at it. You know the carve is a powerful maneuver so you have to be strong on your legs, you have to be strong on your body. The two main parts are I think the core is super important throughout the whole carve and a really special exercise that you can work on is a lateral squat where you're leaning onto one leg while the other leg is off the bottom and pushing. The lateral squat is an exercise that everybody does in the gym but if you do it the right way and you get compressed throughout the maneuver it can help you feel comfortable in those positions. The surfskate is an incredible tool to perfect and memorize the movement and maneuver. Unless you have a wave pool every day it is hard to replicate the same wave and the ocean is never the same but on land you can really get there and keep practicing and practicing so that the movement is memorized in your head and when you get back out there you feel like you can do it better. Or if you don't have waves every day and you're from Italy then you kind of have to use this until you're on your next surf trip. I'm going to try and help you guys as much as possible but personally I don't think I have the best carve in the world. My main inspirations are Andy Irons and Mick Fanning. I think the way they do the carve is absolutely amazing and as close to perfection as it will ever get I think. To help you guys after watching this video DM me on Instagram some of your carves doesn't matter the level if you're an expert and intermediate and I will repost them on Instagram and give you guys some tips to become a better surfer. Please comment on the YouTube channel what you'd like to see on the next how to do video so that I can help you guys. Thanks for watching and see you in the water.