How To Surf Better | Top 15 Tips For Intermediate Surfers | Surf Smarter, Not Harder

So I think one of the biggest challenges that a lot of average to intermediate surfers face is there comes a point where you start to plateau. You go out and you surf and you don't feel like your turns are getting any better or you keep on struggling with your pop-up and you just you just feel like you're not progressing anymore. So in this episode we're going to go and find Clayton and he's going to share with you some tips to help you keep your surfing progressing. Let's go! So Clayton's skating around on the ramp out in the background. Let's sit him down and let's get some tips as to how we can keep our surfing moving forwards. So Clay one of the one of the big problems that a lot of intermediate surfers have is they feel like they've plateaued out, like their surfing's not improving. So can you give us some of your top tips as to what we can do so that we we keep on enjoying our surfing and feel like we're progressing. Yes so it's probably more important to understand your body and then knowing how you move you could then choose the right board. So let me give an example. People that surf with good style they don't move much and therefore they can get a very responsive board because they're really nice and smooth. But people that have really wavy messy arms when they surf if you put them on a high performance board the board's going to be reacting to possibly the wrong technique. So smoother cleaner surfers with good technique can ride more performance boards. People that don't control their bodies well you almost got to ride a slightly wider thicker longer board to mute the too much feedback from your body. Yeah a lot of people get excited and then start over moving and the hands are the first things to go then there's a lot of bouncing trying to get your board to almost get from point A to point B. I feel when the wave speaks to you it almost tells you what you want and then you tend to move better with the wave like you connect with it whereas when you have too many moving parts you lose that connection. Surfing the pocket is where all the power is and it's where surfing flows. The problem with a lot of intermediates is they race them to the shoulder and try to do dynamic turns on a flat part of the wave which doesn't work. Bottom turn is an important part of surfing and it's a turn that you've got to slow down. A lot of people on the bottom turn they try to teleport like bang to get up top of the wave it doesn't happen like that. Whenever you've got speed turns happen a lot slower and you've got to wait and travel one two three do the top turn so you've got to slow it down set it up. I see so many surfers they go for a turn they're looking down the line and they try to jam a big twist but it's almost like the timing's off but had they've just looked back at say the foam board behind them they would then know how much time they had to put in to complete the turn or finish the turn. They're almost surfing and thinking about what they need to do without even looking at it. I suppose looking at it reading the section is important part of surfing. When you're doing a top turn it's very much a big twist whether it's your forehand or backhand. Often if your twist is broken it's kind of like the top and the bottom half of your body they don't talk well to each other so if you think about a twist a twist needs to originate from the bottom up so let's look at a golfer he will go ankles knee hip shoulders but a lot of surfers just go shoulders and that's where the the break in the top and the bottom half comes in so by pointing your knees first it'll help open up the hip which will give you more power for your twist your body's designed for forward movement even when we run we run forwards but it's hard to run sideways so standing in a side-on position you lose your peripheral vision you can't see and it's awkward to move so all the guys with good style are front-on surfers a big step taking your surfing to the next level is actually catching a wave on the peak a lot of people get anxious about taking off in the steep part of the wave and they tend to want to scratch onto it from the safety of the shoulder that extra paddling it causes anxiety it makes your mind run too fast whereas if you're on the peak which is the right place you can glide into it and set your wave up so much better when generating speed there's two ways we can do it think of riding a bicycle you could ride down a hill and get speed or you could pedal now when you surf by using the wave facing compressing and extending you can generate speed or you can twist and twist and twist your body the the latter where you use your body it doesn't look nice in surfing whereas if you use the wave's energy for surfing you'll come across as having effortless style back foot needs to be able to move around i tend to plant my front foot and if i want more speed i'll step more forward if i want to put my right rail then i'll push on my toe edge on the back foot or my heel edge on the toe edge so that back foot needs freedom to be able to move around now a really good way to do that is just to stack a lot more of your weight on the front foot this will give you more speed on the takeoffs it'll also allow you then to shuffle your back foot into whatever position you're comfortable in anybody surfing well in the water make sure you study them when you're pedaling back out and simply by copying and pasting so if someone does has a nice coffee cup pass when is he doing it how is he doing it and then just try simulate it by doing that you'll feel something different and it's probably going to be a feeling that you enjoy and then just have fun with it this is going to sound crazy but your board's not designed to be stood on i know it sounds crazy but think of it it's shaped like a banana have you ever seen a formula one boat shaped like a banana trying to go through the water it pushes water so your board's designed to turn now the more you turn and the more you lean over on your turns the more weightless you get the faster the board's going to go so every turn you do in surfing your board will accelerate so by doing a toe edge turn a transition where you go flat and then a heel edge turn you're actually minimizing how much time you're standing on your board and you're maximizing how much time you're turning therefore creating more speed yeah surfing's a tricky sport where you can quickly overthink things and you almost want to slow it down and be more in the moment and a really good way to be in the moment is to just feel the wave and feel the energy once you've felt that you can focus on one thing at a time like just one percent improvements to slow it down whether it's fixing your posture or just trying to be in that good part of the way where you can feel more so over my 20 years of surf coaching i've come up with ombi being ocean mind body and equipment and you always need to look at your own surfing through the ombi lens so if you've got video footage of yourself look at the ocean where am i on that wave look at your body am i moving effortlessly or am i fighting the wave look at your equipment is it accelerating three turns or is it slowing down three turns and lastly is where was your head at are you calm and relaxed and enjoying yourself or is your head rushing at 100 miles an hour and you basically panic surfing i strongly recommend to have fun in the water so mix it up with boards mix it up with equipment you could go body surf you can just surf switch surf endless there's so many things that you could do to change the situation in and to make it more fun i've seen pro surfers who have the luxury of surfing for a living angry at themselves in the water because they can't do a silly little turn um don't be that person just go out there with the intention of having fun and sharing so there you have it i think that that was 15 tips for intermediate surfers to keep their surfing moving forwards if you've enjoyed this video then make sure that you download your free surfing health check there'll be a link in the in the description below is a it is a really cool training program that is absolutely free you just got to enter in your email and you'll be sent through access so that you can analyze your surfing from eight different perspectives and get a really good idea on what it is that you need to focus on so that you can move your surfing forwards thanks for watching please like share subscribe add a comment below what has been your biggest takeaway but until the next video get out there have fun catching waves