"Young surfing talent is being encouraged to go hard, but often with inferior technique, poor strength levels, and lacking the confidence to successfully land their moves. As a result, over-emphasising risky moves too early often creates inferior performances rather than advances a performance."
A lot of surfers have the limitation of not being able to bend or crouch with ease. This is particularly true for taller surfers. This can be caused by lack of use or past injury to the ankles, knees, hips or lower spine. Lack of use or previous injury leads to mobility and strength deficits.
The reality of the training process is that it can be a hard with lots of frustrations, but for those surfers that persist, when success becomes more common, those frustrations turn into joy and a sense of achievement. Working on your surfing can be FUN for those who really want to be the best they can be.
Exercise physiologist and strength & conditioning coach, Peter Roberts, briefly shares his opinion on what fitness training recreational surfers should do to better their surfing.
The advanced manoeuvres of surfing are often just an extension of their minor manoeuvre cousins. That is, many are simply performed higher……., tighter……., or are more committed – usually in full control.
No matter what level of surfing performance a surfer may have, there are 5 performance factors that interrelate to create a performance. Namely - fitness, technique, decision-making, tactics, and the psychology of our thoughts as we surf.
For many surfers, standing in the way of breaking this threshold are 14 fundamental skills. Get them right, and the real joy of surfing opens up, get them wrong, and these inconsistencies will likely haunt a surfer for the life of their surfing journey.
Bronte Macaulay shares her thoughts on the benefits of using video to develop a surfer's performance.