Lots of us watched Swayze in “Point Break” and decided surfing was for us. Or insert your own surfing movie. But when it comes down to it, if you don’t know how to surf, you are faced with the task of changing that by learning how to do it.
Learning to surf is not overly difficult, provided you are in reasonable physical shape and can put in time on the water. You should be able to stand up and partially ride a wave in the first hour or two of lessons. This is normally enough of a thrill to motivate you to keep practicing.
The biggest hindrances are often things we puny humans have no control over because they’re up to Nature, but there are some steps you can take to make your attempts at learning to ride the waves a little more productive.
You Must Coordinate All the Moving Parts
Surfing is so tough to learn at the beginning because there are so many moving parts. There are waves to find and read correctly, gear to pick up, and physical movements that have to be as close to perfect as possible for a ride to go well.
Let’s take a closer look at these parts.
Finding the Right Place
There are beaches for beginners, some for experts, and beaches whose suitability depends on the weather and the waves on a given day. Ask around to find a good beginner beach– a place with waves no bigger than about two feet.
Locals will know the places to send you.
Once you get there, you’re at the mercy of the environment as to whether those two-foot waves appear. They might break all day for you, or they might never materialize. You never know. You can at least arm yourself by learning to read a surf forecast
and then doing exactly that before you head out.
The Best Beginner Board
Okay, so there’s not one board that’s The Best, but there are things to keep in mind. If you try to learn on the wrong board, you may never catch a single ride all day.
What you’re after is a board with a wide, flat rocker (the curve of the bottom of the board from front to back). This board shape will give you volume (your board’s flotation ability), which beginners need more of.
A longboard that is at least a couple of inches taller than you are should be fine.
Perhaps the best choice for beginners is a foam board– something like Wavestorm’s Eight-Foot Foam Soft Top— which is a bit more forgiving than a traditional fiberglass board. This board is available on Amazon.com.
The Pop-Up and Foot Placement
Two of the hardest things to learn, the pop-up and correct foot placement on the board, are crucial to catching a wave. While you can learn these yourself, it will be easier with an instructor. Failing that, watch the other surfers around you.
Pay attention to the way they do things and put that new knowledge to work.
Your pop-up should be just that– a quick, explosive movement. Most beginners try to stand up by taking a detour involving putting their knees down on the board, but this makes your center of gravity move around, and you’ll quickly get a dunking.
Take the fins off your board and practice popping up while on the beach. Better yet, do that every day.
When you pop up, your feet have to find the correct position instinctively. Your back foot should be dead center, over your fin, and your front foot running parallel to it. This is an exercise in balance, so if you’re naturally gifted in this department, all the better for you and your progress.
Foot placement also takes a lot of repetition to master.
It’s one thing to think about where to put your feet and get them there. It’s quite another for your muscle memory to do the task for you, and that only comes with doing it again and again.
Practice, Practice, Practice
Everyone says it, but it’s true. Practice is the only way to get better at something, and learning to surf is no different. However, the nature of surfing makes this a difficult thing for many people to do.
First of all, your average vacationer from a landlocked state isn’t going to be able to practice day in and day out. She’s got a few days in paradise to learn this demanding sport, and that’s just not enough.
Second, for those who live near a beach and can get out in the waves several times a week, the fact remains that those waves are never the same. If you have a particular skill you want to work on in baseball, you do it a bunch of times and perfect it.
But you can’t do that with waves because you never know what’s coming next from the ocean.
This is probably the most challenging thing about learning to surf– this inconsistency of the waves. You may have caught one wave imperfectly, but you can’t go right back out and catch the same wave and get it done right, and that sort of thing is necessary for improvement.
So you’re stuck with surfing as much as you can, racking up as much experience as the sea allows, but even then, you can’t always practice. There will be days when there are no waves, or waves too big for you, or the water is too crowded, or there was a shark sighting and the beach is closed.
Every day is an adventure, which is cool, but it’s also tough to make strides in your ability if you can’t consistently practice the necessary skills.
Conclusion
Surfing is awesome. It’s fun, it’s freeing, and it will change you for the better.
Remember those things when you’re out on the water trying to learn. You’re going to wipe out—a lot. You’re going to do your first 15 pop-ups completely wrong, wasting each one of those 15 good waves. That’s okay. There will be more.
Don’t get discouraged, don’t get frustrated, and don’t lose your temper. It’s not an easy sport to learn, so cut yourself some slack. It’s not easy, but it’s also not insurmountable.
Have fun and catch all the waves you can.
