Surfing Lesson Five - It's All About Positioning
4 commentsPositioning is extremely important when it comes to surfing. If your feet are not positioned correctly, you'll fall off or not be able to make decent turns. If you're not in the correct position when paddling for or catching waves, then you'll find yourself taking a pounding whenever you surf.
If you're not correctly positioned when riding on the wave, then you'll not be able to keep up the momentum necessary to ride the wave. So what about the all important positioning on the board? Let's start with the correct position for your feet when standing on the board.
Foot Position
Placing your feet into a good position as soon as you get up is desirable so you can get straight into your surfing. You don't want to concentrate on sliding your feet up and down the board when you could be carving it up, dude! The picture below perfectly explains the desired foot position.
Foot Position While Surfing
As you may be able to tell, standing like this means that you will be in a sideways position on the surfboard. If you can get your feet in this position quickly, well done; this is exactly how it should be. Your feet should be about shoulder width apart and feel comfortable to you. If you plan to be a longboard rider, then you'll find that the position of your feet will be changing from one moment to the next as you run up and down your board. You will find that as you develop your surfing, your feet will be moving into different positions for the different manoeuvres you are trying. But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Body Position While Surfing
Keep your body slightly crouched to lower your center of gravity. You'll probably find that you have your arms out wide to aid with balance which is great. Keep your knees bent at all times; riding a wave can be a bumpy ride. Your body will be turned to the side (which you can see from the mystery legs in the picture above) and the top half of your body will be turning to face forward. Take a look at surfers in action in our surfing videos section.
Next Up: Positioning to catch the wave.
HI! I've read all of the lessons until this current one and i'll be reading on. I've just wanted to say that it's been explaining things very clearly, thanks! :)
i agree with the above, i try and try and cant seem to time my pop up coerrectly, i am constantly changing my position but cant nail it, i'll keep on trying tho
hey hey hey, this was really helpful trollololo69
I still think front foot isn't parallel to the back foot positioned correctly. My instructor told me that both feet suppose to be parallel to each other in the pop up standing position that way you can have better stability on the board and easier to do or learn the turns.