You want to ride more waves? You’ve got to learn a few things to get in the position to do so. Photo: YouTube//Screenshot
Surfing is fun because until a certain age, you never stop improving. It’s a constant learning experience, with the level of learning directly correlating with the amount of fun you’re having. The best way to improve your surfing isn’t by doing surf-related workouts or visualizing or dissecting how your favorite surfer surfs, but simply by surfing. Sure all those other things help, but you’re never going to get better without actually paddling out. Which is why Nathan Florence, a man obsessed with getting better at just about everything he does, decided to cut together the edit you see here.
Titled The Fastest Way to Improve Your Surfing, Nathan’s clip is full of tips, some obvious and some not so obvious.
“It’s things I think beginner surfers could benefit from,” he says at the beginning. “If you guys are professionals, maybe this could help you too, but this is going to be more geared towards people at the beginning stages of learning to surf and in the middle stages of learning to surf and basically anyone who wants to spend more time riding waves.”
That last bit is relevant to everyone from someone who’s never surfed before to Kelly Slater, because if you’re interested in surfing, you want to spend more time riding waves. The problem that comes with that, of course, is that in order spend more time riding waves, you’ve got to do all that other stuff that comes with it. You’ve got to paddle. You’ve got to duck dive. You’ve got to get worked. You’ve got to surf in poor conditions and good ones.
“In order to ride more waves, you’ve got to learn how to paddle better,” Nathan said. “You’ve got to learn to duck dive better. You’ve got to learn to position [yourself] better. This video is about things you can do to surf better, and those things are probably the most important things you can do.”
