3 Things to help your take off 🏄‍♀️

Filippo Galli -

Taking off is one of the most important things for a surfer. 🙃

You can be in the perfect spot for the best wave ever but if you take off badly you would not enjoy the ride. You might go to the bottom of the wave, lose balance or just simply fall.

A good and smooth take-off would make you FLYYY ✈️ so here are 3 things that helped me improve it 😬

1- Angle your board but not too much 🎯

0:00
/
Paddling towards the pocket and last-minute angling my take-off - don't look at the rest because my stance is bad and there are other mistakes

Just when you feel that the wave is lifting you up and giving you some speed, angle your board to some degrees right or left depending on the wave.

This is extremely useful when the waves are steep or also when you have a longboard.

Why should you angle your board during take-off?

  1. It would give you more time to pop up.
  2. You would be already trimming on the wave face and then you can either decide to go down for a bottom turn or stay high on the wave.
  3. With a longer board and steep wave, it would prevent you from nosediving.

What to avoid?

  1. Don't angle your board too much, otherwise, you might not catch the wave. So first focus on catching the wave and then angling.
  2. Again don't angle too much when the wave is not steep but slower, just reduce your angle otherwise you won't be able to catch the wave.

2 - Look up before you take off 👀

This is something I kept doing wrong, especially with bigger waves, look at me in 2020:

The sequence of 1-looking down, 2- Bad pop up still looking down, 3- eventually the wave took me down

Below is a silly comparison with the GOAT Kelly Slater, he looks ahead and sees what is coming, I look only down the wave, ready to fall off!

This is a silly comparison of me vs Kelly Slater, he looks ahead of the wave I look down ready to go down

So why bring your head up and look at the face of the wave?

  1. Where you look is where you go, if you look down you would probably go down - Imagine riding a bicycle if you look at your feet down, where would you go?
  2. It would give you more balance, to me even with the wave almost breaking on me with whitewash I can usually keep on riding the wave.
  3. Before you take off you can already see what the wave is doing, is it going to close out? Is it slow? and decide on what line you should take, you want to go down at the bottom or stay high.
  4. It would give more space for your front leg to go through when you pop up, so better standing position -> which results in a better ride.

3- The Cobra Pose 🐍

So you angle your board, you are looking up, then now use the Cobra pose. 🐍

Me with a cobra pose, not really stretchy but you know I am not so flexible 😬

Very classic in yoga, why is the cobra pose so useful in surfing?

  1. It would give you stability & control because you put more weight on the tail, where your fins are.
  2. It would help you prevent nose-diving, as the weight goes to the tail and lift the noose.
  3. It is the first step of the pop-up, so by doing it you would skip that step and be quicker to just pop up.