Some good exercises before and after a Surf Lesson

HERE ARE GOOD EXERCISES BEFORE AND AFTER A SURF LESSON. THESE ARE SOME EXERCISES TO GET YOU READY FOR YOUR LESSONS.

A list of exercises that will not only improve your surfing, but keep your body in tune during that time out of the water.

Surfing is a highly athletic endeavour. It’s this beautiful mix of strength, power, fluidity, speed, endurance, flexibility, flow. It’s fun, incredibly fun, and the large majority of us want to do it better.

Keeping your body in a physical state so you can get into the ocean and do what you love to do, that is what lies at the centre of this whole ‘surf fitness’ shift. Good exercises before and after a surf lesson help achieve that fitness. 

At its foundation, it’s simply keeping your body, or restoring your body, to a better physical state.

Make your body stronger, powerful, flexible, and more durable, so you’re not self-limiting the skill and art of surfing.

Here’s a list of some fundamental movements and exercises that will boost your athletic capacity. Understand this, no singular exercise is going to make you a better surfer, they’re just going to make you a more physically capable human so you can work on your skill in the water.

What all these movements have in common is they hit the athletic components that surfing demands.

Strength, power, flexibility, endurance, coordination, and balance.

List of fundamental movements and good exercises before and after a surf lesson

1) SWIMMING

When weather conditions make surfing impossible, keeping in shape for surfing is best achieved by staying in the water.

Certain swimming techniques become powerhouse workouts for critical surfing moves, such as paddling and withstanding wipeouts and hold downs.

2) PLANK

Try this basic exercise for improving your surfing movements. Keep feet together, keep your back straight, head in line with your spine, support your upper body using your elbows, to maintain this position keep your tummy muscles tight.

Hold for as long as you can. The front plank is a simple exercise for all abilities. It targets the core muscles – essential for surfers.

3) PUSH-UPS

A stronger upper body and core could help with duck dives, popups, and shoulder injury prevention. A good goal is to get to Ring Pushups.

The instability of the rings, and the control required from the shoulder girdle and core has a lot of beneficial carryover to the sport. Most however need to simply start from the ground.

Build understanding of what good alignment feels like, and build some basic strength. From there you can add volume, meaning more reps. You can add load by elevating the feet or placing weight on your back.

You could improve power by increasing the speed of the press. There’s so many variations, but keep an eye on that goal of perfect ring pushups. They’re challenging and beneficial.

4) FRONT SQUATS

The squat pattern is crucial to surfing. Think of crouching through a bottom turn, landing a high speed floater, or holding through a full rail turn.

You need a strong lower body, you require healthy joints to move through full range of motion, and you need to produce and absorb some very large forces.

The loading of the movement places more demand on the extensor muscles of the spine, the crucial muscles for efficient paddling postures as well as a healthy and robust back.

When squatting efficiently, and that’s the keyword, you’re developing a stronger lower body that moves efficiently through multiple joint complexes.

5) YOGA

When you think about Yoga, you don’t really think about surf. But surprisingly they match!

Yoga complements surfing perfectly as it builds strength, flexibility and balance.

When you surf you need to be focused and peaceful with yourself that is why yoga can help. Yoga is a good exercises before and after a surf lesson.

Yoga is the best training before surfing, but if you don’t want to feel your body after the session you need to practice yoga after surf for stretching you.

Learning how to breathe properly might be the biggest benefits surfers will get from practicing yoga. In yoga you want to breathe through your nose filling your entire lungs.

This can be very beneficial in alleviating fear in big surf as well as giving you the lung capacity to handle being held down by the waves. When the breath is calm and controlled it can go a long way in preventing panic in a bad situation. If we control the mind we come closer to controlling the body.

Have a look at this video about yoga for surfers!

The above exercises alone are not enough to make you a better surfer. They are simply meant to make you a fitter, stronger and more physically capable person, which will definitely allow you to brush up on your skills in the water.

Training for surfing is not just about improving your physical state and becoming leaner and more flexible. You need patience, mental strength, and a lot of motivation to become a true surfer!

Do you want to learn to surf? Have you decided to take your first surf lesson?

If you want to know about surf and health benefits check out this article!