Surf With Amigas’ head yoga instructor Reesie just made this perfect compilation of workouts and stretches that you should do to prepare for your next retreat with SWA. Expect to do pop-up practice, stabilizing core workouts, and a few juicy hip openers. After completing the exercises in this video (a few times) you’ll be ready to go!
Interested in more surf-related tutorials or workouts? Let us know!
The bottom turn. It’s the setup for most maneuvers in surfing. Want to get barreled? Do a cutback? A snap off the top?
We know its not as simple as it sounds, so here we are. We encourage you to play around with these techniques. Consider how your board feels different under your feet each time you try something new, and practice, practice, practice.
Keep your back foot on the tail pad
The tail (back end) of the surfboard is the point where the board pivots and turns. If your stance is in the middle of your board and your back foot isn’t placed on the tail pad, you may notice that the board feels stiff and difficult to turn. If you don’t usually get your foot all the way back there, just start here! Practice this. Notice how the board starts to respond differently. Just get used to placing your foot back there, then move on to step 2.
Mid-wave bottom turns just aren’t as good. Why? If you’re already halfway up the wave, there’s not much space to really set up for a good turn! The best a mid-wave bottom turn will ever produce is an average horizontal cutback. Try to get speed and pump yourself down to the bottom of the wave to set up for the bottom turn. This will ultimately give you more space on the wave to work with and result in a bigger, better maneuver.
Touch the wave with your inside hand/fingertips
Once you’re positioned at the bottom of the wave, try to reach your inside hand or fingertips down to touch the wave. This will automatically pull your chest down closer to the wave and get you in a lower stance. It also creates a pivot point on the wave. Creating this pivot point will not only give you more control, but will help direct the nose of your board more vertically up the wave. Getting the hang of this is seriously a game-changer! When you try it out you’ll know what I mean. It may be a technique that you’ve never even noticed before, but after reading this I encourage you to go watch a few surf videos (of short boarders) and you’ll notice that talented surfers do it on almost every single wave.
Look up (or ahead) at the section on the wave that you want to go to
The momentum from your bottom turn needs to take you somewhere! As you reach your inside hand into the water you should already be looking up (or ahead) at the part of the wave you’d like to go to. The purpose of a bottom turn is ultimately to set up for a barrel, snap, or cutback. Keep this in mind and keep your eyes on the prize as you set it all up.
We hope this 4 step guide to improve your bottom turn is helpful and encouraging. If you try out these techniques and they work for you, please share with us! If you’d like for us to break down another surf maneuver, contact us here.
Standing on the beach and watching the waves with butterflies going crazy in your stomach. Paddling halfway to the outside only to turn back around out of fear or anxiety. Or making it to the outside but then feeling too far out of your comfort zone to catch any waves.
Here are three tools that may help you overcome anxiety in the ocean so you can tap into the joy of surfing and catch more waves.
So much pressure is taken off when there’s a familiar face in the water. Surfing with friends means that someone can keep an eye on you, while you keep an eye on them. It also means that you can encourage each other to catch waves, cheer each other on, and laugh at the wipeouts together. Wiping out without a friend close by just isn’t the same. If you can’t line up a surf session with a friend, the next best thing you can do is chat with another surfer in the water. This will immediately take the edge off. Not to mention your new buddy will also be more likely to share a few waves with you!
Surfing comes with many challenges. Surfers have to learn how to read waves, build up paddle and core strength, be able to steer clear of other surfers in the water, and overcome big wipeouts, to name a few. We can all agree that it’s hard. Swimming and playing in the waves (close to shore) is a great way to open up a more playful mindset while you’re in the ocean. Laughing loud, jumping over and swimming under waves, body surfing in the shore pound, laughing loud all over again. These are just a few things that will not only teach you how to tap into a more relaxed and playful approach to surfing, but will also build your confidence in reading waves and being underwater.
Although this one’s a no brainer, it’s hard to remember to just breathe when you’re amidst the chaos! Deep, slow breaths will calm your nerves and get you re-centered. Try taking a few deep breaths every time you reach the outside and have a chance to sit up on your board. This will help to get rid of any panicky feelings you have and put you back in the zone. Try to make this a consistent practice.
We hope these simple tools help you calm your nerves and tap into the joy of surfing and ocean-play. If you try one of these tools and it works, we’d love to hear your story! If you have other practices that have worked for you, we’d love to hear about those too.
This duck dive-inspired yoga sequence is easy to do at home! Many of the same muscles engaged during a duck dive are also engaged during a simple vinyasa flow.
Add this sequence to your daily practice to help commit these duck dive movements into muscle memory, so that once you hit the water to surf your duck dive will feel natural and strong.
One of our newest surf instructors, Florida grom Jazmine Dean, just spent her first season working retreats and adventuring with the Surf With Amigas crew down in Nicaragua and Costa Rica. She created this super rad little surf film and just released it last week! Enjoy the film and a note from Jaz below-
My life changed in the season I spent down here as a first time Surf With Amigas instructor just as much as Amigas often say their lives change during retreats. I’m currently still down in Southern Costa Rica and I’ve spent more consecutive months living here than I have spent living in any other foreign country before. I spend my free days in-between retreats almost the same as I spend my, “work”, days during retreats, and most of my closest friends down here were formed through the connections and roots that SWA has created here in the local community.
This film barely scratches the surface of how this life has reconnected me to my roots as a soul surfer and the good times had. I understand surfing and have for a long time, but these retreats are just as much about personal growth as they are about surfing a wave, and for that, I thank the guests, our Amigas, so much.
I’m most grateful of all for the women I’ve met through the retreats and I took a little from each person I spent time with. It’s possible that some of you reading this were on some of the retreats I worked at and maybe even appear in a scene or two! Anyways, please enjoy the film and thanks for watching.
Pura Vida,
-Jazmine
At these retreats our goal will be to help you develop the skills needed to get your first tube ride. We’ll be getting up early and paddling out at sunrise, then coming in for breakfast, and paddling out again! If the tide and wind are good, we’ll surf four or five hours per day. This retreat is about surfing our brains out!
You may have heard the saying “its not the destination its the journey”. It has always kind of annoyed me because the journey normally means long plane rides, delays, layovers, canceled flights etc., and I just want to get to the destination already and skip the “journey” part. But, it doesn’t have to be that way at all. It’s good to think of the journey as an adventure and wherever I end up, even if its not the place I had intended to go, as the destination.
My latest surf adventure was by boat with 3 girlfriends, a cooler full of beer, a comically large quiver of surfboards, and a desire for right hand point breaks. We left not so bright but very early (4am) and loaded up the boat with all of our boards. We brought long boards, mid length boards and short boards. The great thing about traveling with a boat full of women is that we are always prepared with stylish surf costumes, which explains the plethora of bikinis, leggings, rash guards, surf hats, and some surf sun glasses. Oh, and just in case, the snorkel mask and fins.
For those ladies who already know how to paddle into and ride down the line, we offer several advanced coaching sessions per year.
On these retreats the focus is breaking down higher level skills via classroom sessions and awesome surf sessions with our super talented coaches. This particular week featured guest instructor – 2x world longboard champ Jen Smith and super stylish longboard cruiser Macy Sivage.
On a recent advanced retreat in Costa Rica, I asked the group for suggestions on classroom session topics. One of the guests suggested a talk about how to have good style.
Style is one of those things that you know when you see but is hard to describe. One of the most stylish female surfers, Stephanie Gilmore says “there’s no right or wrong, you do what feels good to you.”
For the talk, I listed a handful of generally considered stylish professional surfers and then created a slideshow of photos of them. One thing we noted that almost all had in common was a tendency to do a “soul arch”. A soul arch is when you usually have your feet relatively closer together and you thrust your hips out, arch your back, and lean your head back. Whether it is in the tube, on a bottom turn, or during a nose ride, a lot of stylish surfers will go for this move. It looks cool, it feels cool. I encouraged the Amigas to try it on their next session.
Inspired myself to take my personal soul arch to the next level, I really went for it one session. I was paddling out with a local friend and we were talking about surfboards. She wanted to try mine and suggested I try hers. She weighs a bit more than I do so her board was quite a bit thicker and stiffer than what I’m used to riding. This is a video of my first wave riding her board. After a few turns, I went for the soul arch, into a cheater 5 nose ride soul arch, into a head-dip tube. Does it look cool? It felt amazing. In the end that’s all that matters!
I dare you to try a soul arch on your next session. Let us know how it feels!
At our Costa Rican location, we offer surf coaching retreats for advanced beginners and intermediate surfers. We define advanced beginners as those that have already stood up in the white wash, can paddle themselves outside, and are ready to start riding green waves. Although we have been flexible with this description, these are the types of surfers that tend to have the best time and are able to take advantage of the amazing waves our Costa Rican location has to offer!
Continue reading “Surf Coaching in Costa Rica for All Levels”
