When you walk past a surf school, you’ll often see them with a line of people set up on the sand, with the big blue boards on the ground.
The people lie on the board on the beach, pretend to paddle, and then spring to their feet.
The idea is that this gives us some feeling of the sequence that happens when we go out to catch a wave.
And it does, to an extent…
The inflection point on how long we need to spend here versus getting out in the water amongst the chaotic, turbulent white-water is pretty early on.
For a beginner, surfing is often more about learning to read the waves and make sense of something that seems entirely out of control than it is about mastering the “pop” to the feet.
There’s never a “wrong” way of course, but an alternative might be to first learn to bodysurf well – eliminating some of the complexity in order to spend as much time being immersed in the waves as possible.
This let’s us get a feel for the environment, understand the energy of the waves, catch a few, and focus on the real problem at hand (“how do I not get pounded by these waves?”)
When we are comfortable in an environment, picking up a different tool or craft starts to feel a lot easier.
