If you only surf every summer because winter is too cold, you’ll never get to intermediate surfer level.
If you want to use a surfboard that is so thick, that you don’t have to work harder paddling, you’ll never get fit enough to become an intermediate surfer.
If you decide to sleep in before work and miss that 6am session, where the tide and wind were perfect. Missing that surfing session is why you’ll never become an intermediate surfer.
If your hands freeze and turn orange, then blue while carrying the surfboard home and you decide to never do that again because it was too uncomfortable. You’ll never become an intermediate surfer.
If you haven’t had a surf for a week because the surf has been bad, even just a paddle for the sake of it. You check the surf today, it’s onshore, 1 foot, choppy, cold, windy and you decide to wait another week. You’ll never become an intermediate surfer.
I started surfing on Avalon beach in the 1990’s and have an enormous amount of surfing experience that I’ll bring to the table in this article.
Don’t worry, I’m not going to sell you anything, this is just my personal blog.
The fastest way to progress from a beginner to an intermediate surfer is by developing the correct habits as a beginner. This is going to be a detailed post, so you can skip to the heading that you are looking for below (if you’re impatient).
Beginner surfers have to learn so many different things at once, this can be overwhelming for many.
Luckily for you, I’m going to explain exactly what you should be doing from the very beginning, which will help you progress to an intermediate surfer.
Having trouble learning to surf? Here are some high-quality surfing tips from a real surfer.
Best Surf Tips For Intermediate Surfers
- Learn to read the swell, tide, waves, wind and banks better
- Fitness – Having the ability to do 4 hour sessions without a break is very common for intermediate surfers
- Intermediate surfers have the right size board for their height and weight
- Practice holding your breath. Intermediate surfers surf bigger waves and having the ability to survive matters. Obviously
- Intermediate surfers generate more speed and are more balanced when popping up to stand up and speed through the bottom turn.
- Intermediate surfers start to learn tricks like cutbacks, racing the wave, and doing basic floaters.
Beginner Surfer To Intermediate Surfer
Intermediate surfers are more balanced, smoother, and create more speed on the wave. Not only these things, but they have also developed through experience more ability to read waves.
I remember noticing as a little grommet back in the day, that Tom Carrol, Barton Lynch and a few other sponsored surfers on the northern beaches, all had these exceptional qualities.
Some of my biggest issues were bogging down on the face of the wave, because I wasn’t balanced enough, and this reduced my speed.
Not to mention the fact that these guys knew where the wave was going to be, long before it got there.
Experienced surfers all have a deeper understanding on what the sand banks are doing beneath the surface, and how that will affect the swell.
Surfing on a shortboard is the most advanced, here is how you can learn to ride a shortboard in a short period of time.
Let’s start with reading waves
Best Intermediate Surfer Hack I Know
As a grommy, the best surfing hack I accidentally discovered was using a long skateboard as transport to the beach. It had big gel wheels, a flexible deck and was almost a metre long.
I noticed almost immediate results.
My speed almost doubled, I was able to race around closeouts that would previously catch me.
My speed off the bottom turn never bogged down anymore too, which meant that I was able to get more cutbacks in per wave.
I think the movement left and right needed for a long skateboard, perhaps built up the muscles in my ankles and knees.
Not sure exactly how it worked, just know it did and I recommend you try it too.
Below is an image of a sector 9 skateboard similar to what I had as a grommet.
Surfing is one of the most difficult sports to learn. Here’s a full list why surfing is so tough.
Intermediate Surfers Know How To Read Waves
I’d like you to start by spending just a little more time checking the surf every day. Look at where the sandbanks are today, then see if they move tomorrow.
You need to start noticing these little changes that happen every day. It’s not just the wind direction, swell direction, wave size, tide level, and direction. Observe the banks, they do change every day.
Next, I want you to watch how the swell moves over the sandbank. You’ll notice in some cases that where the swell moves doesn’t mean the wave will break in that spot. Let me explain.
Sometimes you’ll notice the largest part of the swell hitting the deep water, yet the swell will turn into a wave over the bank regardless of where the swell is. When you learn to read swell direction and waves, you’ll start to understand the way waves behave in more depth. This will come with experience.
Just like people, no two waves are exactly the same. You are going to ride a wave that has never been before and will never be again.
Sure the swell, tide, wind etc all matter.
But, the soul of a wave comes from beneath the water, the soul of the wave is its bank. All of the best surfers know how to read the bank. Sand still matters on reef breaks too, just less so.
What Is a Good Beginner To Intermediate Surfboard?
Improvement is uncomfortable, it’s difficult, it’s tiring. To move from a beginner surfer to intermediate surfer, you must be constantly outside of your comfort zone.
Otherwise, you might as well buy a big malibu surfboard and surf 2 foot waves at low tide in summer or buy a body board and only surf shoreys at high tide in summer.
It’s okay to do this, when you’ve put in a few decades of short board action and your having a few back problems, but if you are reading this to figure out how you can step up a few levels, you need to put in the proper work.
As a beginner, you’ll usually have difficulty gaining enough speed while paddling on waves. So, most beginners will buy a slightly larger surfboard than they should need.
Beginners surfboards are thick, wider, longer. As your fitness and balance progresses, you should be buying slightly thinner, shorter surfboards.
The goal is to constantly be riding a surfboard that makes it difficult for you to gain speed and balance. So, you are constantly struggling to get speed and stay on the board.
You might think this will restrict your progress, but in fact the opposite is true. To improve, you need to constantly be surfing outside of your comfort zone.
Basic Intermediate Surfboard Philosophy
Although the best way to improve is to spend as much time in the water as possible, understanding the principles of surfing, its biomechanics of it, and the hacks to fast-track your success are incredibly beneficial to your overall journey.
It seems like new shapes are popping up everywhere and you’d be forgiven for thinking that you’re falling behind if you don’t buy the next best thing as soon as it hits the shelves.
Well, it’s not the case, but board requirements do change the more you advance with your surfing and depending on the conditions.
It is really important to have the right board. It is going to result in, I guess, developing into a better surfer faster.
What a lot of people find hard when they’re beginning to surf is catching waves. So either you don’t have the ocean knowledge yet or you don’t have the paddle fitness yet, so it can be a combination of both.
Having the longer board and the other thickness, in addition to a little bit more width, helps novice surfers or surfers wanting to improve their skills paddle easier because the board sits a little bit further out of the water, so there’s a little bit less drag and gets, more flotation.
By catching more waves, you have more exposure to riding waves and hence you can kind of grow and develop your skills faster.
You’re looking for like a wide board, wider nose, wider tail, looking more like a bubble-like bulbous and round as opposed to pointing in the nose and narrowing the tail look.
If you’re catching pretty much, I’d say, 80% of the waves that you’re paddling for.
From there, once you’re up, you’re trimming along the wave and finding it easy to get to the unbroken part of the wave.
That’s probably when you’re wanting to expand your skill set and pick a board that has a larger performance envelope.
That board will be a little bit shorter and a little bit narrower and just overall the shape, you’re starting to reduce that kind of width in the nose and the tail and increasing also now the rocker in the board as well.
So you’re looking for a board that effectively has more curves in the outline and in the rocker that will allow a bit more maneuverability.
So we found an appropriate board, well done. This is one of the most important steps that, unfortunately, a lot of surfers just blindly take on their surfing journey.
Having the right board allows you to paddle effectively. It allows you to catch lots of waves, and it allows you to perform how you want to on those waves.
How To Stand Up On a Surfboard Like An Intermediate Surfer
One of the most important things to remember when popping up is to stay centered over your board.
Many people struggle to transition from low to high without losing their centered position and simply topple over to one side of significance is the stance you’re popping up into.
Contrary to the conventional view of surfing, we don’t need to pop up straight into a high stance with straight legs.
In fact, this is not recommended.
By popping up into a lower surf stance with arms semi-relaxed and out to the side, we can create a much more stable pop-up process.
This upward motion during the transition from low to high is something we can train on land, as it does require a certain degree of core strength and coordination.
It’s often a sticking point for many beginner and intermediate surfers.
When it comes to popping up, one big thing I see with beginners is that they get flustered and try and do everything very quickly.
So they’re going to disorientate themselves and upset the equilibrium on the surfboard.
When you’re paddling like a maniac and not paddling efficiently, that can upset your equilibrium on the surfboard.
So for one, you’re starting on the back foot and then I see people getting up and standing up, really trying to be quickly ending up being heavy-footed and being too tall or too high.
I think you want to be getting up slower and lower instead of like a pop-up or a jump up, I’d think of like, how can you slide up to your feet?
For starters, I would focus on getting the hips open, especially if you’re surfing at a beginner or intermediate level as an adult, there’s a lot of tension to undo before we have that efficiency and that fluidity.
So I’d spend some time opening the hips. So one nice hip stretch would be just the normal lunge.
I’d also exercise out of perfect range of motion. So I’d be allowing myself to extend the knees beyond the toes, the front leg, whilst you’re opening up the opposite hip.
I’d also be playing around with some circular motions then you can transition that from a downward dog to stepping 1ft forward to the outside of your hand at a time.
You can do that variable tempo and intensity as well, it can be fast, it can be slow. You can add a little bit of a push-up with that.
So I’d be concentrating on opening the hips. I’d be concentrating on getting a nice open and extension in the spine, particularly the upper back open, upper back strong, lower back strong set of glutes open hips.
The reality is that pop-up training on land is quite different from in the water, where we are moving on an unbalanced dynamic surface.
But the strength and coordination which comes from those on-land exercises are super helpful in perfecting our pop-up technique.
Once you’ve got your pop-up to a point where you’re feeling pretty confident, let’s say you’re taking off on waves with at least an 85% success rate, then it’s time to start catching on broken waves.
For this though, we need to talk about an entirely new skill set, we need to talk about positioning and paddling.
How To Read The Wave Like An Intermediate Surfer
Learning how to read waves is like learning a new language, it’s difficult and there are lots of things to think about, but there are some key cues to look out for to help you be in the right spot for the right wave.
Finding the right conditions for you to transition to out-the-back surfing is going to be critical.
There’s no point doing it in four to six-foot pumping waves. What we’re looking small and perfectly peeling wave. So if you do fall off, nothing bad is going to happen.
If you look at the surf from above, we see that swell and sand contours are not uniform.
This nonuniformity creates areas in which the swell dissipates differently, which essentially gives us the space to ride them before they crash altogether.
When looking at waves from eye level, what we’re looking for is nonuniform shapes across the swell line.
When an area of the swell is bigger than the rest of it, then we’ll often see a peak established and a shoulder.
The difference in time from when these two breaks into whitewater are where we find faces to surf on.
It’s getting used to this kind of analysis that adds such a huge element to your overall surfing.
I mean, without the ability to predict what a wave is going to do, we’re essentially going to be lost in the lineup as opposed to being in control.
Start positioning yourself just to the most open side of the peak.
This way you can get enough speed to get into the wave nice and easily and also make it out onto the face by angling your board slightly in the direction you want to go.
You’ll give yourself a bit of a head start when it comes to turning your board, but make sure you remain centered over the board as you pop up.
You can turn the board with the oscillation of your heels and toes.
Want to turn more to the front side? Put more weight on the toes, turn more to the back side, and put your weight on your heels.
But most often, it doesn’t need to be that technical. Turning and surfing rely on one main factor where you look are where you go.
I constantly have to remind intermediate surfers to look to the part of the wave that they want to be on to get there.
This first initial identification puts a kinetic chain of events into progress where we turn the board.
Eventually, you won’t even think about what your feet are doing as you stand up, because your eyeballs will do all the work and your body just follows along.
A great transition tip is to look down the line at your wave as you paddle in, rather than looking only once you’ve caught it and have stood up.
This puts you two steps ahead of the wave and more in control of where you end up.
But of course, none of this happens without the ability to paddle.
Intermediate Surfers Have More Paddle Endurance Than
I often say that you can only progress in surfing to the degree that you can paddle. And unfortunately, there are very few ”surf hacks” here.
You will have to be consistent, surf as much as you can. Try having longer sessions. Watch what you eat too, being overweight will slow you down.
But, unfortunately, you’ll have to simply put in the time and effort when it comes to gaining your paddle fitness.
Paddling is a full-body exercise, with the main control center being the middle back muscles.
From these muscles, we can arch our spine safely and sustainably without creating shearing tension on our upper thoracic.
It also creates a nice lever from which we can pull ourselves through the water with loosely cupped hands, moving in a slight “S” motion as they go through each stroke.
The arm should enter the water to about tricep depth and stay close to the board not too far away.
Your muscles will be sore when you first start, this is normal, but with practice and on-land exercises, like with the Swiss ball, you can progress fast in this area.
Tips For Speed Through The Bottom Turn Like An Intermediate Surfer
Great. What we’re going to do is make your first move on the wave, one where you can get to the top of the wave.
Now, as soon as your feet hit the deck, what I want you to do is look up to the lip and get that first transition turn, that first bottom turn happening, so you can get up there.
That’s where the most power is going to be.
Now, you can come back to this exercise if you’re finding yourself having a lack of speed on a wave because it means you’re probably not utilizing the entire wave as you should come back to it and watch yourself down the line.
On the forehand, the first turn will be toes dominant. This means that your toes will take most of the pressure.
On the back hand, it will be heel dominant. Our main goal is, though, to put ourselves into the power zone on the wave.
The top half of the wave is where we will be able to get our speed from.
This speed can be harnessed with something called speed pumping, which is essentially moving in and out of the power zone to build up speed, to use in a turn, or to make it past a fast section.
It’s our final intermediate stepping point because essentially all maneuvers in surfing are a variation of this ability to speed pump.
You can practice speed generation technique on land just with a skateboard.
I started with a regular skateboard, but you can also use a surf trainer. The key, though, is to mimic the surfing movements as closely as possible so that it crosses over into your surfing.
Common mistakes during this process are people not moving their arms in a coordinated fashion and leaning too much on the back foot, which prevents driving forward and looking down toward the beach too much, as opposed to directing their movements with their eyes.