Visualisation - if you can't see yourself doing it, you wont & copy other surfers to improve your surfing

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Can you see yourself doing better surfing?

In your mind's eye, can you actually visualise that and see yourself doing that better turn or nose riding or whatever that may be?

If you can’t this may be a great trick to help you connect the dots with putting theory into practice or overcoming bad habits and hurdles.

What I am talking about here is that if you can’t visually imagine yourself doing something, how do you expect to do that?

Sounds a bit odd but there is so much power to this.

If you were to walk down a cliff or climb up something, you start looking for how you will go about doing it. You start connecting it all together.

Some movements you know by instinct and don’t need to think about, but for those harder ones, you have to start thinking about how you will achieve that.

This is exactly what your surfing may need.

If you are struggling with cross stepping, bottom turning, doing a cutback, whatever it is, you want to be able to visualise yourself doing that movement.

How is your body moving, what needs to move, where are you looking, when are you timing it, what part of the wave, the list goes on.

It will either sound obvious or weird to you.

But think about it this way, if you don’t know how to do something properly or even just enough to start figuring it out, how do you figure out how to do it?

This is how your favourite surfers learnt to surf better

This is how a lot of surfers learnt to do make their movements better.

They watched endless clips of surfers in an attempt to them mimic their movement.

In the above clip, Pat Gudauskas does just that, breaking down and looking at Tom Currens movements and bottom turn to make his better.

He is mimicking Tom and then visualises himself doing those same movements to create a similar bottom turn.

It’s so powerful and has a way of forcing you to work through it.

You want to copy Tom Curren, you want his bottom turn, then you’ve gotta break it down into basic steps or parts you can visualise, keep it simple and then imagine yourself surfing and apply that. 

If you don’t understand a part of the movement it will confront you to address that.

This is where your theory now starts connecting to putting it into practice. You can see what other surfers are doing and things may click within your surfing.

It’s immensely powerful and can sometimes be self-validating in knowing what to do or giving you that light bulb of “oh so that’s what to do”.

Visualising to get over things

Sometimes we can be so stuck in our bad habits that getting past them can sometimes a different approach.

Our mind surfer program goes through all of this and guides you through your pop up, bigger waves, turning and more.

To do this on your own though, take the time and sit down and visualise and think about what it would be like to not have these issues holding you back anymore.

What would be different in your surfing and how you would just do rather than hold yourself back.

It’s really powerful but needs you to confront issues in your surfing and take the time to really identify the cause of that issue and not the symptom.

Summary

If you can’t visualise or imagine yourself doing certain things in surfing, how will you expect to do it?

By looking at other surfers and trying to visually mimic their movements you can work through the movement, connect theory to putting things into practice and just have more fun with it.

If you want to do the same to get over issues in your surfing, you need to first confront that issue, find the root cause and then imagine what your surfing would be like to not have that in your way.

Next Week

Is this something you already do or is this something that’s just given you a lightbulb moment?

Or is this something that you will just go a big fat hell nah, not for me.

I’d love to know, you can reach out anytime, either message me in the app or send an email to info@ombe.co

Next week I am going to dive into how you can improve your style and technique, regardless of what you are riding.