Posted on May 2, 2018May 2, 2018 by Tantrum — Leave a comment

Surf Legend Laird Hamilton Shares 6 Fitness Hacks to Stay in Shape and Feel Great as You Age

Life lessons from the 54-year-old icon.

When asked how old he feels, notable big-wave surfer and overall crazy-in-shape athlete Laird Hamilton says,

“I don’t even have an age. I don’t know how I could feel better.”

And though the second statement can’t be fact-checked, the first can. He’s 54, at least in the conventionally-used unit of “years.”

Despite having already surfed the biggest waves in the world—ones so big that he had to help pioneer tow-in surfing just to ride some of them—he wants to keep doing what he’s doing until he’s “60, 70, and 80.” (No word on 90.)

Though he says there’s no replacement for the training…

“We all want to look for the magic pill. ‘Give me the hack.’ Hacking is incredible to support your health and your training and your life. But you still got to do the work.”

Hamilton’s got some tangential-to-the-exercise tricks to getting the most out of your body as you age. And some of them must be working: science degree or not, he looks incredible for whatever age he does or doesn’t believe he is.

81338804 — Laird Hamilton – Axelle/Bauer-Griffin

Coffee is the only energy drink you need. So long as you fatten it up.

“I use my coffee like other people use energy drinks,” Hamilton says. “But are you getting the most out of your coffee? Probably not.”

The real secret to joe, he claims, is combining it with fats (like those in his Laird Superfood creamer) that time release the caffeine, so that your energy stays constant, instead of peaking and cratering.

It also makes you sharper: “You know [how] you drink coffee, you’re all jacked up, but you’re still foggy-headed? The caffeine is jacking the body up. It’s not jacking the brain up. The fat’s feeding the brain. That’s where the focus comes in, and the mental clarity.”

Important whether you’re outrunning a 50-foot swell or a 50-year-old boss in search of some overdue TPS reports.

Use more salt (in your water). And less carbon dioxide (in your workout).

“You need a teeny bit of Himalayan salt in your water. Otherwise you don’t absorb it. The water just goes right through you. You’re like ‘I’m hydrating,’ and you drink all this water and peeing it out. Your body is not absorbing it.”

By the same token, sucking in air during a workout isn’t maximising your oxygen intake.

You do that by limiting the amount of carbon dioxide you exhale. That causes CO2 levels to rise, triggering the body to release the oxygen into your cells. An easy way to do this? Breathe through your nose. A hard way to do this? Hold your breath for intervals while you work out. (Maybe start with the nose breathing.

While we’re on breath…

Fifty-three-year-old Laird Hamilton says that if he could give 22-year-old Laird Hamilton any advice, it would definitely be “the conscious awareness of breath.”

And if that sounds like some spiritual bullshit, well, consider this: a sigh is just a de-regulation of your breath. “As soon as you start extending your breath past 7 seconds, you bring everything down.” (Try it, see if you don’t feel better.)

Free divers do this to lower their metabolism and thus conserve oxygen. And the opposite of this—very quick, short inhalations repeated over and over—revs you up. Outside of physical activity, controlled breathing can also put you into a meditative state. This is one of the things we teach on our Webinar – Click here to learn more.

And though Hamilton admits that the younger version of himself would’ve responded to this the exact same way you probably are — “Don’t swami me” — he also says “you don’t even need to believe. You’re going to go there because the breath will put you there.”

Take ice baths. (Or just cold baths.)

“If you had one bio-hack, icing would be the king.”

It raises testosterone and reduces inflammation. The good news? You don’t need even need ice. You can take a cold shower, or a cold bath. And if you really, really don’t want to hurt yourself in the name of self-betterment, then take any old bath. The water compresses the body, and improves blood circulation. (If you’re a surfer, this is especially convenient, since you’re constantly in earth’s biggest tub.) To find out how you can make this work for you Join us on our webinar

When in doubt, move…

“I think we get caught up in: I don’t stretch enough. But I think you’ll get more flexible by moving correctly. Your spine has to be flexible. If your spine’s not flexible, don’t even talk to me about your hips and your shoulders. Everything moves from the spine. I’d be less worried about going to yoga class and being like a Gumby [than] I would [be] that I can move and get up off the floor and do things.”

…or scare the shit out of yourself.

Naturally, a guy that careens down the face of waves with bone-crushing power thinks adrenaline is a pretty important chemical. He says that moment when we get scared and run faster, or have a heightening, tense feeling right before we crash into something, is something our body needs:

“If you’re only getting your adrenaline boosted by drinking coffee and it’s a slow adrenaline drip, that stuff is just eating you from the inside. It starts to undermine your health because you’re not releasing it. So you need to do something to release it.

It doesn’t take much. Go to the fair, get spun around; go to the bungee jump; get behind a water ski boat and tell them to punch it. It’s connected to the fragility of life and I think it’s important to come into a situation with that perspective.”

Just don’t forget to breathe.

Interested in taking your kitesurfing performance to the next level?

Join us on this FREE webinar where we’ll take you through a complete system for keeping yourself as in shape as Laird so you can rip harder, jump higher and progress faster…

Click the button below to sign up…

Register for the Webinar

If you have questions, hit me up on Twitter or Facebook.

Lastly, if you got a lot of value from this post, help me impress my mom and give this post a share on FB.

✌️?

Sam Guest

Founder of Tantrum Kitesurf

Original article appeared at: https://www.gq.com/story/laird-hamilton-fitness-hacks

Posted on April 24, 2018April 24, 2018 by Tantrum — Leave a comment

The Kitesurf “Tow Up”

THE CHOSEN

When it comes to riding, there are those who like to freeride, and those who like to compete. Although tomorrow’s unofficial kite tow-up ‘show’ at the Mondial du Vent in Leucate holds no tangible prize, there was an increase in the strength that riders found in their ability to squeeze out those extra few metres behind the jet-ski in today’s two hour qualifier that allows them to ride again on Sunday.

It’s a kite loop, but not as we know it / All Photos: Toby Bromwich

Combining the subtle piloting experience they’ve built up in the last few training days, the riders were holding on to the tow line longer today, pinging themselves higher as a result.

Holdiiiiiiing….

The tow-up is a side-line spectacle, a discipline that is strictly a crowd pleaser – led by the riders – to entertain those who turn out to soak up the kiting vibes. However, when the 4 o’clock session opened, the kites were backed up on the beach in a hot launch queue, joined by pilots eager to get a few more pulls.

Carrying a relatively large amount of experience into this, Jesse Richman led the crew at the start of the week with a series of training sessions, and now the seeming expertise and ballsy kite manoeuvres we see at 25 metres up from almost the whole crew is jaw dropping.

Bon vol Paul Serin!

For the worst wind forecast ever in it’s history the Mondial de Vent certainly managed to pack in 5 days of epic action…who needs winds?

Thanks to the guys at: https://www.seabreeze.com.au/ for this article…

Posted on March 23, 2015April 12, 2018 by Tantrum — Leave a comment

Cross Fit, Constipation and Kitesurfing…The Importance of Taking It Easy

Given the new and rather large goal I’ve set myself for this year (for those of you that missed it you can check out the original post here) the first thing I decided I needed to do was get fit. Now I’m not in bad shape but I knew I could be better and I also knew that in the coming quest my physical fitness would be a force multiplier on everything I did. Allowing me more quality time on the water, less likely hood of injury and a higher level of performance both physically and mentally.

Obviously as a smart and well educated man the first thing I did was rush out and spend every minute training…Surfing, SUP’ing, Kiting, Cross fit, Yoga, Pilates, I signed myself up for a Spartan Race…I reasoned I was fairly fit anyway and my body should be able to cope with the added demands. My diet has been optimized over the last few years and I was eating very healthily, I’d also upgraded my sleep and while not perfect was regularly getting 6 – 7 hours a night of quality sleep.

In short I figured I could take it.

3 weeks in and I was pissed.

Little things were really annoying me, (like who’d left the cap off the toothpaste, and who the f**k had moved my favorite mug…I live alone, so guess what the answer was) I had to drag myself out of bed in the morning, I was fed up, everything seemed too much effort. My sleep suddenly dropped to 4 – 5 hours a night, I couldn’t bring myself to do the work I desperately needed to do, I had brain fog and couldn’t think straight and most worryingly my performance on the water was getting worse daily…much worse.

Added to that my mind retreated into dark places, I started being overtly negative, getting down easily and the world just seemed to lack its sparkle.

These were symptoms I’d often associated with the second day of a hangover after a weekend bender. The day after I’d feel terrible physically but often the left over adrenaline from the night before would keep me buoyant, but then the next day, once that adrenaline had left my system, I’d crash emotionally and beer blues would catch up with me in a BIG way.

Now this was an astute observation, but I had given up drinking 5 months ago and since then really hadn’t been to this place emotionally, so this left me puzzled.

The other thing it reminded me of was when I get really stressed out over a fairly extended period of time, ie. when I’m rushing to meet a deadline. My brain would be on fire for a week or sometimes even a month and then one day it would wave a white flag, check out, and leave me to deal with the emotional fallout, which often involved contemplating my existence and general worthiness to exist, which often led to fairly dark places.

So you can see I was pretty keen to get out of this place.

For a few days I was stuck…I was eating well, exercising plenty, kiting loads…all the things that usually made me so glad to be alive, and I still felt like crap, maybe I was just a dysfunctional misfit doomed to live this emotional roller coaster, hey, at least the highs were good.

Then as I reached the top of a flight of stairs by my house, a pathetically short flight of stairs, I stopped and noticed my body. I was breathless, slightly dizzy and had a burning in my legs as if I’d just run an ultra marathon.

I had a brain wave…

Maybe I was overtrained?

This was an effect I’d been aware of for a long time. Hell, we don’t just teach about it, we preach about it on our Evolve courses, but I, like most people, believed that it applied only to other people and not to me.

Could it be that my training was having this effect on me?

But I thought exercise was supposed to help deal with stress?

Turns out that mental stress and physical stress are experienced in the same way. They release the same neurochemicals and hormones into the system so you don’t actually know the difference between the stress of being late for work every day or the stress of running a marathon every day…the reaction is the same.

Or in other words the stress of overworking before a deadline is the same as the stress you put yourself under by drinking too much.

Now here’s some thing I had never considered, exercise actually acts as a stressor for your body. It seems so simple once you realize the truth. By exercising we are stressing our muscles out, we are deliberately overworking them so that they are forced to grow. This is what the Training Effect is all about.

As we’ve already mentioned stress is felt in the same way no matter what the source and this overtraining stress is no different. So if we don’t allow ourselves sufficient time to recover in between exercise sessions all these hormones which are so useful if we are being chased by a Tiger (think Cortisol and Adrenaline to name some of the more well known ones) stick around in the system and guess what?

They aren’t actually that good for us long term.

Their function (at a GCSE text book level) is to suppress the normal functions of the body, digestion, reproduction…the bits we normally really, really like to do, and divert all the bodies resources to escaping from that damn Tiger. This is great if you need to prepare your body to run like crazy or to attempt to go mano a mano with said Big Cat…as they turn you into The Hulk, but at the expense of many other critical systems which are essential to long(er) term survival.

Now for the last few months I have realized that in us humans, the physiological must be nurtured before the phycological. That if you want to change your mindset you must first change your physiology…we go into this in more depth on our evolution courses, but suffice to say just by smiling you’ll likely change the way your feel, trying to do the same thing sitting absolutely still and “thinking” yourself happy is much more difficult.

So could my overtraining be responsible for my shitty moods?

It certainly seemed possible.

So I resolved right there and then to take a week off, to change the physiological…at least a week, no kiting, no nothing, just a bit of walking, until my body was telling me it was time to go back.

The first few days were torture. I would look out the window at the kites on the water and sigh, my body would crave the adrenaline shot and the “Man” energy throwing weights round a gym at Cross fit gave me…but I resisted.

For a few days nothing happened, except a case of constipation, due to a decreasing metabolic rate and a lack of water, (because of my stressed out state I forget to drink). Thanks to Dr. Google I decided this was Appendicitis and so caused myself even more stress (yes, I can be that dysfunctional).

Then about 5 days into the process I woke up, having slept a little better than the previous nights and instantly the world seemed a brighter place. I went about my morning routine and was genuinely excited about work, the future and life in general. In conversations with people I was much more present, I could feel that warrior inside ready to face the world and kick ass.

My performance at work increased massively, I was more creative, more daring, more willing to try new things and more centered in the now rather than worrying about the future…and on the water I blew myself away.

My performance was better than it had ever been. Mentally I felt more energized, more willing to go for new stuff and better able to analyze and improve the mistakes I made in learning. I was able to stay out for much longer than normal and had some of the best sessions of my life in those days…coming back off the water each time I felt a deep level of contentment inside, that feeling that only being outside in nature, ripping it up and really giving your all can give you.

I had to rethink my approach.

I had to accept (however hard that was) that I had found and then exceeded my own biological limits in the proceeding weeks and that pushing it (as I have been constantly told I need to in life to succeed) had done me more harm than good. I fully believed that I could extend these limits over time, but I needed to find a new strategy for doing so, something that would allow me to train but not overtrain…in short I had to train short & smart, not long and stupid.

What’s more I had a theory, one that I will test over the coming months. That this cycle of train, recover and improve doesn’t just apply to the physical aspects of training but also to the mental aspects and to the skill acquisition process. That recovery is simply the most important part of the whole process.

That I don’t just need to learn to train like a machine but more importantly to recover like a mother f*****r.

Posted on February 27, 2015March 12, 2016 by Tantrum — Leave a comment

Tantrum Evolution – Ultimate Human Performance Through Kitesurfing

I have long had the feeling that for many people learning kitesurfing or being a kitesurfer means much more than just learning a skill or practicing a new sport. It forms part of a fundamental quest to discover what it means to be human, to understand what really matters and where we fit in the universe.

In short I believe kitesurfing is a quest for much more than just riding around on the water under a piece of colorful canvas, impressing passers by on the beach.

Bit too hippy for you?

Stick with me and I’ll try to explain.

There comes a time in most kite surfers evolution when simply getting out on the water is not enough.

When you’re just beginning your kitesurfing journey, every little thing fires you up and sends you into a spin of excitement. You’re progressing rapidly, learning to ride, going upwind, nailing those first jumps…results are tangible and their achievement and the promise of further progression keeps you awake at night…buzzing.

As you improve progression slows down, tricks become more complex requiring more focus, more dedication, more balls and more time, it takes more effort to find that elusive zone where every thing just flows, where time slows down and you feel at one with the elements.

At this point many of us get caught by “The Dip Monster.”

The Dip Monster is a terrifying beast.

You know you have a deep love for the sport but are unable to express that passion in any meaningful way on the water. You either don’t know what you should be progressing into or have convinced yourself you are happy to stay in your comfort zone and just plough the lawn, telling yourself that it is enough to just be out on the open ocean.

From here the rot sets in, you see other guys at the beach, who you know have been kiting much less time than you, over taking you in terms of ability. You start to think, ‘maybe I’m just not a natural.’ Your brain makes excuses like ‘No, there’s nothing wrong with me, I’m just not that into it’

“BLAM”

Suddenly, almost overnight you’re not any more…

Before you know it, you’re sat watching the cricket on a windy, sunny afternoon convincing yourself you’re better off without the hassle and the expense of kitesurfing altogether, while all the time being irritated by that itch in the back of your mind telling you something isn’t right.

I know where of I speak…I’ve been there!!!

For humans, the need to keep improving, to keep growing, is fundamental and without this growth in your kiting, being on the water quickly becomes stale as progression falters.

Think back to when you first started kiting.

The reason things were so exciting then was because you had a BIG, HAIRY GOAL…mainly to get up on the damn board and come back to where you started from. That goal energised you, it ignited your passion, it was real, tangible and it was achievable….in that you had a LOT of role models around you demonstrating how possible it was.

Added to that you had daily feedback from instructors and your own experiences that you were improving. You were also humble enough to accept failure and chalk it up as experience, you didn’t mind being dragged up the beach as you were just a beginner and things like that happen to beginners…your pride didn’t get in the way of your learning.

More than that however you could feel things slotting together in a way that was almost tangible, you had loads of those flashbulb moments where all the skills you’d been struggling with seemed to just fall into place leaving you on such a high, it was addictive.

Over time and as these initial goals are achieved and not replaced by new ones or the goals become progressively harder, requiring more physical strength and balls, this heady cocktail of chemicals is felt less often. The passion tends to morph into something altogether mundane. We go kiting just because it’s windy, without really having any major ideas about what we want to achieve or where we are going.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life it’s that if we allow ourselves to settle for the mundane, the mundane is what we get.

Now I was deep in the clutches of “the dip monster,” when one day on the water I nearly met my maker, and the light bulb went off.

Kitesurfing a wave I had absolutely no business being on in the first place, shooting down the line on this 20ft monster, rocks appearing out of the trough in front of me as the wave sucked up on the shallow reef and then crashed down, chasing down my heels over the jagged rocks with all the power of the Atlantic behind it.

For a few moments out there on the water, faced with the real possibility of a pretty grisly end I was plunged into an alternate universe so far removed from the every day norm that it almost defied definition.

In that instant I felt bullet proof, unbreakable, GODLIKE. I fully realized my potential and could truly experience the immense power of being human.

That instant on the wave offered me a superhighway to the insight to how fucking amazing the human experience can be, how everything we chase, money, success, power is all a ruse to distract us from what we really want.

To realize the full potential that exists inside of us and to unleash it.

More interestingly for me, it brought together all my skills and leveled up my kitesurfing in a way that was quite literally spellbinding, even thinking back on the moment now I get goosebumps.

Stepping back on to the beach having had this revealed to me I realized my life could NEVER go back to how it was.

As I researched more and more it turns out this state I experienced on the wave has been categorized and studied for the last 50 years, companies like Microsoft are using it to drive their corporate culture, executives, CEO’s and the worlds top athletes have recognized they are 5 times more productive when in this state and all great sporting achievements…EVER (yes EVER) have been attributed to its presence in that moment.

This state my friends, is FLOW.

[quote align=”center” color=”#999999″]The Flow State: Flow states, peak experiences, in the zone, runner’s high, being unconscious—the lingo is endless. The experience though lives up to the hype. Time slows down, self vanishes, there’s a complete merger between action and awareness— it almost sounds like nonsense, but fifty years of serious research says otherwise. Flow states are now known to optimize performance, enhance creativity, drive innovation, accelerate learning, amplify memory and underpin happiness itself.[/quote]

Taken from The Flow Genome Project

The place that Flow turns up most often is in extreme sports, the reason for this is simple.

In most extreme sports, if you’re pushing the envelope and you’re not in a state of flow, you’re dead.

As a result extreme sports athletes have become very good at finding flow on demand.

Of course this is not the only place flow shows up, we can find it in anything from computer programmers to public speakers, musicians to goalkeepers. What’s more, it’s not something that is available to only the chosen few, but is some thing we have all probably encountered at some level, at some time in our lives. That moment when time falls away, when action is effortless, success guaranteed and when thought is replaced by feeling.

And importantly for us when learning goes through the roof.

I realized that this concept, if I could uncover it, could instantly be applied to our teaching. For years I’d watched fascinated as students got more and more frustrated over their apparent lack of progress and then suddenly in a moment of insight, or what I now know was Flow, we saw the building blocks falling into place in a magical way and the student leveled up in front of our eyes. What fascinated me was that this was NOT a linear progression, learning came in fits and starts and was obviously supercharged by this state called flow (this became obvious when talking with students after the experience).

I realized that this for me was was kitesurfing was about, those moments where you feel in this state of flow, where you level up and feel time warp while every move you make is effortless and perfect. It was not, as I’d thought for so long, about the image and lifestyle that came with the sport, not about impressing chicks or wondering around in board shorts all day (though these are nice perks of the job too!). It was about feeling that oneness with nature, with the universe, with the wave and the wind, and then ripping the shit out of it!

I figured if I could understand this state, if I could build a more reliable pathway to it, access it more often and combine that quest with cutting edge learning techniques and the very latest knowledge in human performance as it relates to maximizing recovery, energy and the bodies ability to perform consistently at its top level, I could learn and thus teach people much more effectively.

More excitingly I figured if this pathway could work with kitesurfing, would the exact same pathway work with any extreme or adventure sport?

Was it possible to create a system that by following the same formula but plugging in different material I could then apply that same system to learn snowboarding, skydiving, surfing, skateboarding, mountain biking, climbing, kayaking in record time and to a world class level? (remembering that I am not some teenager or early 20 year old, but am currently mid thirties)….I had a sneaky suspicion that it could.

One thing was obvious…the first person I needed to start with was me.

To do this I decided that I needed to reassess my kitesurfing with this in mind. To get excited about anything in life we need a Big Hairy Goal…something that keeps us awake, something that fires us with passion (and often more than a little bit of fear, in fact I would argue that the fear is essential), after a few years of kitesurfing, just getting out on the water wasn’t filling this role for me any more and I needed to rework the dream. Whatever it was going to be I had to make it much bigger than I thought was possible…as I said you NEED the fear, if it doesn’t scare you, forget it and start again.

Deciding on this goal the change was instant, I fell back in love with the sport in a major way and started accessing this elusive state called Flow much more often and more importantly discovering hacks to get there more consistently.

The Commitment

So here is my commitment, to ride a BIG wave, which one exactly doesn’t matter, but one that scares the SHIT out of me right now, I’m thinking Punta Preta, Nazaré or something of that ilk…which one exactly will depend a lot on the conditions at the time. To be busting strapless back-loops, jump transitions and other generally pimping tricks on the water and to do it all in one year. (I reckon theoretically this would be possible faster but I want to allow myself time to really crack the “magic formula” along the way…plus I’ve got a business to run!).

I figure that should put me in the top 1% of kitesurfers worldwide.

A supposition which I will test next winter by entering into a wave riding competition and seeing how I stack up. I figure if I can land a podium place, that isn’t bad progress in one year…along the way I’ll be investigating the latest in human learning techniques and doing all I can to access that elusive state of flow to help level up my progression. From there I’ll take the blueprint I’ve developed and apply it to other sports: snowboarding, skydiving etc to really nail it down cross discipline.

The real goal of all this is to feed all this knowledge back into our Evolution Camps and Courses to give you guys access to this stuff.

We’ll be updating our findings and the techniques we use on this blog over the next year and we’ll be incorporating all of the learning into our camps an courses. If you’re interested in keeping up with our discoveries and have any ideas you think we should be trying, feel free to follow us on twitter and let’s see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Follow @TantrumKitesurf

Posted on February 17, 2015July 11, 2016 by Tantrum — 3 Comments

Hacking INSANE Air In Kitesurfing

The first thing all of us want to do, once we’ve actually got riding, is strap on our jet packs and go AIRBORNE. Despite this skill being, in principle, really simple, most people struggle to really get the kind of height that leaves bystanders gaping in awe from the beachfront.

The most that many manage is a small whimper of a jump, that, despite all protestations to the contrary, rarely propel them higher than a few feet off the water, and that’s only because they really pull their knees up!

To add to the frustration, everyone you meet will tell you that learning to jump is easy, just move the kite to 12 o’clock, sheet in and hold on.

This is true.

Learning to do pathetic jumps is very easy.

Going truly airborne is a fine art of balancing power and control and as such is much harder and takes much more skill, especially when you add in some chop.

Stick with me young Padowan…all is about to be revealed.

There are a few secrets that we will share with you today that highlight the common tripping points and reveal exactly how to take your flaccid, feeble attempts at airborne antics into rocket fueled, inverse skydives of legend.

The BIG Secret

The thing that you should remember if you take nothing else away from this article and the one piece of advise that every single pro rider I have EVER talked to has given me as their number 1 tip for going truly aerial is this:

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BOARD

…forget about the kite, to go BIG, you have to really stack that edge with power, get as much tension as you can in the lines and let that tension tear you from the water, preferably with perfect timing using a wave as a ramp, for really gasp inspiring airs.

The major mistake most people make is that they try and use the kite to gain height, the kite is the means of propulsion and provides all the energy for everything we do on the water. For that reason most people believe that just by sending it harder, faster and slicker it will provide all the lift needed to send them to the stars.

Most People Are Always Wrong…

Using just the kite you will be able to generate some small airs, you’ll get a little whimper of a jump, a flaccid little fellow. Your ability to pull off this pathetic attempt will be highly dependent on the conditions (and often a fair amount of good fortune) and you’ll often travel a long way down wind as you’re trying it, resulting in a flat but albeit long jump.

In short your jumps will be rubbish, 90% of the time.

The problem that arises is that whilst the kite can indeed generate HUGE amounts of power, if that power is not controlled, it is down to blind luck if we get the result we are after.

Now don’t get me wrong you do really need to use the kite to get airborne, but that part is relatively simple and if you’re clearing even a couple of feet in your jumps, you’ve likely mastered the kite to a point where you are getting as much height out of it as your going to.

You need to master the board.

Into The Wonderful

So the drill is as follows, as you’re preparing for the jump, start to edge the board hard, keeping the kite fairly low. The lower you have the kite to start with, the more power you’ll be able to generate, as the more speed you’ll be able to clock up as you sweep it upward.

Now sweep the kite up to to 12 o’clock.

This is where things start to go wrong.

The faster and more aggressively you sweep the kite upwards towards 12 o’clock, the more power you’re going to generate. However, the more power you have, the harder it’s going be to hold down your edge and the more likely you are to be pulled off the edge and ripped downwind towards the kite. As the kite moves higher in the window and the angle of pull on your harness becomes that much greater, this effect is multiplied, as you are naturally pulled up onto you toes by the rising kite and your weight slips off the edge.

Why Is This A Problem?

As you get pulled off the edge you inevitably start to drift (often the sensation is more akin to being ripped rather than drifting!) downwind towards the kite, this has 2 effects:

It reduces the apparent wind in the kite, releasing that all important tension in the lines and makes controlling your speed impossible…not what you want for trips to the moon.

That downwind motion will now be transferred into your jump. Every bit of energy you expend in moving downwind at this point is energy that now cannot be used for upwards propulsion (engineers and scientists feel free to wade in here, something to do with vectors of motion if I’m not mistaken?)

Add a little chop into the mix and you’ve now got real problems. Chop will make it even harder to hold down your edge. Every bump you hit will shift your center of gravity, the motion this generates will likely force you to throw your weight up and forwards to compensate, again disengaging the edge with the same results as above, with the added complication that now you’re off balance as well.

This leads us to the inherent contradiction in going BIG. You need to generate a HUGE amount of power through the kite, by moving it fast and hard from low in the window to 12 o’clock…BUT as soon as you lose control of that power, by letting it pull you off your edge, your jump’s going to suffer.

So you need to balance one against the other, the more power you can hold down through the edge and the faster you can pilot the board and kite, under control, consistently, the higher you’re going to go.

So what to do…how do we achieve this?

Well like most things in life I can show you the door but you need to walk through it. The key is holding the edge down and really stacking it up with power…how much you need to do this will depend on your skill levels, your strength and the amount of chop you’re dealing with on the day.

Get out there and play with it, see what works, for sure within a few attempts of trying this you’ll be going MUCH higher than you’ve been going before.

Details that Matter – The Meta Circuit

Rip It Up

Wait for the feeling of being ripped off the water, if you’re not getting that feeling then your trying to jump too early, not edging hard enough or not flying the kite hard enough (or you’re underpowered).

This is something it took me ages to understand…and it really is the crucial piece of feedback telling you you’ve got this right. Once you feel it you‘ll get hooked on it…it’s an amazing feeling of harnessed power. If you’re not sure if you’ve experienced it…you haven’t…when you get it you’ll know.

The Bar

As an exercise try to keep the bar all the way in while edging. This is an exercise in playing with the edge, somedays it will be possible, others not, but have a go and see what you find (this is much easier on flat water as your not being knocked off balance by the bumps). This isn’t something you’ll want to do all the time when your jumping but is great for getting an understanding of the principles we’re talking about here.

Use the Waves

If you can time your jumps off little ramps you can really go aerial. This is NOT cheating and is a trick the pro’s use all the time. That chick, dude (or judge), you’re trying to impress on the beach is hardly likely to come up to you afterwards and say “nice jump and I would have really gone for you BUT I saw you used a wave to launch…too bad,”..well let’s face it they’re hardly likely to come up to you anyway (especially if you’re wearing board shorts over you wetsuit!) but you know what I mean…height is what counts…not how you get there!

Exercises to Practice

Riding S’s

Simply practice transferring the weight from your toes to your heels (remember here your weight will follow your head…so always lead with your head…ie look where you want to go and let your body follow) As you get more comfortable and can do it while maintaining forward speed, start to make the turns more aggressive. For an idea of the kind of power you can harness through this, have a look at the top wave riders cranking out top and bottom turns…this is what we want you looking like!

Pop

I’m talking about board generated pop. Have the kite nicely powered at about 11/1 o clock, and turn slightly downwind to gather some speed, now crank hard on to your heel side, feel the tension stack in the lines and before you slow down, release the edge (by shifting your weight to you toes) and sheet in. What you’re looking for is a small drift, just a foot or so to start with, (upwards and downwind). As you get more comfortable with this, get more aggressive and start timing it off small waves to increase the height and improve your skill with timing. Then you can slowly start tweaking the kite as you hit the kicker to really start to get some hang time.

Fins

A really fun way to see the amount power the board can hold is to experiment with different sized fins. This really demonstrates how much pressure you can apply through the turn and what difference this makes to your jumps.