How yoga can improve your surfing skills
Yoga comes as a great complement to many others physical disciplines. To mention only a few, it is an ideal recovery activity for runners and helps to stretch out the muscles that skiing strengthens yet at the same time shortens. Surfing is another great example as yoga can positively impact your body, your mind and your breathing which are all very important when it comes to being in the water.
Prepare your body – strength, flexibility and mobility
Both yoga and surfing engage the full body, working on large and small muscle groups, improving overall muscle tone. More specifically, surfing demands strong balance and good mobility.
Balance is a combination of flexibility, strength and focus. To find your balance, you need to engage the muscles but lengthen them as well. Yoga provides a wide-range of asanas to strengthen your core, glutes and hip flexors together with loads of yummy stretches to elongate the muscles. If flexibility comes easy for you, then you will want to work on strength and particularly working the muscle to safely support the posture. If you are strong, but tight and stiff then you will be focussing toward increasing flexibility.
Mobility in your shoulders and hips for paddling and popping up on waves is key to surfing. Specific yoga postures for shoulders and hips will create more space and bring some mobility to feel lighter and more fluid on your board.
Get your mind to focus
Beyond the physical aspects, surfing requires to be mentally in the moment. You only have few seconds to take actions on the waves so your mind needs to be in the present to take the best decisions. Being calm and focus will keep you safe in the water and will also help you progress faster as you’ll get more waves and quickly understand your mistakes.
We live in a world where our attention is the new gold, everything around us is built in order to grab our attention and monetize it. So our attention goes constantly from one thing to another and we feel overwhelmed instead of being grounded into what we do.
In Yoga, we use several tools to train our attention:
- Connecting to our breath: it can be as simple as observing for few minutes your body expanding on the inhale and relaxing on the exhale.
- Setting an intention for your practice which you can hang on to every time your mind starts to wander, helps rewiring the brain to be more present.
Because of the complexity of what we are asking our body to do in terms of movement and fine motor control, both yoga and surfing need us to pay attention. The quicker we master this skill and learn how to focus under pressure, the more we progress to eventually reach a “flow state” that many athletes refer to as the peak of performance and happiness.
Mastering the breath
In certain yoga practices we use the breath to initiate the movement but more importantly the breath can help our body and mind to relax or bring us energy when needed. We also use the breath to go deeper into our yoga stretches and twists.
The breathing rhythm, will be changed by our autonomic nervous system based on demand of oxygen and demand of the brain when it comes to how much we need to get rid of carbon dioxide. When we are stressed, the brain thinks we need to get rid of more, so this accelerates our breathing. Our breath can be controlled voluntarily, we can bypass the autonomic nervous system and mindfully control our breathing system to bring back balance.
Through yoga we connect more into our breath and this naturally get transferred onto the board, allowing surfers to relax their mind, manage their energy levels and feel more in control in unpredictable waters.
Both surfing and yoga demand discipline, patience, and grit. They need us to be here and in the now which we can all benefit from in our daily lives too to create more meaningful interactions with the world around us. Whether you use one to fuel the other or practice both, there is a lot to get from the combination of surfing and yoga. Give it a go, your body and your mind will thank you!
