Author: Tantrum

Performance Kitesurfing in Tarifa, Spain.
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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.

Kiteboarding-Jump

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.

Jumping Big Kitesurf

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?)

Kitesurfing Jump

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.

Big Air Tarifa

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.

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Hacking Learning to Kitesurf

I thought long and hard about making this video, as I don’t want people to get the wrong impression. I’m not trying to recommend that people teach themselves to Kitesurf, however in this video I do try to give you a few tips you can safely try, to speed up the time it takes to go from total beginner to kitesurfing megastar.

Please stay safe!

[youtube height=”460″ width=”580″]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffC1GQicFmU[/youtube]

 

 

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Sleep Your Way To Kitesurfing VIctory

When was the last time you woke up in the morning before your alarm clock, bursting with energy, bounced straight out of bed and just felt great to be alive?

My bet is, if you like 99.9% of the rest of the Western population, it was a long time ago.

As a society we are chronically fatigued. Most of us are so chronically fatigued we don’t even recognise the symptoms of this fatigue, we simply accept them as part of the human experience, that this is how we should feel.

In fact it is calculated that it would take the average Westerner three weeks of quality sleep to repay their sleep debt and take them back into optimal functioning.

Three weeks seems a tall order when most of us struggle to get 3 hours uninterrupted good sleep.

Why is this important to us?

Deep wave sleep is the time when the brain organises and enhances the cognitive skills learned during the day. This is the time when new neural path ways are laid down and old ones strengthened and any cognitive skill you practised during the day becomes fixed in your physiology. Thus by denying ourselves deep wave sleep we are massively impairing our ability to learn and to progress.

Now I’m not about to tell you you need to get eight hours sleep every night. Personally I believe that sleep quality is much more important than sleep quantity and that the amount of sleep you actually need varies greatly by individual and even for the same individual will differ on a day-to-day basis depending on what you’ve been doing and eating during the day.

What I do know is that when I started paying attention to my sleep, my performance, my retention of information and probably most importantly, my general well-being and happiness skyrocketed through the roof.

Now that’s not to say it doesn’t require some effort to hack your sleep effectively. Most of us are so ingrained in the Western lifestyle where sleep is the first thing to be sacrificed and we wear our fatigue as a badge of honour to show how hard we work or how tough we are.

Breaking through these barriers in our own brains and in society’s eyes does take a little effort and in future articles will talk about how this can be done.

I will however leave you with one little titbit, something you can get started with very, very easily, which can have a profound effect on your sleep. I use the app Sleep Cycle to track my sleep on a nightly basis. I have found that the simple act of monitoring how much sleep I’m getting and the quality of that sleep, has led me to search for ways to get better and longer sleep. As a result of this I’ve improved my sleep exponentially over the last few months and this has impacted positively on a LOT of other areas of my life, most importantly, my kiting!

And this from a man who used to struggle to get more than 4 hours sleep a night (and crappy sleep at that) and could still barely get out of bed in the morning.

Go download this app and start using it (we’re not affiliated) it’s much cheaper and has much greater performance enhancing effects on your kitesurfing than buying a new kite!

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How Do We Keep & Build Momentum In Kitesurfing?

We all know that the quickest path to victory in any given pursuit, is momentum. 15 minutes of effort every day trumps five hours of effort once a week. This is true if you are learning a new skill, improving your strength and fitness or trying to get something done.

Little and often beats much and rarely every single time.

The problem we have then with kite surfing is maintaining momentum, when our sport is reliant on the wind, which is inherently outside of our control.

I will first lay down several techniques to get around this problem and then talk about why a lack of momentum in this case may not be such a bad thing.

Of all the methods we can use to maintain momentum the most powerful is really very simple:

Visualisation.

Scientists have proved that simply by visualising an exercise we gain around 70% of the benefits as actually doing it.

So for example let’s take strength training, if you were to go and physically do biceps curls with a 20 kg weight you would gain 100% of the benefit of doing that exercise (whatever that may be). If you were to sit on the couch and simply visualise doing the same exercise you would gain somewhere between 60 and 80% of the benefit of actually having done the curl with the weight.

Do you see how massive this is?

It means that simply by taking 5 minutes each day we can’t get on the water and visualising the next trick or the next move you’re trying to perfect in kite surfing we can physically improve in that skill the next time we go out. If you actually use your body i.e. stand there and physically make the motions associated with that movement as well, the benefits can go up even higher, as can the strange looks from passers by!

Crossover sports are obviously another great way. However for many, suffer similar problems, that of set up and travel time and relying on conditions. Things such as surfing, stand-up paddling, skateboarding, snowboarding or any sport which requires balance, will really help our kite surfing.

Physical conditioning is obviously of huge importance as well.

Exercises such as Pilates, body balance even just standing on a balance trainer will help us to gain that overall equilibrium which is so important to our kite surfing (and our well being in general).

Conditioning classes such as cross fit can help or workouts that specifically target the major muscle groups used in kitesurfing and just as important allow our body to handle the stresses and strains a days kiting inevitably places on it, without it falling apart at the seams and leaving us sofa bound for weeks.

So earlier I mentioned that this lack of ability to build momentum in kite surfing (because of the wind and its variability) may in fact be a good thing, how can that be so?

Again going back to science, what is being discovered more and more is that the minimum effective dose needed to learn a skill, to gain strength, to build muscle, to build fitness is a lot, lot less than previously thought.

In his book Body by Science, Doug McGuff propounds a method of strength training where people train for only 20 minutes once a week and have seen massive strength increases. Tim Ferriss in his book The Four-Hour Body proposes that the minimum effective dose for a whole host of things is much less than we ever thought possible and participants in his experiments have shown superhuman results as a consequence.

What this leads us to is that the most important part of training is recovery.

Yes we need to train hard but what is more important is that we recover like a Mother Fokker. Most of us spend so much time in the training zone that we never allow our body to recover we are also in our modern society very bad a utilising the principles of recovery.

What do I mean by recovery?

Very very simple.

Sleep, Diet & Mindset.

You need to be getting your full quota of sleep, we are a nation of chronically fatigued individuals. For many of you out there I imagine trying to think of the last time you got a full eight hours great sleep and woke up full of energy raring to go not even thinking about hitting the snooze button is a long distant memory yet this is our natural state as humans in the 21st century.

It is during sleep that the mind pieces together the skills it has learned that day and where performance really improves. Performance will rarely improve during the time you are actually doing it (i.e. when you are on the water) in fact performance often decreases as you get increasingly physically tired.

Deep sleep is required for the brain to piece together the skills and to recover the body to the skill becomes implicit. This is why often a day of intense practice and frustration attempting to nail a skill you come back in the morning and perform it effortlessly first time.

The same can be said of diet if you’re filling your body full of crap at every meal your body is not going have the fuel available to power effective recovery and performance, learning and improvement will suffer greatly.

Mindset is possibly the most important but the most difficult to get your head around (ironically enough). Being in a constantly stressful state releases so many hormones into your system that actively take you out of this state of recovery and prevent you from getting back there any time soon thats it’s probably the most important and most under rated performance booster we have.

So the next time you sat on the beach waiting for wind don’t get frustrated, chill, enjoy the sun…think about how much recovery time you’re giving your body and how you actually improving your performance just by sitting there!