The Coaching Board - Surfing Levels

Learn what you need to focus on for your specific surfing level.

We’re very excited to introduce you to a game-changing tool: the Coaching Board. It will help you identify the physical and mental skills you need to acquire according to your experience level.

One of the biggest keys to unlocking new surfing skills is to know what to focus on depending on where you’re at in your specific progression journey. Not being able to provide in-person advice to our online students, we designed this tool to help you coach yourself to the next level!

Here’s how it works:

Across the top, we’ve got four experience levels:

Beginners 1.1: are starting their progression journey.
Beginners 1.2: are learning to catch unbroken waves & angle their take off.
Intermediates 2.1 Start to learn speed generation & carving skills.
Intermediates 2.2 Often want to improve manoeuvres like cutbacks and top turns.

On the left side, you’ll find our 7 categories of techniques, mental skills, and surf knowledge.

Let’s say that you are a 1.2 beginner surfer…

To learn how to use this grid efficiently, let’s say you are a level 1.2 beginner. This means the blue cards should be the most relevant for you. To improve your take-off, you’d click on the “Angling & Improving Consistency” card. By clicking a card, you get redirected to the specific content of the platform, with a video and article teaching the technique.

The coaching board doesn’t contain videos or tutorials. It’s simply a different way to navigate our platform, redirecting you to the key skills you need to acquire at your specific level. Of course, each surfer progresses slightly differently. As a 1.2 beginner, you might still need to acquire some 1.1 skills while already having some 1.2 skills under your belt.

It’s important to understand that these skills build on each other. If we return to the Take Off for a 1.2 surfer, you first must find a take off technique that works for you before improving consistency and angling. Once you can angle consistently, you’d work on taking off faster and landing in the proper stance. It’s best to ensure you acquire the skills of the previous level to build on a strong foundation without developing bad habits.

Why we created the Coaching Board

In our Courses section, content is arranged somewhat in a progression order. It makes sense, for example, to learn how to paddle on a surfboard before learning to catch unbroken waves. However, these courses contain a lot of content which can be relevant to surfers of different experience levels. For example, our paddling course has content for intermediates, such as improving paddle strokes and sprinting properly. It would be wrong to assume you must acquire every paddling technique before moving on to the take off course.

Surfing is a complex sport with techniques that surfers keep polishing for years through their progression. The coaching board visually represents how these techniques evolve and re-organizes our tutorials in a more logical progression order.

True magic can happen when you focus on only a few skills for your specific level, and the coaching board can help you do that. Remember to watch and read your most relevant content multiple times to grasp, visualize and integrate techniques into your practice.