Here’s why your surfing pop up is so important. You know the old guys on the benches at your local break who spend more time in the peanut gallery than in the water? Many of them don’t surf anymore because they just can’t get to their feet. Like many things in life, if you don’t stay on top of your surf fitness, including your surfing pop-up, it will catch up with you. With age comes injuries, stiffness, and loss of power that can combine to make surfing difficult, if not impossible.
The good news is you can fight aging and keep surfing long into your 60s, 70s, even 80s if you stay on top on your surf fitness and mobility. It all starts with your surfing pop up. If you can’t get to your feet, you can’t surf. In fact, even after many years competing, smart professional and semi-professional surfers practice surf pop-up technique. For beginners, you will never improve your surfing if you don’t master your pop-up. In a sport with so many variables, the pop-up is something you can take control of in your surfing. So you want to improve your surfing pop-up, here’s where to begin:
What is a Surfing Pop Up?
“Pop-up” is the term surfers use to describe the motion that gets them from laying prone on their surf board to standing up and riding down the face of a wave. Ideally, this is one smooth motion from paddling to riding. In reality, surfers of all levels struggle with surfing pop ups because of issues with strength, mobility, and mechanics.
Surfing Pop Up Steps: the Mechanics of a Good Surf Pop Up
If we’re going to create a system to improve your pop-up, we need to deconstruct the motion so you can practice it extensively in the water and on dry land. Not only is the surfing pop up one of the most fundamental movements of surfing, it’s also demands a very specific form of strength and mobility. The best thing you can do for your surfing pop up is to practice it over and over until the ac
All of the guests on our Sea Hearts Surfaris take the 30 Day Pop-Up Challenge before their surf trip to put surfing pop up troubles behind them. The surf pop-up troubles so many surfers and really determines how you will surf the rest of the wave. A strong, consistent surfing pop up will allow a surfer to take off deeper, make steeper drops, catch more waves, and feel more confident in the water.
So, let’s break your Surfing Pop Up down into a few steps:
Basic – Three Step Surfing Pop Up:
Chicken Wings to Cobra: Place both hands flat on the board near the rails (chicken wings) and push your chest and hips up off the deck (cobra). Do not grab the rails.
Front Foot: Focus on your front foot more, even though your back foot probably will land first. With your hands still flat on the rails, swing your front foot into place on the center line of your board (the stringer). This should open your hips and help you bring your back foot into a surfing position. World’s Greatest Stretch, below, will help you thread the needle with you front foot between your hands. Your foot should be in a surfing position at 90 degree angle to the stringer.
Back Foot: Technically speaking, the back foot lands first, but if you watch good surfers pop up, you will barely notice as it looks like both feet land at the same time. Using your arms and front leg, push up off the board and move your back foot into place on the center line. Assume Ninja surfing stance: knees bent, hands in front of your body, shoulders open and pointing down the line.
Advanced – Combine all three steps into one fluid movement
Now, REPEAT.
Repetition over time should make this action automatic. You’ll no longer have to think about popping-up. When you stroke into a wave, you’ll just rely on our old muscle memory, pop-up, and start shredding down the line. One less thing to worry about. Barefoot Surf does a really good job of describing how advanced surfers do their pop-up to take off.
Watch this video of the World’s Best Surfers Popping-Up on Kelly Slater’s Wave. Do you think Jordy, Kelly or John John are thinking about each surfing pop-up?
Surf Pop-Up Stretches
Hip Mobility is crucial to an effective surfing pop up, so you’ve got to work on your hips and core strength to improve you surfing pop up.
How mobile are your hips? Can you sit in an Indo squat for at least a minute without screaming with pain?
=If you’ve ever been to Indonesia, you may have noticed grown men comfortably squatting as they talk, work, or smoke a cigarette. That’s because they never stopped squatting and starting sitting in rigid desk chairs. Just like small children, they are able to squat to the ground and inspect something with ease.
Hip mobility and your related ability to bring your front leg between your arms is essential to a proper pop up. A lot of what we do at the Surfer Gym is based on increasing mobility in our hips. Some exercises you should try to improve hip mobility include:
- Sitting in an Indo Squat for 30-1 minute each day and building up tolerance as demonstrated here. Bonus points if you can do it on an Indo board.
- Do a round of scorpion walk – the scorpion is an animal movement position akin to flipping your dog in downward dog. It opens up the hip joint. Do each side 10 or so times, it should feel amazing.
- The World’s Greatest stretch – this stretch lives up to its name! I do it everyday.
- 90/90s and BJJs – these are exercises borrowed from the Jujitsu world that work wonders for stiff surfers.
Specific SurfIng Pop Up Exercises to Strengthen the muscles you need
You can break down you surfing pop-up even further. If you chronically struggle getting to your feet, it’s likely you need to strengthen the fundamental muscles that propel your Pop-Up. That’s why we ask our guests to do these three exercises everyday before their Surfari. Three exercises you can incorporate to strengthen your Pop-Up muscles are sets of push-ups (modify by placing your hands on a higher surface like a bench rather than dropping to knees), spilt squats, and burpees. Try doing rounds of 10 of each of these exercises, followed by 5 Pop-Ups.
Countless surfers have claimed that their goal is improve their Pop-Up but very few have implemented a simple, daily system to achieve this goal so that’s exactly what you are going to do. Pilates and yoga will also significantly increase your strengthen and mobility when coupled with pop-up practice at home. You can also check out our favorite pro-surfer workouts for surf fitness.
- Single Leg Squats (Photos)
- Proper Push-Up (Includes knee Modification)
- Surf Burpees
Surfing Pop Up Problems
Kale Brock does an excellent job of describing the most common surfing pop-up problems that he see through coaching 1,000s of people, especially in the wave pools.
- Using Your Feet to Pop-Up – On a longboard, you might be able to get away with planting your toes to start your pop-up, but on a shortboard your feet need to fly up under you and land on the board, not be anchored onto the tail. Plus, on many boards your toes will be hanging over the tail so you won’t have that base to use to anchor your pop-up.
- Getting Up on Knees First – When you sit on your knees it is impossible to get on your feet without putting all your weight on one leg. This means you are going to load weight to the right or left of the board and when you do this it will cause the board to flip over almost every time.
- Riding the Horse (see photo above) – I call this “riding the horse” because it looks like the surfer is slinging their front leg over back of a horse. This pop-up works fine for a while, but when you surf steeper, faster waves, you just don’t have time to swing you leg around your whole body before you stand up.
- Back foot lands first – Makes both feet face forward and makes it very difficult to get your front foot on the board. You essentially get trapped at the top of the wave. Focus on your front leg first.
- Tilting to side or back when you pop-up – When you try to lean across the wave and tilt your board too early, you’ll fall into the wave. Try to pop-up directly above your surfboard, don’t try to turn before you are standing up.
- Board Issues – Your board doesn’t support your weight/ability.
Tips to Improve Your Surfing Pop Up
- Look Up – Where you look, you go. If you are looking down instead of down the line when you take-off, you will go down or miss the next section.
- Keep Your Back Arched, Not Rounded – Holding the prone position (cobra) for a couple of seconds helps so much in getting your front leg into position and get speed as you take off the line.
- Try a Few Extra Paddles – All too often, surfers try to take off before they’ve fully caught the wave. Paddle hard and start to plane down the face of the wave before you start to pop-up. The board will start to fall away and make it easier for you to po-up.
- Practice – Did I mention you need to practice your surfing pop-up? A good pop-up is instinctual and comes from muscle memory. You need to memorize the pattern of motion.
Your 30 Day Surf Pop Up Challenge
Everyone who comes to one of our Surfaris is always asked to take the 30 Day Pop-Up Challenge before they leave.
The 30 Day Surfing Pop Up Challenge
- Do 10 Pop-Ups per day everyday for 30 days. f you can do more, great. Do sets of 5 Pop-Ups at time to avoid fatigue and poor form. If you try to do fifty Pop-Ups in a row, you will fatigue quickly and then your form will go down the drain and you are more likely to injure yourself.
- Do 10 push-ups, modified to knees if needed.
- Do 10 single leg planks on each leg.
- Do 10 burpees or surf stance burpees.
Bonus points for doing the stretching exercises above before you begin.
Repeat for 30 days!
Hopefully that helps everyone with their surf pop-ups, let me know if the comments if you have any specific issues with your pop-up?
