Yoga Poses Tailored to Surfers

Surfing demands strength, balance, coordination, and the ability to respond to constantly changing conditions. Yoga complements these demands by improving body awareness, mobility, balance, and control, helping surfers move more efficiently both on and off the board. In this article, yoga teacher, surfer, and author Bellatrix van Wingerden shares how yoga can enhance your surfing performance through greater body awareness, along with four key yoga poses to build strength, stability, and resilience in the water.

Why Yoga Supports Surfers

Yoga enhances your body awareness, thereby boosting your surfing performance. With refined body awareness, you gain increased control over your muscles, joints, and body movements. Engaging in a yoga session reconnects you with your body, providing a sense of being present within it. Each session is like an exploration into your body: allowing you to recognize areas of tension, stiffness, injuries, suppleness, and freedom of movement from within. This self-awareness proves helpful on your surfboard, allowing you to use this knowledge effectively.

Building Body Awareness on the Board

Self-awareness is essential when learning anything. To improve, you must identify areas that require adjustment. Mastering a trick on the water requires repetitive practice, with each repetition aimed at improving the technique. Consistently making the same mistakes allows for progress, highlighting the importance of body awareness. By feeling where adjustments are needed within your body, you can adjust your technique with each attempt.

Yoga Poses for Surfers

Yoga offers an opportunity to engage muscles and perform movements that are often underutilized or neglected during surfing. This holistic approach addresses the entirety of your body, promoting overall development. Muscles frequently used in a repetitive manner while surfing, such as those in the lower back, can become excessively contracted. Yoga provides a platform to lengthen and stretch these muscles, counteracting the imbalances caused by prolonged surfing stances.

Chair pose variation (utkatasana)

1. Begin by placing both feet directly under your hips.

2. Inhale as you bring your arms up sideways, extending them past your ears.

3. Lengthen your back, and as you exhale, bend both knees.

4. Lift your heels off the ground and balance on your toes.

5. Maintain focus on a single point (dhristi) and breathe steadily, remain standing for as long as possible to strengthen your leg muscles and enhance your sense of balance.

Why is this pose beneficial for surfers? Surfers require strong leg muscles to absorb impact when executing jumps (tricks) on the water. Additionally, the constant need to propel the board and adjust to changing waves demands considerable leg strength. This variation not only strengthens leg muscles but also improves balance and enhances foot strength and flexibility, particularly beneficial for those who frequently use footstraps while sailing.

Dolphin pose (ardha pincha mayurasana)

1. Begin on your hands and knees on the mat.

2. Position your elbows directly under your shoulders with your forearms resting flat on the mat.

3. Push yourself diagonally backward, focusing on extending your sternum towards your toes; your heels don’t need to touch the mat.

4. Allow your head to hang freely, relaxing your neck while feeling the strength in your back and arms.

Why is this pose beneficial for surfers? Windsurfers often adopt a rounded upper back posture when hooked into the trapeze ropes, with the core pulling backward and the arms extending forward to grasp the boom, resulting in a convex curvature of the upper back. Dolphin Pose serves as a complementary movement, counteracting the effects of windsurfing by promoting an opposite posture. This alternating movement helps maintain body and muscle mobility, preventing stiffness after prolonged windsurfing sessions.

Cow-face pose variation (gomukhasana)

1. Stand upright and extend both arms forward.

2. Pass your right arm under your left.

3. Hook your elbows and forearms together.

4. Inhale as you bring both arms up, then exhale as you lower them, repeating the movement seven times.

5. Extend your left arm outward and twist your torso to the right.

6. Use your lower (right) arm as a hook to deepen the twist, providing an extra stretch to the shoulder blade.

7. Look over your right shoulder.

Why is this pose beneficial for surfers? Wave surfers often experience stiffness in the upper back due to paddling. This posture helps restore flexibility to the upper back, enabling smoother arm movement during paddling. Increased flexibility in the upper back and shoulders facilitates powerful paddling, aiding in navigating through waves and currents. Additionally, for winging, where shoulder movement is crucial for control, this pose enhances freedom of movement, allowing for more agile control of the wing in all directions.