Longboard freestyle - generalities & terminology

This article is a mish-mash of general advice and thinking around freestyle and practicing freestyle. There is no one-shot, magic tip that will make all tricks easier to learn. Freestyle is an attitude as much as skills. If freestyle was pure skills, I just wouldn’t be here, that’s for sure. Learning a new move is all in the approach, the forethought, the perseverance, the will to perform, the visualization, and so on.

By the way, these tips apply to general windsurfing as well: perfecting, learning gybes and tacks, and so on. All aspects of the sport require using da brain…

Play hard, play safe. This is the first advice here, and there is a reason. Practice when there are people around. Wear a floating device, a rubber ducky floater or others. Don’t overdo it. Rest when tired - resting gives you time to think anyways. Don’t allow yourself to get dragged off-shore. These are all basic windsurfing tips anyways…

Start slow, take your time. Ain’t no rushing freestyle, especially at the beginning of your career! Toy around with a few ideas and moves. Take your time. Mix your freestyle trying with normal sailing. Hang loose, man! I’ve had moves that come just like that, but most required months of trying, a few tries at a time.

Have a list of your moves. This is important: have a goal. Have an ordered list, of the kind “I wanna do this as it comes first, then I wanna do that as it follows…” and so on. Having a list of only one move is OK, as in “I want to start with this move and then we’ll see”. This is good, as is to say “I want to try that move only next year.”

Don’t make the same mistake as I: having too long a list. I go from one to the other and never end up achieving what I set out to do. I’m the reason for my own frustration. Try few moves in the same season. If you’re that good and get them all, then you can always add moves to the list later.

The main thing is: don’t try them all over the place. In my articles, there is an order based on my teaching experience, that’s what I recommend to follow. We’ll discuss the pre-requisites and chaining of moves. Me hope that will help your learning.

Visualize. Understand. I don’t believe in simply going out and trying things blindly, without seeing it in your head first. (Granted, that may be a personal limitation of mine, but seems to fail with others as well.) Every single move I have ever accomplished, I could perform in my head first. And I was falling and failing until I’d get it somewhere in my circumvolutions. This included the angle of the wind, body position, my feet on the board, dead fish in the water, and so on.

RR

Here’s a true anecdote. In my heydays, I was disabled for a few months due to injury. As In those days, I was pacing the shore, looking at the sailors out there, but never at the fauna on the beach of course. At the time, I was also practicing a particular move in my head. It was a particular type of more advanced railride, that I’d never been able to perform before. It took me a full month to understand it “cerebrally”. Guess what? As I recovered and starting getting back on my board again, I was able to get it right, right away, as if I had never taken a break! (The move is pulling the leeward railride, picture to the right, one exciting trick that I’ll write on soon.) That completely convinced me then of the possibilities of visualization. I suppose three quarter of the sport is 80% mental…

Try 5-10 at a time, then take a break. Don’t try a railride all day, it’s counter-productive and you’ll only get frustrated. Try a few times, think about it, move on to some other move. Sometimes the magic of going away and coming back is unreal! I strongly believe in this point: it’s not the time you spend at it, it’s the number of separate times you have tried. In other words, if you are to practice something one hour, make it 20 times 3-minute periods with breaks in-between - that’ll work!

Choose your spot - shallow waters, on-shore winds. Make the right conditions happen. The right spot makes for a much more pleasurable experience. Whenever I can, I like to practice in 2 feet of water, sandy bottom. Falling is tempting then, and coming back on board is easier (beach start, lifting the sail, etc.). You get more adventurous, less tired, everything follows from there.

Balmoral, Sydney Australia

Wait for the right wind conditions: on-shore, steady or rising wind. Avoid flaky off-shores, avoid dying winds at the end of the day. Those winds can be deceptive: your eyes see the waves of the day and think the wind must be good and constant. Under those conditions, freestyle fails, leaving you to ponder about what happened to life’s principles. I’ve made that mistake soooo many times I’m considering therapy now. Make your life easier: choose your place and wind.

Picture: now, is that a nice spot on the picture for fun sailing or what? Forget about the sailor and freestyle: the bottle shop is just to the far left…

Keep your list of moves flexible. I usually carry a list of moves as follows: 1-2 low-wind moves, 1-2 for medium wind and a couple for stronger winds. Don’t try to force a move into a wind that is not suitable. Don’t go practicing railrides (a fair wind move) in light winds - you’ll wreck the shins. Conversely, don’t start practicing sailing front-to-back (pushing the sail) in a gale. Eventually, you’ll pull the railride in lower winds and you’ll be sailing front-to-back in a gale, but there is an order in learning.

Go with the flow. Old 60s sayin’. Sometimes I feel like trying gentle stuff, sometimes I feel like breaking myself or the rig. Be in touch with the mood of the day, and sail accordingly. I try new railride moves when I feel particularly energetic, happy or tense (?). I work on easier, gentler moves when I’m dull or tired. If the wind is good and you just feel like going for a ride on that day, do it! Know yourself.

Do not frustrate with others. Do not frustrate with those better than you. Don’t fall in the trap “I’ll never be as good as this-that guy anyways”. Everyone has to start somewhere, and anyways the idea is not to be as good as the Jones’, but to have fun. Au contraire, go talk to Jones, take advice. Observe too. I find the freestyle crowd to be extremely nice and chatty and wanting you to be as good as them! Go talk to Jones.

Do not frustrate with you. Persevere. Be tenacious. Now, this is the single most important advice here. Please don’t be one of those who drop all at the slightest failure. You learned windsurfing, therefore you can do at least some basic longboard moves - I’ve never met someone who couldn’t. In fact, in the old days everyone used to! It’s a matter of getting over the first hump, that’s all. Here’s a secret: I have accomplished most of my moves within the first 3 years of my windsurfing. Of course, after 25 years, I still have a list of moves that I’m working on and never got to work. We all have limitations, but all of us can do fun stuff on a board, short or long or wide.

I am at a fair level when it comes to freestyle windsurfing, but I still have the same admiration for someone in the early stages of learning. I’ll be the first one to go & congrat the person - they are my kind of crowd.

Impart. Communicate your fun, get others to try with you, teach what you have learned. This includes basic windsurfing as much as freestyle moves.

Practice both sides. All moves can be done on a starboard or a port tack - do both. I have too many moves that I can do better on one side than the other, am working lately on fixing that. Otherwise one becomes limited when it comes to chaining moves together. One also loses on general proficiency.

Falling Again

Dare. You may be the only one at the beach doing it. You may stick out like dogs’ balls. You might even feel a tad askew. Still, dare do what you set out to do, dare to improve. You’ll get pressure from a few in the windsurfing crowd NOT to do freestyle. The argument’s gonna be like: get into “fun” boards, come “do speed”, buy more gear, and so on. When under pressure, keep the following question in mind, with a smile: if they’re not doing freestyle, then what are they doing?

Ask. Ask fellow sailors around. Ask lbws.com.au, we’ll be there to talk out concerns or questions with you. There will be better freestylists than me as well to answer. Don’t try to figure out everything by yourself - life’s too short.

Keep thems tacks short. Do lots of gybes and tacks. I never, ever sail long reaches. I find reaches boring, plus it keeps me from improving at my transitions. Then I get lazy. Frequent gybes will improve your board control and freestyle, and vice-versa. (I learned on a tiny little pond - it was a blessing I realised only later.)

Longboard freestyle terminology

A terminology of sorts is necessary to describe freestyle moves. Your body, the sail and the board can be in all sorts of positions and combinations. That’s the idea of freestyle, right?

Firstly, I’m not too fond of pet names for moves. You will find on the Web that most short board moves have pet names, nothing to do with anything, not even the name of the inventor of the move. “Gecko”, “the cowboy hat”, “the skinny mountain goat”, and so on. Call me pedantic, but I don’t like it.

In my articles, I will vaguely borrow a terminology from an early 80s freestyle book by one Gary Eversole, freestyle guru at the time (he might still be, I wouldn’t know). The terminology in that book played a part in the readability of complex moves.

Under that terminology, the position of the sailor compared to the sail is described as “front-to-back” (your front to the back of the sail), “back-to-back” and “back-to-front” (sailing your back to the front of the sail, facing the wind).

A board has two rails, the windward rail and the leeward rail. Therefore one can pull the “back-to-back leeward railride” - and good luck to you. Turning the sail around is a sail spin, i.e. a sail spin 180˚ or 360˚. A body pirouette is, huh, a pirouette. So one doesn’t pirouette the sail nor does one spin the body. That’s clear. A board is “reversed” when direction is changed without tacking nor gybing - a useful concept for more advanced freestyle.

 

Believe it or not, these simple definitions go a long way in describing just about any move. Here’s an example of a sequence we would describe as “duck tack the railride into a back-to-front leeward railride”:

Don’t worry, this is about as complicated as it gets. Any move is simpler than this.

Understand your rig.

Any windsurfer rig has exactly one point of balance for each side of the boom. On a longboard, this is some sort of an imaginary, fairly vertical line that meets the mast foot, at the boom. This will be discussed in greater details in an equipment article, but still, do understand the forces in your boom. This is important: many freestyle moves involve the swinging of the rig in some way. Knowing the point of balance is also important for regular sailing, in order to understand how to place hands and harness and minimise effort.

The first thing I do when I get on the board is to locate the point of balance for the day. The balance depends on the wind, boom length, sail tension, mast foot adjustments, board speed, and so on. Try to swing the sail around. Also: try sailing straight whilst holding your hands as close together. You’ll find the sweet spot. Look at the following video:

Now, it is fair to assume this guy has found the point of balance on the boom. Look at the effortlessness.

Equipment considerations

This is a long topic per se, we’ll leave for a future article.

For the time being, it suffices to know that a lot of freestyle can be done on any old longboard, and about any board of the hybrid type, as well as some of the modern boards shaped like a cricket field (wide, oval).

Know that most longboard freestyle can be performed on most longboards. Still, use your judgment for the time being, and I will mention specifics issues about equipment in the individual articles. I myself in the video clips will be using the worst possible gear, that is, early 80s vintage banged up boards with 8-foot booms. It can only get better from there… (Until I get sailing, many get sorry for me when I arrive at a new beach.)

Until I write that article, here is a quick bang-for-buck pot-pourri of advice:

• in general, keep the booms underarm-high. If you borrow equipment, make sure you adjust the boom height (ditto when you lend out to teach).
• try keep the same gear to learn a given move - keep the equipment a constant while you learn. This is not quiver city.
• if the U-joint or mast tee comes out, duct-tape it tight in the well.
• generally, sails must be tight to learn - difficult to learn when the sail flops around.

This concludes the general tips section. I may add to this article, as comments pour in (!). Have fun!

Now before we get started, please note that by reading these articles and tips you acknowledge that these tips can cause injury and are carried out at your own risk. Pierre and LBWS take no responsibility for your actions.