109 How to Catch More Waves and Abolish Surfing Shame

https://learn.surfmastery.com/wave-catching-academy-1

If you've ever felt frustration, shame, or disappointment from missing waves, this episode provides actionable drills and insights to help you surf with more confidence and consistency.

3 key techniques that can help surfers at all levels improve their wave-catching ability: Mastering timing, overcoming the fear of falling, and dealing with the emotional fear of failure.

Click HERE to register or find out more about the Wave Catching Academy 

Tim Ferris - How I learned to Surf in 5 days:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_c_FCTX0gk

Transcript:

 Welcome back, or welcome to the Surf Mastery Podcast. The podcast that helps passionate, lifelong surfers to catch more waves, surf with more speed, style, and grace, and to gain wisdom and confidence in the water. I am your host, Michael Frampton. Today's episode will be another solo episode. That is a follow on from the episode that I released two days ago.

And we will expand on catching waves and give you some solid tips to do that. Next week we've got another long form interview coming your way, all about surfing philosophy. So excited to release that one. So make sure you subscribe and stay tuned for that. In the last episode I was talking about a breakthrough I had in catching waves.

And for some reason it didn't really translate into catching small, soft waves on a small wave shortboard. Which was something that I really wanted to do. I was lucky enough to live in an area where the waves were mostly pretty good all the time. They were mostly head high. But every now and then a nice small swell would come through.

And I remember pulling up to the beach and the waves were small, only about waist high. But they were really nice. And it was no wind. Perfect shape to them. And there was no one else out. And I was so excited. And I grabbed my small wave shortboard and paddled out and spent at least 20 minutes. Just could not catch anything.

any of these waves. Just could not figure it out. I just remember being so disappointed and frustrated and by now you've got a handful of people sitting in their cars watching, ready to come out surfing or decide whether to. So you're feeling shamed as well. And one of these surfers decided to come out and it was an older man in his 50s, on a board even smaller than mine, and he just paddled out and was just Catching these waves like any other wave, just gliding into them with ease, going so fast, doing roundhouse cutbacks, just blowing my mind, and meanwhile, I couldn't even catch any of these waves, let alone stand up and surf one, and the contrast from them.

From going from being excited to go surfing to just feeling ashamed and disappointed and frustrated just was not only gut wrenching, but it left me confused because it was like, how is this guy doing it? The waves are so soft and slow. How is he surfing a shortboard? And I was so determined to figure it out.

I ended up approaching him and He was, turns out he was a former pro, really friendly, and ended up getting some coaching from him, and it changed, had another breakthrough on small waves, because in surfing we often think it's quite simple, the wave comes towards the beach, and you paddle for it in the right part of the wave, and you glide in, and that's true for most waves, but when you start wanting to surf smaller waves.

On a shortboard, you've really got to get an eye in for the details and what I noticed he was doing, which was pointed out, was he was wait