Well after surfing and coaching 8 days in a row last week I got stuck behind in my intellectual output. Was cramming to get vids and session invoices to those that I coached and I didn’t have the 12-24 hours required to craft the blog posts that I have been churning out. It’s early Saturday morning and I’m gearing up to go surf, but I wanted to post something. I was thinking about finding and sharing Wayne Lynch footage, but when I started digging a little I realized that that requires a larger post. He’s an important figure in surfing and has some pretty strong views worth giving a more concerted dig into. In search for clips of Wayne, however, I discovered something else: The Surfers Journal has a Vimeo Channel! It is filled with tons of new and archival surfing footage like this competition in Western Australia. I cannot link any of their videos here due to privacy policies, but if you’re looking for inspiration and surfing cultural history in the form of 3-20 minute surf vids, I suggest you head over there before or after your next surf or at-home visualization session and click on anything. The further down you scroll, the better and better the content gets. Like this video Spyder Wills took of Gerry Lopez and Rory Russell at Uluwatu in the 1970s, which starts off with a perfect image of how to paddle a shortboard followed by 7 minutes of perfect trim and tube time.
Many people that I have been working with both at the beach and virtually need as much good surfing content as they can lay their eyes on in order to see what good form looks like. Where are their hands placed? What about their eyes? How do they crouch to get into the tube? What is their stance like when trimming? Sure you can take your surfing by feel, but that won’t account for an effective approach unless you’re some kind of savant like Lynch. Most humans need exemplars to mimic if they are to learn any grammar proficiently, and this channel is full of that, so get over there and start studying!