Do you live in an area of the United States with good waves? If you’re a resident of the Outer Banks in NC or Hawaii, then you have plenty of great waves on your doorstep. Learning to bodyboard allows you to enjoy these waves for some fun and exercise.
Bodyboarding is a relatively easy sport to pick up, and it doesn’t involve the complexity of getting to your feet like surfing. With bodyboarding, there’s no pop-up, which is the single biggest sticking point in learning to surf.
You just find yourself into the wave, and the ocean does the rest for you. Bodyboarding also allows you to do some stuff that surfers can’t. You can take off deeper on waves, getting a near-vertical drop without the worry of coming off at the bottom.
As a result, you get more tube time and better results when surfing slabby waves with meaty barrels. However, before you dream of dropping into 10-foot pits, you’re going to have to learn the basics of the spot.
This guide unpacks everything you need to know about how to bodyboard
Contents
Buying Your Body Boarding Gear
Choosing the Board
The board is the crux of the spot; we suppose that’s why they name it body “boarding,” right? There are several different styles of bodyboard, varying in width and length.
You’ll choose the right board by selecting a model that reaches your naval when standing on the floor. The sizes range from 32-inch kids models to 46-inch models for the heaviest surfers.
The Leash
The leash connects to the front of the board and wraps around your upper arm with a Velcro strap. The leash uses a telephone-cord-style wire to reduce drag in the water.
- -Stable and Easy to Ride – Designed for all wave conditions, Quill beach board is the ideal bodyboard for kids and adults, beginners and intermediate alike. The 42-inch body board for the beach is the right size for surfers up to 210 lbs.
- - Offers Flexibility and Buoyancy – This water body board is engineered with an ultra-strong light weight EPS core embedded with a weather-resistant FRP stringer, which makes it buoyant and flexible. So, you can ride already-broken waves with ease.
- - Durable Heat-Laminated Board - Our heat lamination process cushions and seals the board’s top and bottom, making it sturdier than regular glued bodyboards. The IXPE deck is designed for speed and comfort while resisting impact.
- - Boosts Speed and Control – Each beach bodyboard has an HDPE Slick Bottom. It’s reinforced with a plastic mesh and features dual channels, a crescent tail and 60/40 rail. So, you can maneuver the board with better responsiveness and fluidity.
- - Your Ultimate Body Boards for Beach – Enjoy surfing for years. We crafted these water boards for kids and adults with a unique printing technology that gives our boards a premium wood grain look. It’s also equipped with a stainless steel double-swivel coiled bodyboard leash.
The Fins
When surfers paddle for a wave, they use their arms, and some of them might kick their feet a bit to give the board’s tail some additional lift to get into the weave.
With bodyboarding, you’re finning to get into the wave while securing your hands and forearms on the nose and rails of the board as you drop in.
Your fins should provide a comfortable fit and have soft rubber on the upper to prevent them from digging into your feet when finning.
The fins come with an angled, short blade design. The edges of the fins have rails, allowing you to dip them into the face of the wave to control your movement on the board.
Wetsuits and Rash Guards
If you’re surfing in cold water, you’re going to need a wetsuit. In cold water in California, you’ll need a 3/2mm full suit in the winter. In New Jersey, you’ll need a 5/4mm wetsuit in the wintertime, with booties and a hood.
If you’re in warm water, you can get away with wearing boardshorts and a rash guard. When the seasons change, you have the option of using a wetsuit top or pullover that’s around 1.5mm to 2mm thick.
Learning to Body Board : A Guide
Bodyboarding is a fun sport. Whether you’re a young kid enjoying the foamies push you along, or you’re a twenty-something dropping into 6-foot barrels, you’re out there to have a good time. One of the best parts about surfing and bodyboarding is that you don’t need to be a pro to have fun.
A beginner will have the same amount of fun in the water as an expert. The thrill you get from catching that first three-foot open face green wave is the same that you experience when dropping into a 15-foot monster barrel grinding and sucking off the reef.
Part of learning to bodyboard is the requirement of understanding your equipment and personal limitations with your fitness and breath-hold. The other part is reading the ocean and the ocean conditions as a whole.
This section will look at the critical information that every bodyboarder needs to know to have a safe and fun experience out in the water.
The Beach, Break, and Conditions
First, you’ll need to understand the breach and the conditions. You can’t go bodyboarding every day. Well, you can, but you’re not always going to have a great time. There are very few locations around the world that produce consistent swell every day of the year.
Unless you live in Indo, the chances are that there will be those flat spells and stormy days when you can’t get in the water. So, when those good days do arrive, you have to understand how to recognize them and plan for the days in advance.
When you arrive at the local break, you’ll need to pay attention to three things, the swell, the wind, and the water. The most important of the three is the wind. There could be great swell, and the water looks fantastic, but if the wind is howling onshore, there’s probably no reason to paddle out.
You’re looking for offshore wind conditions that run away from the breach., These winds run up the face of the wave, keeping it open. As a result, you get the best condition for barrels, and every bodyboarder froths for barrels.
The next is understanding the break. What kind of bottom are you dealing with here? Is it a flat sand bottom or a reef? Does the wave look like a point break like malibu or a beach break like the lighthouse at OBX?
Reef breaks are usually longer rides and more consistent. However, beach breaks can provide steep drops and thick barrels. However, landing on a sandbar is a very different experience from landing on a reef, and you might want to consider taking a helmet with you when challenging reef breaks as a beginner.
After that, you need to analyze the swell size. If you’re a moderately fit person and you have no water experience, then you’re going to want to stick in swell conditions under four feet. This site is all you need to have a great time getting a feel for the board and the break.
When it starts to get above six feet, you’re going to need to have a decent level of fitness, and you’re going to need confidence in your breath-hold and your knowledge of reading the water.
Being caught inside on an 8-foot sneaker set with a mountain of water coming toward you can feel terrifying if you don’t know how to handle it.
Understanding Your Fitness Level
Your confidence in the water comes from your fitness level and your experience., For instance, a fit person could go out in 8-foot surf and struggle if they don’t have any experience.
An unfit person could handle the technicality of reading the water in those conditions, but they don’t have the fitness to challenge the power of the ocean.
So, you need a balance of fitness and experience to handle bigger waves and heavier water. Increasing your fitness level and practicing your breath-hold will dramatically increase your confidence in the water, allowing you to continue testing your boundaries in bigger surf.
Holding Your Breath and Controlling Panic
When beginners are in the early stages of learning how to drop into real waves, not foamies, they find that they might get on a wave that’s bigger than they expect, and it closes out on them. As a result, they end up taking a beating underwater as the wave tosses them around.
When you’re not used to the power of larger surf, you’re going to feel an instinctual response to want to panic. However, panicking at this stage could end up costing you your life. If you panic, it causes you to burn your oxygen really fast.
What in five seconds underwater can seem like five minutes. When you’re out of air and desperate to breathe, that’s when accidents happen. To relax when you’re under the water, count to five after a wipeout. Relax and let the water throw you around, don’t try to fight it.
Reading Charts and the Water
As mentioned, world-class conditions don’t come around every day. Typically the best waves arrive in the wintertime when hurricanes blow in the Northern Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico or during the typhoon season of the North Pacific.
These storms occur thousands of miles away from the beach, pushing waves across the ocean until they reach the beach or reef and start to break. Some top surfers will chase a swell from Hawaii to Mexico, surfing the same swell over seven days in two locations.
Using charts from Surfline and Windy can help you analyze the wind and swell conditions a few days in advance. So, when the good day arrives, you’re out in the water at first light before the crowd arrives.
Learning to Bodyboard Phase 1 – Catching Foamies
When you’re learning to bodyboard, you can think of it as learning to walk. If you have no previous experience in the ocean, then you have a steep learning curve ahead of you.
As mentioned, one half of the challenge is learning your equipment, and the other half is understanding the ocean conditions. When you’re starting, paddle out into the foamies before the backline and practice paddling into the foam, spinning around, and catching the rise back to shore.
This strategy helps you understand the power of the wave and how your equipment responds to being pushed around. Catching the foamies is fun, and there isn’t much danger of anything going wrong. As long as you’re not going out in conditions over four feet, you’ll be fine.
Learning to Bodyboard Phase 2 – Catching Green Waves
After you have a handle catching those foamies, it’s time to try and get out to the backline to hang out with the big boys. Green waves are the unbroken waves that stand up at the back as the wave starts to reach shallow water and begins to break.
You’ll need to be in the “take-off zone,” sitting just behind the peak, or where the wave starts to break, and about two or three feet behind it to prevent it from pulling you into the impact zone as it breaks. However, before you get to the backline and the take-off zone, you’re going to have to paddle out past the breakers.
To get to the back, you’ll “Duck dive” under waves as they break in front of you. The duck dive lets you dive under the turbulent water, pooping you out the other side of the wave. When you get out to the back, you can’t just paddle to the take-off zone if other people are already out.
Doing something like that in Hawaii could end up with the locals calling you out and telling you to get out of the water.
You’ll need to observe etiquette and fall into the “line up.” The lineup starts at the peak and extends back down the wave direction towards the channels where you paddle out. In some locations like Pipeline in Hawaii and Snapper Rocks in Oz, you’ll have to wait for hours at a time to reach the peak as one surfer after another drops into the waves, and you move close to the front of the queue.
When you’re at the peak, and it’s your turn, don’t hesitate when you choose a wave and paddling. Remember, the person that takes off the deepest on the wave has the right of wave. So, if you’re sitting deepest, and you’re confident you can make the drop, then it’s your turn.
When you see the wave approaching, turn and start finning when it’s around six feet from you. Point the nose of the board at an angle down the wave, not straight ahead. You’ll feel it when the wave grabs you and pushes you down the face. At that point, draw your feet up to reduce the drag, and enjoy the ride.
Use the board’s rails to move up and down the face and ride the wave as far as possible. If you miss your take-off, you’re going to have to let someone else go in front of you as a way to apologize for costing the next person in the queue a wave.
Learning to Bodyboard Phase 3 – Building Confidence
Keep it to four-foot days until you have confidence. When you’re coming off waves, and you find you don’t panic anymore, you know it’s time to start lifting the bar on the size.
Building confidence doesn’t happen overnight. Unless you have experience diving or swimming in the ocean, then you’re probably going to find it takes a few weeks or even months to learn to read the sea. Some people say they never stop learning.
However, as you get better with taking wipeouts and handling bigger conditions, you’ll find you keep placing yourself in positions outside your comfort zone, allowing you to extend your skillset. The more time you spend in the water, the faster you learn and build the fine motor responses needed to make you a better surfer.
Never go out if you’re not feeling confident. Remember, even if you get out, you’re going to have to get back in somehow.
That means catching a wave. The last thing you want is to find yourself out the back on a 10-foot day when you’re not ready for it, especially with the swell building. It’s a terrifying situation, and panic can end up costing you your life if you paddle for a wave and don’t make it.
Learning to Bodyboard Phase 4 – Challenging Heavy Water
When you have your technique and confidence down, it’s time to start pushing yourself. Look for different breaks around where you live and see if you can find a slab with a thick lip and spitting barrel.
Learning to Bodyboard Phase 5 – Learning Tricks
When you have barrel riding in the bag, it’s time to learn how to make airs. When you come out of the barrel, you can move up to the shoulder and hit the lip of the wave, launching into the air. You can learn aerial tricks to give you a thrill at the end of your ride.
Get Out There and Get Stoked
Becoming a good bodyboarder doesn’t happen overnight. While it’s not hard to grasp the basics, you’re not going to be the next Mike Stewart in your first few months of the sport.
It takes time to build confidence, especially as you progress into larger, thicker waves. However, with enough practice, you’ll find yourself dropping into thick, gnarly pits in as little as six months to a year.
How far you decide to take the sport depends on you. We all have differences in our fitness levels, age, breath-hold capability, and surfing ability. Some people may take a few weeks to start shredding, whereas others could take months.
The more time you spend in the water, the shorter the learning curve. It takes time to learn how to maneuver the board, pick the right take-off spot, and master the art of choosing the right wave. However, if you live in a location with good waves, you should find that you pick it up in a few months.
You’ll be riding those sick 6-foot winter pits in a year max. Get out there and get stoked!
