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will the brain become fashionable in the world of surfing

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Quando é que será que o cérebro vira moda no mundo do Surf?!

When will the brain become fashionable in the world of surfing?!

 

In the process of creating solutions for the best education system for all skills that I consider imperative to pass on to Good Surf Good Love practitioners,

in a process of countless hours of study,

thousands of euros invested in courses and books,

in an interesting collection of the most original community values ​​possible,

in the transfer of values ​​from other sports, which are only now starting to reach surfing,

in the experience with more than 20 thousand students, in more than 26 years that I started surfing and learning with others, more than 22 years ago, when I took the Coaches Course and started teaching Surf, at Ericeira Surf Camp and then with my Coach at his School in Ericeira,

that I collected and tested what brought me to the Inês Tralha Method.

I often wondered if it was called the Good Surf Good Love Method, but no. The Method is older than Good Surf Good Love, which despite being one of the first 10 academies in Portugal, had to drink from my personal experience, which shows my personal values, which actually make a perfect match with the values sports:
  • Responsibility
  • Team spirit
  • Subject
  • Tolerance
  • Perseverance
  • Humanism
  • Truth
  • Respect
  • Solidarity
  • Dedication
  • Courage

When I form the Good Surf Good Love Coaches with the Inês Tralha Method, it is not always easy to pass on specific Surf values ​​to those who arrived at Surf when it already had this scenario of allowed excesses and true disorganization and disorientation. When they haven’t had any kind of sports training (if they haven’t practised other sports, formally) or academic, then it’s like teaching them to walk. If you’ve already taken a Surfing class out there, then everything gets complicated, because there’s a method here!

When everything has a beginning, middle and end, and a reason for being, and these Trainers are humble and interested in learning, then everything is easy.

This is a little smell of the Inês Tralha Method.

As Technical and Pedagogical Director of 3 Certified Surfing Coaches Courses – Grade I, I tried to pass on some of these values, but with a very mediocre success rate, because in the world of surfing, everyone already knows everything and doesn’t train to know more and to be better, but to have a role, which allows them to be more at ease in their more or less legal jobs… (Of course, there is no rule without exception. But unfortunately, this is the rule that prevails most.)

Still, I hope that this video with a small sample of the Inês Tralha Method, which is practised at Good Surf Good Love, will help some Surfers, Monitors, Instructors or Coaches who give some lessons, to be better, more respectful of Surf while practising and Sports mode, and practice sports values ​​more and more, because now Surfing is not just an activity for marginal people or a dream life.

It is an activity where it is possible to make a career! This career, promising only for those who want to be better. This career, in which, definitely, professionals have to qualify every year, improve themselves every season, have pride, study, train, this time, not to have a role in their hands, but to have more scientific information in their heads.

LER ESTE ARTIGO EM PORTUGUÊS:

 

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3 Benefits of Surfing

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3 Benefits of Surfing

🧠 It promotes mental health 🧠

Surfing contributes to psychological well-being, as it helps you deal with stress, pressure, increases your confidence and helps you meet new people.

 

❤️ Improves cardiovascular health ❤️

It is one of the most complete sports, as it requires the effort of almost every muscle, bone, and tendon. In addition, the decrease in body temperature forces a greater energy expenditure to keep you warm.

 

🏄‍♀️ Improves balance and motor coordination 🏄‍♀️

Standing on your board requires a lot of balance and strength to be able to fight against the force of the waves and their constant motion. You also have to think and perform different movements simultaneously and coordinate the different parts of your body.

 

Would you like to try it?

Send us a message to learn more about our classes! 📩  📩

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 3 Values that we insist on spreading on to our students

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 3 Values that we insist on spreading on to our students

There are a number of rules and values that we start to go over from the very first lesson, but today we will just highlight 3:

🌊  Loose boards, thrown or badly cared for – one of the appreciations that everyone who has attended other schools will immediately mention is that our equipment is all new. Actually, it isn’t. Some of our boards are already in their 3rd or 4th season. But it is a principle of ours, out of respect for the greatest artists in this love story – the shapers. These artisans are responsible for simple details that further refine our emotions when riding the waves. As such, even if they are sponge boards, they are not meant to have cuts, dings, or bumping into anything or anyone. Of course, this behavior starts with us – Surfers who teach, Monitors, Instructors, Coaches, or Teachers.

🌊  Disturb the leisure of others – ⛔️  NEVER! You know, no wave sharing. None of that weird new party waves stuff. Waves are not shared, not stolen, not disturbed.

🌊  Not respecting your turn in the “queue” for the waves! – Priorities demand knowledge. Sometimes, even on the most unruly peak and full of new practitioners with little knowledge and many doubts, there can be order, rule, and respect.

Ah!! and the rules of priority, that normally everyone knows, are those of the athletes that use them with knowledge and strategic wisdom. While they have little experience, it is normal to take the leftovers from the good surfers, and when in the middle of equals, the rule of every man in his turn should reign, like in the supermarket line.👌

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To read a wave – lesson 3

How to read a wave?

The ability to read a wave is acquired mainly with sea time, with training! But there are a few things you can take into account to read one.😉
🌊 3 tips to keep in mind when reading a wave:
🔹 Analyze the sea and the waves and try to find patterns, similar repetitions. Observe live from out of the water, underwater with diving goggles, take pictures, use a drone to see from above or take advantage of beaches like Ericeira, Santa Cruz, Consolação that allow us to look at the beaches from above;
🔹 Try applying these zones in different waves, more or less perfect, to the right and to the left;
🔹 Feel the different energies of the waves just by bodysurfing, without any props or with just a few duck feet. It is one of the exercises we do regularly at Good Surf Good Love Surf Academy.
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Borg Scale

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How to Measure Training Intensity: Relation Between Heart Rate and Training

Sports performance, improving general fitness, weight control, or developing surf-specific fitness. If you have one of these goals, it is important to monitor your Heart Rate during training. 😉

🔹 Heart Rate (HR) control and monitoring is an excellent tool, to manage training intensity intervals more precisely.

🔹 Even without a heart rate monitor, it is relatively easy to do this same monitoring, although less accurately. To do this monitoring you can use the Borg Scale.

What is the Borg Scale?

The Borg Scale, or Borg Table, from Swedish physiologist Gunnar Borg, is a list of sensations, which allow the subjective classification of an individual’s effort.

🔹 Subjective Perception of Effort (PSE) is a valid method in monitoring intensity in cardiovascular training.

🔹 The reliability of intensity ratings in strength training has a margin of error. However, it is a good tool.

How it can help you?

By using the chart, you can also transfer the sensations you have during your surfing sessions. Then try to characterize your effort, for example when you paddle out to the peak, when you finish riding the wave, or when you paddle out more vigorously to catch the wave.

If you identify the sensations, you will be able to understand what kind of intensity you are using. By understanding the intensity areas, you’ll have information about what intensities you can train on land, when you can’t do it in the sea.

Whether you have a heart rate monitor or not, you can now train more assertively.

For more information, please also check this article where you will find another tool to measure your training HR.

Fill in your data: Age and Resting Heart Rate and the tool will automatically give you your training Heart Rates for different intensity intervals. Depending on your goals, you can now monitor your HR training interval. 🤩

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Surfing Stance

😉 Today we offer you a detailed description of the basic position of Surfing that we consider to be the best approach, for the initial training of any person.

This approach is based on 22 years of collected experience, many courses taken, some academic, others just for a few hours or weekends, many questions asked to other professionals of the area, to whom I look with admiration (unfortunately in the Surf area there are few who deserve this merit, but many others from the sports area complete the range of many good professionals, scholars and sports scientists), more than 20 thousand students taught, not always with this method, and that we will improve whenever we consider that something different works better.

But the most important thing is that all our method is grounded. Any person, client or professional, can and should challenge, question, as long as they can then refute or substantiate it as well. “Because everyone does it this way”, “because I do it this way”, “because I learned it this way” “because I was taught it this way”, are not valid justifications.

Please justify yourselves based on and knowledge of Biomechanics and Anatomy, and then in another phase, Fluid Mechanics and Laws of Physics, Wave Phenomena, and so on…  😀

At Good Surf Good Love, we absolutely disagree with the typical “archery” position 🏹, that you see constantly being taught on beaches all over the world, every day, by all kinds of monitors, instructors, coaches, teachers (no, it’s not all the same thing…). 😬

Let me ask you, those who have learned this way, how many of you have consistency in the first turning maneuvers (at the bottom or top), especially when this turning is done in the direction of our backs – Backside??❓❓❓ Have you ever wondered if the position is not too rigid and stressed, and if your back is turned to the side where it is more difficult to do the first maneuvers, with what eyes will you be able to see the wave❓😬 hihihihi
The naturally lateralized position, we can accept, but the excessive flexion of the legs and the proudly expressed ninja attitude, no way!

😉 Calm down “ninjas”! This is just our method, and everyone can have their own. 😜

If the average consistency of standing up every time you catch a wave is not above 80% after your 2nd surf session, then you should try our method!

👉 Share this information with any of your ninja friends if you think they need to know this urgently! 😉🙏

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Relationship of harmony between the individual – sea – surfboard = Surf Flow

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Harmony between the individual – sea – surfboard

I often hear among my students and other surfers, regardless of levels, the following remark:

❓ “I would like to try a different or smaller board. This one is already too easy?

And I ask, “What do you mean you’re having so much fun you can’t take it anymore!?” 😂  🤷

I know many other reasons for not choosing the right board, but this is one of the most recurring ones.

Once and for all: The board should help us because we already have the sea which is unrepeatable and requires many “flying hours” to learn to feel and read it. Ah, and us, our physical condition and abilities to manage too, getting in our way. Are you sure you want a board that “robs” you of the best part of surfing, the fun, that “feeling” that real surfers know.

🤷. What I’m going to say maybe shocking, but most of the people who are already independent in the sea, still don’t know this “feeling” of sliding in harmony on the board and in the most interesting part of the wave. I don’t care if he is a great surfer, the best on the beach or on his street.

Sometimes the great surfers impose maneuvers on the sea that it doesn’t ask for, and for me, this is not surfing. But I can also see an individual with very little experience of practice, gliding with the harmony that I speak to you, and without knowing anything, there he goes in complete pleasure of slide with the board at sea, in full harmony.

🤔  As I’ve heard it said: “Without knowing how to read or write, that one made a big wave”!

Then there are also those who forget about the sea, either when they paddle out to try to catch the wave and they don’t have enough experience to feel or guess it, who know enough about the sea when they watch others on the beach, but then when they are in their session they “turn their back” on the sea and don’t communicate with the waves, don’t read it, don’t listen to it, and so don’t know what the sea wants to tell them.

🎖 For these I have a tip: You will feel the sea, no board. Just you and the waves. Do little reels, cut the green waves, make contests with friends, to see who goes longer in the wave! Indispensable condition, to move on to Level 1, at Good Surf Good Love.

Seriously, the real feeling, the reason why we miss social and family events, wake up at the crack of dawn, drive miles and miles behind perfect waves, is more than the contact with nature. It is more than the good that the sea does us.

The greatest good is to feel that HARMONY, the full control of sliding with the right board, in the right place of the wave, without using our strength before we have explored the energetic potential of the wave.

😉  And you, have you felt that full harmony? 😁

💬 How would you describe the feeling when running the wave?

 

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16 most common mistakes of base position 

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16 most common mistakes of base position 

Previously I have already given you our very general description of the Surf Base Position, the one we advocate in our teaching method. Today we will describe to you some of the most common mistakes.

    1. Very open base – This gives you much less range of motion in the hip, and also causes your body weight to be projected backwards from the centre of the board, which will cause you to brake. The so-called ‘foot on the nose, foot on tail’ position will also take away balance, stability and leg strength, which you will need later on when you start manoeuvring.
    2. Very closed base – Very closed base will also take away balance and stability. In fact, a mistake that is not listed here and that you should know is that the feet should not remain fixed, but should be adjusted. Even when you are still only moving forward, you should train your dancing feet, light on the board, so that you can adjust them when it becomes more necessary.
    3.  Front foot points to the nose – This one I have unfortunately seen taught on the beach. Serious, as it also doesn’t allow you to have balance on the board and will also make turning difficult. If you make this mistake you should correct it by over-correcting and placing it perpendicular to the stringer of the board – that wooden line that runs across the whole board from the back to the front edge.
    4. Thinking that the back foot must be on top of the keels at this early stage – so if the feet/handles should be shoulder-width apart, more or less, and if the front foot should be in the centre/middle of the board, just do the maths. Of course, we will need to put the back foot there on the fins to turn. But for now, the turns, while the turning angle is still small, can be done with a slight bending movement, looking and turning/tilting on the way up. Later we will move both feet if it is a big board or just the back foot if you are a shortboarder, to make a more radical turn.
    5. Thinking that the position of the feet is fixed – It isn’t. Whether you ride a big board or a small board, you’re going to have to adjust your feet a lot depending on the manoeuvres you want to do.
    6. Knees apart and pointed in opposite directions – The back knee should also point forward to allow for greater hip-femoral functionality.
    7. Legs/ Knees too bent – I have said before in other posts that this is one of the reasons many of the riders are condemning the evolution. This exaggerated strength in the legs is not necessary when the ride on the wave is controlled. On the contrary, it will make you unable to use them to make a change of direction or absorb instability along the wave.
    8. High tension legs – I reinforce the previous description. To understand how serious this error is.
    9. Lateral pelvis and shoulders – Over-correcting, in order for the brain to process the information about the required position, we should try to turn the shoulders aligning with the perpendicular of the stringer of the board and the pelvis should make an angle of at least 45º, never less, so that in the future, it will not be almost impossible to correct this functional constraint.
    10. Arms aligned with the board stringer – Again, overcorrection, both perpendicular to the length of the board.
    11. Arms hang both on the same side of the board – Always, one on each side of the Rail or board edge.
    12. Back foot does not support the heel – Recurring error, often due to lack of mobility in the ankle, often, because if your Trainer, does not identify you the error. If the reason for this mistake is lack of mobility, a coach who is also trained in Physical exercise and health can help, if there is pain, you should seek a therapist.
    13. Look directed at the feet or down – Apart from not knowing where you are going, if you make this mistake, you are also a great danger!!! Look directed where you want to go, ALWAYS!
    14. Very marked “ninja” style – This not at all flexible approach, needs to let in more and new information. Try it and you will see the difference.
    15. Center of mass designed on the back support – Have you noticed, for sure, that sometimes when you miss the wave, after standing up the board points upwards?
    16. Center of mass projected on the 2 supports– It’s due to your ninja position, or lateralized position. The consequence is again, the loss of waves,…

To correct these mistakes? Hummmm, I have a tip: Come and meet us!

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The pyramid of respect

The pyramid of respect of the Good Surf Good Love Method has a very particular reading.

🧠  Aware that many will not understand it, we still insist on giving you a vision that can change the way you see, feel and explore Surfing.
The true and purest pleasure of surfing comes from the full control of gliding effortlessly, in the place where the wave generates all the energy (so that we can forget about the surfboard as if it were our worn shoes).

😉 Well, we know that just going to the beach, filling your chest with that sea air, diving into the icy sea, lying on the warm towel, riding the waves coming and going, or being in the sea trying to catch some waves, and even if you don’t catch any,… Well, we know that even so, everyone who loves the beach and the sea feels a kind of balance and harmony, do you agree?

But it’s time to explain to you the magic 🧪, beyond all these ways of enjoying this sometimes calm, sometimes rough, but always fickle Nature.

The true holistic intoxication of surf therapy comes when there is a clear reality of what surfing is, and when we can perfectly adjust our expectations to our true individual capacities and abilities.

This is why we often teach this approach to our students, especially those who have long been searching, in an unequal struggle, for that intoxicated feeling.

Everything starts again towards a new world “after surfing” by having at the base of the pyramid of respect their “I”.

When we have this “I” at the base of Good Surf Good Love’s Pyramid of Respect, then we discover that there is room for everyone to coexist and poetically enjoy their waves always, always, always without disturbing the Surf and the well being of others, who also always need another dose of the sea.

Do you want to know Good Surf Good Love Surf Academy and fill out the rest of the pyramid? Contact us.

Draw your pyramid and share it with us! 🤓

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Share a Wave!

Share a Wave!

🙄  Have you ever felt out of place in the place you chose to catch your waves?

👩‍🚀  The reason for that discomfort may be on the basis of your learning, or in your knowing – behavior!

ℹ️  What I am telling you today is one of many ways of looking at things, but in the teaching philosophy of Good Surf Good Love, the most correct one.

THE ORIGINAL CULTURE

Dear aspiring, practicing, new surfers…NO ONE who is really a surfer wants to share waves with you!

Sharing a wave is something very special that is done on an epic day between friends of many surfing trips, of whom you know very well the performance in surfing, regardless of whether or not they have higher levels.

A surfer uses the wave in all its time and space dimension! He goes well ahead, speeding up guessing a segment of that wave, to maneuver on a board that he guesses is going to crash but may soon want to turn back if the wave remains available/open for more surfing.

THE NEW CULTURE

⛔️  Usually what we see on the beach today, in a very “new school” culture, is a very nasty joke of both sharing the same wave, made by people who are likely to have little experience to understand that:

1️⃣  Waves are not shared. It is a basic rule of safety and ethics: ONE ON A Wave, period!

2️⃣  A reasonable surfer doesn’t just ride forward (whether you interpret that as riding straight up the beach or running straight through a wave, without ever doing a cut back looking for the pocket of the wave). So, to think that one can go forward, sideways, or backward makes no sense to us at all!

3️⃣  The sea indeed belongs to everyone, but the waves do not. Whoever caught them first doesn’t have to share them.

An important note to retain!

😤  Every time you get on someone else’s wave, even if you know them, please be aware that you may be putting them or their equipment at risk of an accident, or you may be disturbing their leisure and good mood no less. 🤬

Proper behavior:

🙏  If you want an exceptional way to share a wave, take a look at the picture! There is nothing more special than catching high waves with one or two friends, sharing those moments in everyone’s memory! 🙌

In this suggested format and please, no other: “Share a Wave”! 👌

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