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Using Your Paddle To Improve Your Front Side SUP Surfing
Perfecting The Bottom Turn
In this video we see the Zane Schweitzer almost always uses his paddle for the bottom turn. Just before he steps down into the bottom turn the first emphasis needs to be placed on our feet.
Just before we really make our turn and place the paddle in the water, we want our back foot to move towards the toe side of the board.
As we transition our back foot to the toe side rail and we start to learn into our paddle we now want to ensure our eyes are focusing in the right place. As with anything, we are going to go where our eyes are, so we need them up and looking down the line at the lip we are wanting to hit.
Now that we are in our turn we want to use our paddle as a pivot point, we want to think about placing the paddle so that we can turn around the paddle. As we place our paddle down we want to ensure our paddle is out way wide so we can really get our chest and body to be leaning out and over the water.
Perfecting The Top Turn
As we get ready to switch into our top turn we must once again focus first on our feet. As we setup we want to transition our back foot from the toe side back to the heel side of the board.
Our next point of focus is on the paddle plant. We want to reach forward towards the nose of the board and out to the side towards the lip of the wave when we plant our paddle for the top turn.
As we go through our turn we want to go from reach out towards the front of the board all the way back to reaching around the tail as we add more and more pressure onto the tail.
As we are at the top of our turn we want to ensure once again that our eyes are looking where we want to go, we want our eyes looking down over our shoulder on where we want to land.