Are You Balanced?

Stand On One Leg And Hop Around – Single Leg Balance

elephant doing balance on ball

You surf, so you can obviously balance and maintain your equilibrium, but how efficient are you really? Can you stand strong on a single leg? How about producing force in a rotational movement while standing on one leg? Are you a balanced surfer?

Can you produce strong hip contractions, or stabilize your ankle and knee properly? These are all highly relevant questions for you as a surfer, and all can exemplify holes that are depleting your optimal abilities and sucking life out of your performance.

Improving balance on a single leg is essential, for not only the simple act of balancing, but also improving your muscle’s ability to stabilize the ankle, knee, and hip properly.

Stabilizing those joints is critical in preventing injury to them, and allowing strength from your core, hips, and torso to flow down into the board and make it move how you’d like it to.

I’ve had people say that single leg work is isolation, and that working in isolation is useless for the surfer, as our sport requires full body motion constantly. I agree that isolation isn’t necessary, unless rehabbing an injury, but single leg work is far from isolation.

Work on any of these exercises shown in the video, and tell me that it’s isolation. Hell no it’s not. Balancing on a single leg and performing movments requires just about every damn muscle in your body to be working, and working hard! But more importantly, think of yourself on a surfboard, and in the process of surfing.

Your legs, while both in contact with the board, are often moving independently of each other, one releasing pressure, while the other producing downward force, maybe through the toes, or the heel, or any combination of the above.

Think of force absorption of landing an air.

Your not necessarily landing on a smooth surface, so while one leg is landing in flat water, the other could be landing on a soft part of whitewash foam 10 inches higher in elevation, which demands completely different force absorptions and reactions of the foot, ankle, knee, and hip.

So do you see how your legs, while both on the board, have really different demands placed upon them, whether turning, pumping down the line, or just moving over a bumpy wave face…It’s all completely dynamic!

So you need to train on a single leg to absorb force, produce power, stabilize your joints. And just get more efficient at balancing. This is easy stuff to improve, it just takes some decent exercises…And lucky for all you folks, I’m giving them to you!

So, start using these to improve your single leg balance, and in the coming days, I’ll throw up some exercises to really start working on single leg strength…. they suck in an awesome way. Get to work…. one leg, and hop around. Become a balanced surfer.