The best exercise for surfing is surfing. Surfing is a skill, training for surfing is to improve your physical condition so you can practice the skill of surfing more effectively. Strength and fitness training cannot help you to improve your skill level in any sport. What smart training can do is improve your strength, fitness, endurance, power, speed, agility, flexibility, general athleticism, body awareness, movement efficiency, etc. Therefore allowing you to practice your skill more effectively.

We do however try to keep the movement as close to the sport as possible. i.e. it is no use doing bench press to improve your surfing. However doing push ups can help your pop ups. Whilst bench press is working on a lot of the same muscles you use to pop up on a surfboard. It is also teaching your body ‘bench press’ or pushing into a bench. A push up is about as close as we can get to a pop up on dry land and therefore a better choice of exercise. See pop up pt1.

Some physical atributes of top surfers: Lean and athletic – not muscular. Flexible and supple, agile, ability to control their own body weight very well and recover from all sorts of positions – strength to bodyweight ratio.

So this website is dedicated to helping surfers choose the best exercises to improve there strength and fitness etc. relative to surfing.