Slacklining Helps You Think Faster: Wanna Surf Well - Think Fast.

Aloha Tribe,

Some of you may by now be getting into slacklining and bringing it to your surfing experience. If so, awesome. You see, by tightrope walking, tightwire walking, slacklining, slack rope walking, and loose rope walking, you are increasing the speed with which you can sense what is happening to your body, specifically, as it relates to balance.

This is extremely important to the surfer because in order to surf great, you need to be able to sense what is happening with your balance very quickly. The thing is, with surfing, it's not uncommon to have as much as 20 minutes or more between rides. Personally, I love the way Darrick Doerner is training me, the second my ride ends, DD has me paddle out of the path of other surfers as fast as I can by heading to the side of where everyone is surfing. Then, as soon as I am out of the way, I paddle my fastest to catch the next wave. Now granted, the reason this worked for us was because there was not a traditional lineup with lots of surfers waiting their turn, thus, there was no reason not to hustle. As such, one can catch a lot of rides. The most I got, in roughly an hour and a half or so session, was 25 rides. While I would have loved that to be even higher, at least it was roughly a ride every 8 minutes or so. In some places, like Sunset Beach on the North Shore, sometimes, one was lucky to get 3 or 4  rides for the day.

And, since a ride typically doesn't last that long, maybe an average of 8 to 10 seconds, that's not a whole lot of training time. On the other hand, on a slackline or similar rope, if you fall off, you simply step right back on. Thus, you can get a lot of balance training in, compared to surfing. This extreme amount of balance training leads to greater balance awareness, which, yields quicker balance thinking.

Here's how it works. When you're on a tightrope, it takes extreme concentration to not fall. And as such, you learn to eventually sense extremely small shifts in your balance, the more you do it. The sooner you can determine if your balance is shifting out of whack, the easier and smoother it is to maintain balance.

The thing is, what you really need to do is to learn to train yourself to perform the best that you can. If you simply walk a line or surf for that matter, mindlessly, even with years of experience, you really won't progess far. On the other hand, if you think about what you're doing, train specific exercises to help you, work on the worst things you do first until you become good at it, then work on the next worse thing, in no time at all you'll find your skills exploding.

Bodaciously Stoked,

Lily of the Valley