A new facility in Southern California makes you and Brett Simpson better surfers.
There is, in Costa Mesa, California, a 2500 foot warehouse filled with all manner of heavy rope, heavy ball, stretchy band and padded floor. The name on the outside reads Extreme Athletics and, though I’ve never been inside, I’m certain it is also there on the wall.
What makes Extreme Athletics different from all varietals of CrossFit X-Fit t-Fit is that it is surf specific training. A whole gym! Dedicated to the shred! First opened in 2012 by a kinesiologist and an exercise scientist, the whole mission was/is to help surfers surf better by focusing on what surfers actually do.
“It’s not traditional training, we put a different spin on it. We take the mechanics of how the body works and [use] specific exercises that a surfer needs to get results…” Paul Norris, the exercise scientist, tells Sports Illustrated. “If you watch a lot of videos of NFL athletes, they’re doing a lot of clean and jerks and really heavy Olympic lifting because they want to be explosive. Surfers don’t need to be big and bulky and don’t need to carry a ton of mass, but they still need to have that power and agility.”
Pros (Brett Simpson is a client!) and more casual surfers both receive similar training, apparently, focusing on the legs and agility but the pros get a more tailored experience depending on what sort of wave they’ll be making surf to.
In Huntington Beach, for example, during the US Open of Surfing “… the waves are chopped up and not smooth and the wave will reform so they can do a few more turns on the inside,” Norris says. “So we’ll focus on leg endurance so they can keep pumping on the wave on the inside.”
Let us please, now, be honest with each other. Are you the sort that tells people, “The best training you can do for surfing is to go surfing…”? Do you roll your eyes at the thought of going to a gym and doing surf exercises? Do you even hate the gym altogether and think it is completely anathema to the surf life?
Would you surf train if it was guaranteed to make you surf better? Do you only hate the gym because people who used gyms beat you up in high school? Does the smell of sweat on padded floors and the sound of Metallica rush you back to an uncomfortable childhood place?
So many questions, but important I feel to arrive at our root catechism. Is surfing a sport? Let’s once and for all answer!
Surfing is a sport… but is also an art form. Training for surfing needs to compliment the specific athleticism needed to express oneself on a wave, train for surfing the way martial artists and dancers train.
I tried to set up those cones i stole from roadworks down the road with a bit of conduit i stole from a building site down the road but they just wouldn’t stand up because i didn’t have a gym. so i went and set them up in a gym but i couldn’t jump over them because i don’t have a coach. since realising this i haven’t been able to make a takeoff.
Surfing is a lot of things, as well as being a sport.
Either way…..would it stop you?
Or you could just go surfing…
Maybe it’s only going back on if it’s on hold. Once it gets called off. no going back for the day cause some guys make other plans. Like going to the gym
Or playing golf. I’m so fucking bored of hearing about surfers golfing exploits on lay days.
Yes! they can. But it’s never happened, because everyone goes home except for KP who goes for a surf.
Is surfing a sport? Only for a very few. Depends on the definition you use but starting with the Oxford: “An activity involving physical exertion and skill in which an individual or team competes against another or others for entertainment.”
Like other outdoor pursuits most want nothing to do with any notion of what a sport means.
Surfing’s blatantly a sport. Just like hunting, climbing, skiing, and numerous other crazy outdoor pursuits. The issue is with our cramped modern idea of “sport”…and there’s nothing more cramped than a fucken gym.
Yeah,but nah and it’s very far from self-evident. And your examples are of dubious merit. Hunting as a sport? Most I know do it as a way to secure a feed for their family, ala the ancient meaning. There is a sporting side of hunting and they call it trophy hunting.
Fishing is very much the same and pretty much the closest analogy to surfing. Both rely on a scarce natural resource and have long learning curves ……and there is a competitive element that a tiny percentage of people take part in. Again, fishing is smart enough to distinguish that different part of the activity and calls it Sportsfishing.
To distinguish between surfing, as the vast majority of recreational surfers do it and the “Sport” of surfing we call it competitive surfing or Pro surfing if people are good enough to get paid for it.
I went down the beach this morning after dropping the kids to school. There was a little shorey running so I bodysurfed a few waves and it was a little better than it looked so I went and got a board and rode a few waves. No-one saw me, no-one timed me or gave a fuck what i was doing, and nor did I.There was no aim, no goal, no-one to beat, no rules, no competitors. Is that a sport?
I think not, more just a dabbling in a lifetime recreational pursuit that becomes a way of being in the world if you stick with it long enough.
Well Shearer you know I have a different view of the term to you. Sport to me is something physical that you do just for the hell of it, basically. The fact that a lot of great sports evolved out of things people once absolutely HAD to do to survive only strengthens the definition, once you do it because you WANT to. Sure it can have a competitive element but it’s not restricted to that at all. A surfer can go in a heat one day, then spend the next two weeks just going surfing for kicks, or to try a new board, or whatever; the experiences are interwoven. This view is probably more to do with who I am than anything; almost every time I enter the water it’s with some sense of mission, however thin that sense may be. (Sometimes it is rapacious and crazy! Never is it fucken artistic.) That sense of wanting to do something physical and a bit primitive helps define it as a sport for me.
I know we are quibbling over semantics here but doesn’t your reply fit it into the “well he would say that wouldn’t he category?’ I mean you’ve been surrounded and up to your neck in competitive surfing, surfing as sport, the ocean as sporting arena your whole life. From having a brother as world champ, being Aus Champion, the current ultra-clubbie stuff, the Molokai paddle etc etc. Hasn’t the ocean been an arena for your ultra-competitiveness your whole life……and couldn’t it be possible that that is very much the exception rather than the rule?
It’s telling you use a theoretical pro surfer as an example….isn’t their experience of surfing as a concept almost totally remote from the average work a day surfer whose sense of “mission” extends to nothing more than trying to ride a few waves for the enjoyment of it before work, on the weekend etc etc. Or even not ride a wave, maybe just head down on the lunchbreak and spend an hour looking at it. Would a golfer go spend an hour just standing there looking at the course? A tennis player? They seem qualitatively very different things to me.
With this resting on nothing more than personal definition the only statistic we have to rely on is self identification. You could guess a hundred percent of footy players, tennis players, golfers etc etc would identify as playing a sport. There’s no controversy there.
In Australia the number involved in boardriding clubs is about ten percent of the surfing population. They are people involved and likely to identify as being involved in a sport. This is an inference but I’d be surprised if too many of the other 90% identified as playing a sport when they surfed.
Well I wasn’t using a theoretical pro surfer, just any surfer who might surf in a heat at your local LeBa board riders club contest for example. People who you would know are capable of living surfing on many different levels. But let that be. Surfing’s been a shit load of different things to me aside from competition, I feel fully in tune with it as pure enjoyment too. I even remember writing a short piece for a mag once about sitting watching a big swell hit the Sydney coast in a storm, being soaked to the skin, and how I couldn’t imagine sitting there in the rain gazing at a tennis court…somewhat of a weird synchronicity there. I guess what I am trying to say here is that none of that rules it out as a sport to me.
Randy Rarick made essentially the same point in Step Into Liquid when he asked, “How many people do you know who go and gaze at the tennis court?” It never ceases to amaze me how many pros go looking for somewhere else to surf once they’re knocked out of a comp or the comp is finished for the day. How often does that occur in other sports?
Marketing 101. Same exercises, different pitch.
Gyms suck because your comparing it with surfing, not some lame ass sport. Let’s see, I can go paddle around with dolphins, turtles, and the hottest women on the planet, or I can sit inside in a warehouse in some inland hellhole in Orange County…
I’ve never seen a black woman surfing.
Surfing and Darts – vying to be the sport of Kings! Is Phil Taylor a greater ‘athlete’ than Kelly Slater? Are Brett Simpson’s results really a good advertisement for this gym?