SB gets mega manoeuvrable

With deep winter on its way Simon Bornhoft looks at a fun, dynamic, body warming windsurfing exercise with great added value. Photos: Karen Bornhoft / WindWise

Considering the time of year I’ve decided to give you a fun, easy, rigorous winter warming exercise that will instantly improve your manoeuvrability, help your gybes and most definitely assist in riding swell or waves. Even if you’re at a non-planing improver / intermediate level you can still do this exercise – the only difference is that you can’t lean the body so acutely into the turns as you have less inertia and support from the rig. As ever, we’re going to break the move down into component parts and focus on proven methods that develop the muscle memory to MAKE YOUR MOVE. Accentuate and repeat each session, rather than just blast up and down all day. Finally, close observers will notice that the first three sessions link into previous Make Your Move features, such is the value and importance of these WindWise skills.

Session 1: Hook Out & Hold On

Session 2: Switch-Stance

Session 3: Clew-First Beachstart

Session 4: Extreme Flat Water Waveriding

Session 5: Strap-to-Strap Gybing

Click here to read WindWise 270 in full…

Simon Bornhoft makes a swift exit

As winter tightens its grip we all want to spend what time we can blasting over the cooler water rather than submersed in it. Simon Bornhoft offers some crucial skills and drills to ensure speedier waterstarts. Photos: Karen Bornhoft / WindWise

SCENARIO 1: Falling In Mid-Gybe

A common dismount is when body and rig fall into the turn mid-gybe (usually due to not leaning the rig out of the turn enough to counterbalance). A good sailor will do all they can to hold on to the boom and then pop back up onto the board and sail away clew-first. If you want to achieve this, get brilliant at clew-first beachstarts!

SCENARIO 2: Facing the Wrong Way?

How many times is the kit set up just right, but you want to go back in the opposite direction? Being able to spin board and rig round without dropping the sail saves time, exhausting swimming and the possible impact of oncoming waves. Being able to do a waterstart gybe is one of the most time-saving (and energy-economic) skills you can learn.

Click here to read WindWise 269 in full…

Duck-gybe with SB

Can’t gybe? Don’t worry, you stand a very decent chance of duck-gybing! Simon Bornhoft breaks down this seemingly elusive ‘trick’ to make it achievable – regardless of your level. Photos: Karen Bornhoft / WindWise

If you had two cloned intermediates and one focused just on gybing and the other just on duck-gybing, the odds are that the duck-gyber would learn their move the quickest and be most likely to plane out too. Despite limiting beliefs, my tests have proved that duck-gybing can actually be easier to learn than gybing. In fact, when someone comes on a course and dedicates decent time to light wind skills and drills and then makes 40-50 duck-gybe attempts in planing winds, the success rate is very high. I’m not talking about advanced sailors, either. If you can blast in the straps you can duck-gybe! Here’s how…

Skills & Drills

Session 1: Sail 180s.

Session 2: Switch-stance.

Session 3: Non-planing duck-gybe – involving our ‘upwind-downwinder’, ‘sail 180s’ & ‘switch-stance’ skills and drills.

Session 4: MAKE YOUR MOVE – the fully planing duck-gybe!

Key Principles

Exaggerate and commit to our WindWise Principles, adding finer detail to speed up MAKING YOUR MOVE!

Vision: Look forward and through the turn to where you want to go.

Trim: Adopt a wide foot spread to steer and lever the board.

Opposition: Rig moves one way, you move in the opposite direction (and vice versa).

Power: Wide arm spread, pulling down on the boom before and after ‘ducking’.

Stance: Going and out of the turn, adopt a super-7 ‘drop-&-push’ stance with flexed back leg and extended front leg.

Build your skills, confidence and neuromuscular propriaception (muscle memory) by trying the following sessions on land first then using a large enough board to uphaul with a sub 6.0m rig on the water.

Click here to read WindWise 268 in full…

Simon Bornhoft – gybing, part 2

Simon Bornhoft strongly suggests working on these skill and move enhancing drills, which will help you MAKE YOUR MOVE while having a great time on the water! Photos: Karen Bornhoft / WindWise

Hopefully you’ve had time to digest and try some of the skills and drills from last month’s feature. As we’re now heading into winter I thought we’d offer some higher wind action that not only guarantees gybe improvement, but also boosts your overall technique.

Unhook & Hold On simulates setting up for moves, jumps, gybes and duck-gybes.

Flat Water Waveriding develops blasting confidence, steering, all gybes, and waveriding.

Finally, the Rig Rotator is for all gybes, helicopter tacks and any other time you rotate a rig. So break that plateau with these fun run-by-run suggestions – all made, as ever, one accentuated point at a time!

Skills & Drills

Session 1 – Unhook & Hold On

Session 2 – Flat Water Waveriding

Session 3 – Rig Rotator

Session 4 – MAKE YOUR MOVE!

Click here to read WindWise 267 in full…

SB Gybes...

Simon Bornhoft breaks key transitions down into component parts to dramatically speed up the understanding, training time and probability of actually MAKING YOUR MOVES! Photos: Karen Bornhoft / WindWise

In windsurfing we talk in terms of weeks, months or years trying to learn something, but in fact it’s so often only seconds spent on the important part of our objectives.

As you might know, my coaching ethos is to break windsurfing down into achievable, transferable multi-level skills that link together to increase the prospects of actually learning something. Out of the many thousands I’ve coached, those who mix their precious sailing time with skills training always make the quickest progress. So this is how you actually learn something! Rather than just gybing and practicing common mistakes, genuinely try these WindWise skills and drills and I can guarantee you’ll make your moves!

Who’s it for?

First time or frustrated veteran gybers in non-planing and planing situations on any volume board. So get out there and go through the run-by–run suggestions, one accentuated point at a time!

Skills & Drills

Session 1 – Upwind-Downwinders

Session 2 – Shift-&-Switching

Session 3 – Clew-First Beachstart

Session 4 – MAKE YOUR MOVE!

Click here to read WindWise 266 in full…

Simon Bornhoft flips the rig...

Simon Bornhoft looks at a very common counterintuitive moment that affects us every time we rotate our rigs at the end of a transition.

In the early days of space travel it was assumed that elongated streamlined shapes would offer the best possible chance of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere safely. Counterintuitively, however, the opposite would appear to be true. NASA’s testing, thankfully, discovered that ‘wider blunt shaped capsules’ provided more effective heat shields when returning back to Earth. NASA’s counterintuitive discovery definitely saved lives, whereas these WindWise suggestions will simply help you avoid doing completely the wrong actions on the water.

Us humans aren’t great at dealing with counterintuitive sporting moments. When learning to ski students don’t initially take to the idea of leaning forward when speeding down a steep slope – they ‘instinctively’ lean (incorrectly) back. It’s a sore backside that encourages them to overcome this counterintuitive action. With windsurfing, much of what we do on a board is fairly clear to see, but there are definitely irregular counterintuitive moments that can be so frustrating and challenging. It’s often during these moments that ‘bad habits’, plateaus, or our dismounts occur.

As your humble coach I’m going to highlight one regular counterintuitive moment that relates to all levels of gybes, helicopter tacks, and any time a rig is rotated. It also involves two of our key windsurfing principles: vision and opposition.

Click here to read WindWise 262 in full…

Jem bottom turns

In this instalment of his comprehensive series examining every aspect of wavesailing, Jem Hall has a bit of a recap and proffers some tips on bottom and top turns.

Summer is almost over and we are now licking our lips in anticipation of what might be on offer this autumn. Over the last few issues I have covered some basics in the hope of inspiring you to perform simple moves with consistency and efficiency, and we will now look at how you can continue to improve and polish your waveriding skills. This will act as a kind of half-term report, so I do urge you to look back at relevant articles – all available on www.boards.co.uk

Now, when I said ‘tips’, this doesn’t mean that I’ll be going on and on about how to do this and how to do that, but I will empower you to take charge of your own learning, and I do this by asking questions. I have presented many simple tips including gear setup, sailing fundamentals, how to get out, how to ride and so on – but are you actually putting these into practise? Are you embracing the change? Are you coming out of your comfort zone and being comfortable with being uncomfortable? And you know what I am going to say here… In order for things to change you must change!

When I’m coaching I help people to keep improving on their return from my clinics, and this is done by making them better self-coaches and asking them lots of questions so they can find the answers. Firstly, they must be honest about where they are at, and be able to self-analyse, diagnose and then set targets.

Click here to read Jem’s Wannabe 245 article in full…

Better gybes make better waveriders – fact!

In this instalment of his comprehensive series examining every aspect of wavesailing, Jem Hall looks at gybing, the positioning thereof, and the crossover benefits towards competent riding…

Throughout this series I have been offering simple tips and drills for you to take on and practise. I have also empowered you to be the master of your own improvement, so if you have done these drills and heeded my words then you’ll be jumping higher and definitely riding sweeter. Now we’re moving into off-peak wave season it’s time to get our gybing sorted so we’re ready to improve our riding when conditions and, of course, time permit.

Potential clients often approach me and ask what’s the best way for them to become better wave riders and wavesailors. They are expecting me to say “Come on a wave clinic mate”, which I do to some of them – but only after I’ve assessed their basic fundamentals. My main recommendation is always to get the basics done well. Yep, good old early planing and stance. And to get really proficient at step gybing and tacking.

Through my coaching and observation of ALL sailors I’ve seen that the better gybers make the better riders. Simply put, how you gybe is how you ride. If you hug the rig like your bedclothes on a cold night and stand up like a tin soldier when you gybe, well then, here’s a free tip: your waveriding will suck big time! Riders who gybe smoothly and with speed are more likely to get more committed in the bottom turn and arrive at the lip with more speed. They will also have the ability to get more vertical (dude).

This never struck me so much as during a spring clinic in Ireland in May ’07. We had some mellow down-the-line days that were interspersed with bump-and-jump sessions due to the wind being there but the waves having a rest. The whole group’s riding transformed as their gybing improved, both through their hard work and an inevitable amount of my deconstruction and reconstruction.

Building wavesailors is my job, and with this in mind I do steering drills with all levels from beginners to winners (good phrase, that). These drills free up the hands and get the head and hips moving, nay, even dancing. Simon Bornhoft has written oodles of great articles on how to get your gybing better, so please do check those out in combination with an overview of the game plan for gybing right here…

Click here to read Jem’s Wannabe 243 article in full…