This one simple framework can help improve your longboarding.
As you progress and start to learn cross-stepping and making your way up to the nose you will find that your boards position on the wave is critical to the success of your waves.
Sometimes you will feel like your board is perfectly balanced and in trim on the way, other times you will feel disconnected and out of position on your board.
It can often feel like you're not ever in the right part of the wave to do the manoeuvres you want.
This is where the ‘rule of thirds’ comes into play.
The rule of thirds is the idea that you need to position yourself at different sections of your board, on different parts of the wave.
At the bottom of the wave, you should be on the tail of your board.
At the middle of the wave, you should in the middle of your board.
Finally, at the top of the wave, you should be at the nose of your board.
Now, why is this?
Well, let’s think about it…
At the bottom of the wave, you have very little potential speed, so you need to return back to the power source at the top of the wave.
To do this, we’ll need to be at the tail of our board, driving the board upwards back into the power zone.
From there, we can step to the middle of the board so we can put our board into trim.
If we time it well, we can keep our board lifting up through to the top of the wave, the most critical section, and take two steps to the nose.
At the nose, the board is likely to start moving down the face and we reverse the process - back to the middle, back to the tail, draw out a cutback and start again.
Watch this LogRap edit of Devon Howard to see this in action:
To spend more time nose-riding, you need to put your board in the most critical part of the wave, and to do that you need to match your position on the board with your position on the wave.
The key element to remember is your board needs to be high up on the wave for you to make those last two steps to the nose.
Even in small waves, the Rule of Thirds still applies, even if it’s more nuanced, it’s a great mindset and framework to remember.
Here’s a clip of Hunter (@hunterj.shredda) showing us how it’s done in smaller waves.
This takes weeks, months and years to master but try it out in your next session.
Try to focus on your positioning, initially with what the section dictates (tail, middle, tail, middle, nose) or whatever the wave is telling you.
From there, you will slowly be able to manipulate your board to be drifting upwards off your take-off to put those toes over the nose consistently.
Happy gliding,
Michael from modest fins
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We hope you found this useful - if you have any thoughts, questions, comments or feedback about this topic - reach out and let us know on Instagram @modestfins.
