So Ruben Lenton has an new video site – OnTheLoose.TV – with weekly diary/relality TV style shows. Good stuff and well worth a watch.
But he’s also producing some Tips and Trick videos, the first of which is one of his trade mark moves, the Mega Loop Front Roll. Its a great little video and I guess the bit that caught my eye was his mentioning “tensing your stomach muscles“. You don’t really hear people talking about this much but its a REALLY good point for this trick and variations on this for other tricks. I’d been thinking along this lines recently and have a post in the works, all about how focusing on muscles groups can really help you land certain tricks, but for now great going Ruben for bring this to peoples attention and looking forward to future vids…
If the answer is “yes”, is that because you learnt it in your initial lessons but have you even done it since? How many years have passed since you last tried?
The fact is modern kites fly so well that the need to self rescue is a distant thought for most people. In my first 2 years of kitesurfing I probably self rescued a dozen times, and probably had friends drag my kite in, whilst I swam, a handful more. Kites 6-7 years ago just weren’t that stable, they fell out of the sky all the time and getting them back out of the water could be herculean effort. Now take my girlfriend, Fi, she’s been kiting for two years and never had to self rescue. She can vaguely remember how to self rescue but honestly if she got put in the position where the wind died and she was 1/2 mile offshore she wouldn’t really know what to do. And that kind of freaks her out.
So yesterday we did some emergency drills on the beach. Walking out in the shallows, let the kite release on the safely line and then going through the procedure to recover the kite and how to then drag back in. Pretty standard stuff really and not what you would think as being alot of fun but Fi was beaming afterwards. The confidence that the 30 minutes of practice has given her will make her a better kitesurfer – she’ll not have the panic when the kite won’t re-launch; if the wind might start to lighten, she won’t be the first back on the beach; and she’ll be more confident to kite in new places where not everything is common place.
Landing the kite on your own is another drill we went through, once again something she should know, because at some point she will have to do it and chances are it won’t be a mile long stretch of silky soft sand with no one in sight. Yeah she needs to practice in a few other places and the unknown will always complicate matters but atleast she’ll now give it ago and be safer to herself and other beach users.
Yeah, we all want to learn the good stuff – maybe its riding upwind, our first jumps or riding toeside, it may even be you’re learn handlepasses – but can you self rescue? Can you land your kite safely on your own? Really sure you can?
Next time its not windy enough to kite or its too gusty, why not grab a more experienced friend and get them to give you a few tips, and in return you will be a better kiter, you’ll understand your kite a little bit more and that toeside riding or handlepasses might just get a little easier.
When I was in La Ventana, Baja, Mexico, earlier this month, Aaron Hadlow popped out to get some training in and we took the opportunity to film him for a couple of short sessions so he could playback and fine tune his performance – and he experimented with some new no-pop wakeboard tricks, so he was keen to see how they would look.
Anyway check his blog for a quicktime download of the video and to keep up with what the Champ is upto.
In the spirit of getting excited that things are warming up (even just a little in the UK), we’ve joined forces with UK Champ, Jo Wilson to get you into gear for the season with a little competition.
First prize (for UK residents) is a day’s coaching with Jo and we have DVD’s & T’s to give away too. Check it out here www.progression.me/summer
If you haven’t been out all winter, get your gear out of the loft / garage / bedroom, dust it down, check it all still works and then tune into our You Tube pages to pick up on where you left off last summer. There’s loads of content on there, for whatever level you’re at!!
I’m currently away from the office on a bit of a working holiday, and this has given me the opportunity to write some scripts, play around with some ideas for new Progression projects and test our a new video camera! Nothing too fancy on the camera front, I’d loved to have bought my XH A1 with me but its too big and I just don’t have room for it. So I decide to try out a small Canon solid state handycam – I found an HF100 for £500 and the results have been pretty good. I’ll post some more about the camera later but I wanted to mention it as its relevent to the rest of the post.
So today I filmed my girlfirend Fi kitesurfing. She’s at that intermediate stage, learning to jump, perfecting her toeside riding and getting smooth carving turns. Anyway, I filmed her for half an hour trying everything in both directions and then we watched it back over lunch. Now I spotted a few things as I was filming but the interesting thing was I held back saying anything until after we watched the video. Now some of the more technical stuff like getting her jumping timing spot on, needed some discussion but the interest part was with riding toeside. Watch this video of her below.
She spotted her mistake straight away, with no prompting from me. As soon as she watched it she said “Why do I keep taking my hand off the bar, I slow down everytime, I didn’t even really think that I did that”.
Maybe its time you get out there, grab a friend or partner to film you and see what you look like? Yeah, they’ll be loads of “oh my god I look crap or I though I was jumping so high!” but at least you now know and can get out there and try and get a bit better a bit quicker.
And why did I mention the new camera earlier? Well, it was to show you don’t need some fancy camera to get some footage that will show you want you are doing wrong and right. My tripod over here is shockly bad but I work around that, the camera isn’t great at everything (the zoom is way to short) but you can work around those limitations too. Just get out there and try it out and see how it works out.
Whatever level you are at, seeing yourself making mistake is vital to getting the most from any sport. Tomorrow Fi is gonna film me so I can look at horror at how bad I have become – and get better! This is what Progression is all about, using video to help you understand what you need to do to get better and enjoy the sport even more.
So Ruben Lenton has an new video site – OnTheLoose.TV – with weekly diary/relality TV style shows. Good stuff and well worth a watch.
When I was in La Ventana, Baja, Mexico, earlier this month, Aaron Hadlow popped out to get some training in and we took the opportunity to film him for a couple of short sessions so he could playback and fine tune his performance – and he experimented with some new no-pop wakeboard tricks, so he was keen to see how they would look.