Tips for Numb Feet & Moving on Your Board

Hi, I'm Robert Stehlik with Blue Planet Surf. I wanted to talk a little bit about moving around on the board.

A lot of times, beginners will really feel their feet basically hurting after their first day of stand-up paddling. And a lot of times it's because if you're struggling with the balance, you tend to grip your board with your toes, so it's like you're grabbing the board with your toes.

It's important to just think about that and remember to relax your toes, kind of wiggle your toes a little bit. And then also shift your weight from front to back a little bit. That'll keep the blood flowing in your feet, keep your toes relaxed, and it'll keep you from having numb feet or hurting feet. And that's a really common thing that happens to first-time paddlers. So wiggling your toes, moving back and forth, is a good way to keep your blood flow going in your feet.

So and then if you have to move your weight forward or backward, which you have to do when you're catching a wave basically and also in other situations where you want to move around a little bit to make sure your trim is correct, what you want to avoid is unweighing your feet. Like if you tried to walk like this, my board rocks back and forth.

So what you want to do is basically unweigh both feet at the same time and then kind of do little jumps. If you make little jumps, you can move forward and backward without rocking the board. Also even if you don't move both feet, you'd still want to unweigh both feet. You bend your knees and unweigh both feet, even if you're just moving one of the feet. You just want to avoid rocking the board when you're moving around.

So and if you're surfing, you want to be able to move your weight back and forth pretty quickly. So the best way to do that is to get your weight over the center line of the board by getting into the surf stance. So you jump into the surf stance and then from this position, I can easily move my weight back or forward. [I'm wearing the microphone right now so I don't want to fall in.] But you can see I can shift my weight back and forth without rocking the board side to side.

So in the surf stance, you're able to move the feet back and forth. It's good for when you're doing down-winders or catching a wave. You want to be able to move your feet back when the wave gets steeper and then move it forward again as the wave flattens out or slows down a little bit. So jump into the surf stance, move back, move forward. That's how you can move your weight forward and backward by just keeping it on the center line of the board.

All right, that's another little tip from Blue Planet Surf. Aloha. See you on the water.