FORUM : PUMPING IN DOCK START !!!

Sylvain wants to progress with his pumping. He shares a video on the Forum showing him in action and asks for some advices to improve his technique: “Hi everyone!! I would really like to progress in pumping especially by saving myself from needless effort. I’m attaching a small video, I need some tips to improve my movement. Basically I can do 200 or 250 m max but after my back leg quadriceps tetanizes !!! I found a little trick that I apply from time to time: once at the top, I stop the movement to go down quietly, it helps me to hold a little longer … But it’s not enough. Anyway! Am I not flying high enough on the Mast? Don’t I put enough support forward? Don’t I lighten up enough with my arms? Is my back foot not far enough forward in relation to the Mast? Did I put on too much weight during the winter ?? In short, if you see things that are not going well and that will help me to go and connect even more waves when the confinement is over, I’m a taker !!! Thanks to you.” Here’s L’Ours answer: “Hello, Several minor things : 1/ What you’re doing is already great. Not many people on earth know how to do that. 2/ Your concern to go further is linked to a lack of dynamics, and I can explain: In detail, you see a lot of parasitic movements in the upper body. This means that you apply a significant part of your effort to counter errors of support, alignment, or timing. Let’s say it’s 30%. If you solve the causes of these parasitic movements, you will gain 30% more distance, which is enormous. All in all, we can see your foil evolving in a rather bucked up manner. This is a sign that you are at the stage before the ultimate stage of pumping control : you’re thinking more about putting your Board back up to lighten it than putting pressure on it to accelerate. And that’s the key. In any case you’ll have to pull your Foil up and put your weight on it when you go down. That’s the base and you’re going to do that. But the key is to put enormous pressure on the Foil to make it generate what we call a resource in the airplane: the harder I press on my Foil, the more it will send this force back to me in the opposite direction, upwards. It goes without saying that you can’t press hard and for long. When you take your breaks in the air, you don’t press hard, but you press for a long time. This is a good technique for resting, but not the solution. You should therefore concentrate the pressure on the shortest and most intense input possible. To reach this concentration of your strength, you must have adjusted the concern of parasitic movements. Then you have to aim for the exact moment of the descent where you will give it all in a fraction of a second. When you get to that point, you see that not only will your Foil respond by wanting to come up harder, but you also see an acceleration. This generates speed and therefore lift. As a result, the amplitude of your inputs can be reduced and you end up moving your Foil vertically by only a few centimeters instead of a few decimeters. As your Foil will accelerate and send back stronger, you will have to move your mass in front of your Foil: bringing your torso in front of your feet increases the acceleration by projecting your body forward. But this is less relaxing than standing upright.

As you can see, it’s all about compromise. And that’s why the pros are going to be more efficient pumping on thin, small, fast Foils. They don’t use their Foil in their low-speed lift. They’re all about speed and intensity. You see them struggling to get started, but then they’re rockets. So you have to get out of the “up-down” scheme and into a world of concentrated inputs to move faster. Once you’ve got the feeling in your feet, you can go to the ultimate : take your time between two inputs ultra concentrated. It is then to feel the minimum speed of efficiency of your input. You give it, you let it slide, you give it, you let slide etc. … Finally, pumping a Foil is also a story of strategy. On the flat the strategy comes down to being in mega physical condition or ultra technical, and therefore to oscillate between the two to hold. In the waves it is also that, but to combine with the speed of movement of the waves.