Always reading posts where surfers say they like to drive off their front foot and so on.
I reckon it’s actually a misnomer.
My theory is that the surfers who like to say this are simply ones who are not trying to do critical manouvres in the pocket.
These surfers will feel safer out on a green face of the wave.
Out on an open face the wall isn’t as steep and you don’t have to be reacting as quickly.
I’ve come to this conclusion by looking at my own surfing as of late.
Getting older and don’t have the reaction time to be trying to do constant snaps in the pocket like I used to.
If you’re in the pocket doing snaps, reos, tail slides and whatever you’ll be pivoting off your back foot constantly.
So surfers who are “front footed” are the ones that aren’t constantly pivoting off their back foot. They are just applying less pressure with their back foot and probably standing further forward on their board.
if you're doing a pivoting turn surely you're not driving?
for me, reos, tailslides etc arent driving maneovers, they are manovers done with spped to burn. any extra speed from a reo comes from the force of the wave or gravity. I'd concur its hard to do these with a heavy front foot weighting.
driving manuovers like bottom turns and carves are more centrally balanced with weighting dependant on the wave and where you want to go.
when it comes to fast walls when you need to shift as fast and are weaving/pumping to gnereate speed I can't see anything contentionus about some poeple using their front foot and some people using their back foot. IT depends on the waves they've grown up surfing and the boards theyve used.
There are some reasons why many people surf a lot better on a quad than a thruster and why some surfers prefer twins and singles over boards with rail fins and why most of those single and twins have fairly narrow tails relative to their noses. Biolos and others may consider Slater to have a “weak back foot”, but what I see him doing is shifting his weight back and forth.
Maybe “Front Footed” is a misnomer. Perhaps “Centrally Weighted”? But what about barrels? That is by definition a (deep) pocket maneuver, and weight can certainly be front footed…
Maybe it should be stated as, "predominantly front footed". My decks always have more pressure dings under my front foot. Where I end up surfing tends to be fast and walled up when it's on. You always have to adjust for the conditions and if I surfed the same on a mushy slow wave I'd simply outrun the thing.
Maybe it should be stated as, "predominantly front footed". My decks always have more pressure dings under my front foot. Where I end up surfing tends to be fast and walled up when it's on. You always have to adjust for the conditions and if I surfed the same on a mushy slow wave I'd simply outrun the thing.
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Agreed- pic is not of me, but I think the front foot is the "throttle" on this board and in this situation:
Tuberiding (Tomson) will definitely have skilled surfers move forward to adjust their weight distribution.
And as you and others are saying there is a mix.
My contention is with people claiming to be front footed surfers.
I reckon if you take a look at them they are simply standing too far forward on the board from habit/poor technique.
Boards with wide noses (ie fish) will allow the surfer to stand well forward and perpetuate the belief that the front foot is driving their turns…hmmm…
There are design elements that can allow this to work (by digging the forward rail in and allowing the back end to follow and/or come around it, by adding more rocker, and/or release), but a lot of people aren’t conscious that the habit of standing too far forward of the fins will dictate those design elements, and dictate what maneuvers are possible and which ones are damn near impossible from up there.
some of us got caught in that period where tear drop shape of your board put most of the thickness and width in the upper half of the board and the tail was just a pulled in spike of a pin or rounded pin. I think they somehow got named Parrish beak noses or brewer beak noses. Some times when you stepped back on your tail it was narrower than the length your foot which I guess you could blame BK for back then. But then he was riding 16" wide red rockets in 15 foot sunset at the time.
The style back then was an angle drop or a long bottom turn and then just up to the nose and pump with your feet close togethor down the wall until you could make a big sweeping turn down the face and back up again. That's why guys with those bow legged stances ripped like Terry F and Hakman. Just watch the movies from back then and you'll see.
That's why some of us dinosaurs who never grew out of that era still have problems with the new fangled world of manuver surfing and these new fangled tri-fin boards because we drew different lines with our beak nose pin and rounded pins. Personally I'm still having trouble mastering this pivot/slash business off the tail versus pumping down the line and making a big roundy burying half your board underwater while trying to put out a house fire with the spray.
If you look at the really really old guys like when Rabbit Kekai was a kid, they surfed in a parallel stance both feet togethor facing forward kind of like buffalo's $50K contest stance or the tiki stance. If you remove the fins from your board and surf it I'll think you'll see how the balance point changes and what it's like to turn off the outline of your board versus just off the fins.
I guess it's just a way of saying that most of it has to do with changes in board design versus anything else.
Pivoting an early 1970's beak nose single fin pintail off the tail wasn't going to do anything except create a stall for you.
