9 ways skating will improve your surfing with Bryce Young

Interview by Lucas Townsend 

1. Flow
Skating teaches you how to keep your flow. In skating, if you lose your flow, then you also lose all your speed.

2. Consistency
Skating is the perfect partner for surfing, because when the ocean’s flat, you can go skate and keep working on things you want to take to the ocean. Anything that keeps you in the rhythm of being on a board is going to help, too.

3. Style  
Skating helps to develop your individual style, which you can take to a bowl on a wave or cement.

4. Fitness
Skating keeps you super fit. You’d be surprised. Skating transition in particular can actually be a pretty good workout, and definitely gets the heart rate up. Which is always a good thing, and will always be beneficial to your surfing. Skating, like surfing, requires good balance. Some things in skating, like rails down stairs and coping at the top of a ramp, require especially precise balance. If there’s no waves, it can’t hurt to do something that’ll keep your balance in tune.

5. Consequences
Timing is everything and skateboarding teaches you that. Especially when you throw in the consequences of mistiming it while skating – hitting concrete is a pretty good way to pay more attention to something.

6. Focus
Skating demands concentration and focus, just as surfing does. Nothing compares to the reflexes that surfing’s constantly changing platform require, but skating comes pretty close when you get some speed up.

7. Commitment
Skating requires a lot of commitment, just as surfing does. Often, more so. And bailing when skating can have a lot more consequence involved. The biggest benefit here is that committing to something over concrete makes it a lot easier to commit to something over water.

8. Recovery
As important as commitment is, so is knowing when to bail. Because on the flip side, if you commit to something stupid… it isn’t going to be pretty. Knowing when to bail from a skateboard will make it easier to identify lost causes when you’re surfing.

9. Satisfaction
Skating and surfing are not team-orientated, which means they’re both individual disciplines that only require you and your board to have fun. Remembering this is the most important lesson of all.