LearnWake

A wall ride is a pretty common obstacle seen in cable parks across the globe. In this video, we will briefly demonstrate a few simple principles and on land training techniques that will help you master the wall ride.

First, lets walk through some on land similarities that you can practice safely without beating yourself up on the water. For these steps, you will need to wear some shoes with grippy tread and find a textured concrete wall in an open area with preferably a grass or dirt surface underneath you. As an extra safety precaution, you may want to wear protective gear while practicing the on-land portion of this instructional.

In order to properly simulate the wall ride out on the water, you must first learn to shift your weight from one flat surface to another flat surface. Most wall rides are set at an angle and not completely vertical like the wall we will be practicing on. You won’t have to shift your weight on the water quite as far as you will have to for this drill. This practicing at an extreme on land, will make the mellower transition to a wall ride on the water that much easier.

The following sequence of steps will be demonstrated by a regular stance rider simulating a Frontside approach on a wall ride. For step one of this drill, run directly at the wall, jump off of the ground, plant your feet on the wall, and then give a good hard push directly against the wall to return back to the ground safely on your feet. The purpose of this step is to simulate the change in momentum that you will experience on the wall ride. On the water, you will be traveling toward the obstacle and then stop this momentum by shifting your weight onto the flat surface of the wall ride. This momentum that you carried into the wall in both cases will allow you to plant your feet on the face of the wall, stand mostly horizontal for a brief moment, and then push away from the wall hard enough to get your body back to vertical again. This shift in momentum is what makes the wall ride possible.

For step two of the drill, let’s add some travel to this shift in momentum to better mimic the travel that you will experience on the water. This time run at the wall at about a 45 degree angle and jump onto and off of the wall like in step one.

Now that you can throw your weight from the ground to the wall and back while traveling, we are ready to take this to the water. Edge toward the wall ride to build up some momentum, then ollie onto the wall shifting your weight just like you practiced on land. Once you have made it onto the wall ride with enough momentum, push against the wall hard enough to stand you back up right before your board gets too close to the water or to the end of the obstacle. This can be practiced quickly and lazily, or aggressively with a lot of momentum.

That’s about it. Once you are comfortable with the basics of the wall ride, you can begin mixing it up by approaching the wall ride in different ways, pressing out your board, spinning, and so on. The possibilities are endless!