Negotiating the surf clinic
- Swim school
- Interstate locations
- 3 Hours
- 8 Participants
- October - March
★★★★★ 5/5
Learn to adapt your wave negotiation techniques on the go and make smarter decisions
As an ocean swimmer there’s nothing more satisfying than swimming out through the waves like they weren’t even there and then body surfing gracefully all the way back to the beach.
This intermediate-level clinic focuses on the surf zone; developing a better understanding of waves, learning to adapt your wave negotiation techniques on the go, and making smarter navigation decisions. You will get personal realtime feedback on your technique, timing and decision-making as we train within the wave zone.
To finish, we’ll touch on some advanced skills and race strategy that will develop your speed, efficiency and competitive tactics.
How you'll benefit
In Negotiating The Surf we build on the ocean awareness session from the Learn to ocean swim clinic by focusing on how we can use our new knowledge of how the ocean works to swim smarter and new ocean swimming techniques are introduced.
The strength of this clinic is in the time allocated to practising your new techniques with your instructor close by to give immediate, personal feedback.
You’ll leave this clinic with a huge bank of techniques you can practice in your own time or at your next ocean swim event.
You’ll be surprised at the level you can take your ocean swimming in such a short time.
What you'll learn
- How to go beyond a basic beach assessment to see what others can’t
- How to make smart navigation decisions in the moment
- Navigating the shallow inshore zone by wading and dolphin-diving
- How to get every little bit of assistance from the ocean as you can
- Adjusting your swimming stroke to the wave-zone, choppy and open water
- How to swim onto a wave and bodysurf it back to the beach
- How to identify multiple types of waves, and the best techniques to negotiate each
- Buoy turns, pack swimming and drafting
- Tactical competitive decision-making
Included
- 3-hour practical clinic
- A minimum of two instructors (1:4 ratio)
- OceanFit silicone swim cap
- Post clinic advice and support
Pre-requisites
This clinic is for intermediate swimmers with a good level of fitness and endurance (speed is not a factor).
If you do not meet these pre-requisites, please do not register for this clinic. Not sure if you’re at the right level? Contact us
Pre-clinic
You have participated in OceanFit’s Learn to ocean swim clinic
2km swim
You can swim a minimum of 2km freestyle in a pool
Event exp.
You have participated in a 1km ocean swim event (preferred)
FAQ
We require you to participate in the Learn to ocean swim clinic, before participating in this clinic, because when it comes to ocean awareness, it is often a case of ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’.
In Learn to ocean swim we guarantee you will learn things you didn’t know previously, and we will bring everything you do know into a clearer picture of how to get the most out of your knowledge from an ocean swimmers point of view.
When it comes to ocean swimming skills, your actual swimming skills will definitely help, but the focus is on learning techniques, and not doing lots of ocean swimming. So if you’re a great swimmer, we’d expect you to be able to pick up the techniques faster and perform them better than others, but you still need to master the core techniques.
We are also very good at spotting great swimmers, and we will help you get even more out of your technique session by having you move onto advanced skills, or we’ll tweak them down to the last 1% of efficiency.
During the summer we run clinics in Sydney (Bondi & Manly), Wollongong, Newcastle, Gold Coast (Palm Beach), and the Sunshine Coast (Noosa).
We look to take our clinics on tour throughout Australia in the summer, so if you’d like us to visit you, and you think there’d be plenty of interest, please contact us.
We’ll start off with an ocean awareness session will completely transform how you look at the ocean – including popular myth-busting & 3D sand formation sessions – and it will change how you approach your ocean swimming from that moment on.
We spend our water time establishing the core ocean swimming techniques for sighting and efficiently and effectively diving under waves while swimming.
You will learn how to use the ocean to your advantage and be aware of how to to make smart decisions when navigating in and out of the surf zone.
The highlight of the clinic is a tie between the rip current swimming experience – where you’ll get to swim in a rip current and learn how ocean swimmers use them to their advantage – and the body surfing session at the end.
Participants in this clinic leave looking at the ocean in a completely different way, have a heap of ocean swimming tricks up their sleeve and appreciate what it takes to be an ocean swimmer.
This is a technique-based clinic, and so speed isn’t important (although it will help!). You will need to be able to sustain whatever speed you swim at for the entire clinic to get the best out of it. We’ll bunch swimmers of similar speeds together for all the group drills.
There is a lot of swimming in and out of the surf in this clinic, so we recommend wearing swim fins for those who may find this challenging. As an option, you can start without fins and then put them on if you’re feeling tired.
The minimum age is 16-years-old.
From $195
per person*
There are currently no scheduled clinics.
*Plus booking and payment processing fees
View full clinic schedule on a calendar
Our ocean swim school season has finished
Missed out? We’ll be back in the spring
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Need help reaching the pre-requisite level?
Follow our FREE online Up The Ante training program over 8-weeks.
The program includes two guided pool swim training sessions a week to get your swim fitness up to speed.
