Why You're Not Getting Better at Surfing (And What to Actually Do About It)

Every surfer hits this wall. You paddle out, you stand up, you ride waves — but weeks pass and nothing really shifts. The pop-up feels the same. The turns aren't happening. The better surfers in the lineup look like they're playing a different game entirely, and it's not obvious what they know that you don't.

Here's the thing: surfing punishes repetition more than almost any sport. You can log a hundred sessions doing the same thing wrong and go nowhere. Or you can spend a focused week on the right coastline, with the right coaching, and come out the other side actually surfing differently. The difference isn't talent. It's usually a handful of specific things — and once you know what they are, progress stops feeling mysterious.

Your board is probably the first problem

It almost always starts here. Someone learns on a big foam board, gets comfortable, and then gets told — by a friend, a shop, a random guy in the lineup — that it's time to go shorter. So they do. And suddenly surfing goes from fun to frustrating overnight.

Volume is your best friend as a developing surfer. A bigger, more buoyant board means you catch more waves. More waves means more reps. More reps means faster progress — every time, no exceptions. The surfers who improve quickest are almost always the ones who stayed on more foam longer than felt cool.

One of the first things Yassin does when a new guest arrives at Ohana is take a look at what they've brought. More often than not — especially with surfers who've been going a year or two — the board is already too small for where they actually are. It's not a judgment. It's the most common thing he sees, and a simple board swap can transform someone's week before a single technique adjustment has been made.

If wave-catching still feels like a fight, you probably need more board under you. You'll know when to go smaller — not because someone tells you to, but because you'll feel like you've genuinely outgrown it.

The pop-up: what's actually going wrong

The pop-up is the foundation every other part of surfing is built on. It's also the thing most surfers practice least — because it happens in half a second in real sessions and it's almost impossible to notice what you're doing wrong while you're doing it.

The usual culprits:

• Looking down at the board instead of where you're going
• Hands placed too far forward or too wide before the push
• Getting to your feet in two or three moves instead of one clean pop
• Landing in the middle of the board rather than your natural surf stance

The fix isn't glamorous but it's reliable: beach drills before you paddle out. Five minutes on dry land rewires muscle memory faster than twenty wipeouts in the water. Mark out your stance in the sand if you need a reference point. Get the movement locked in when there's no pressure on it.

This is how Yassin starts every first session at Ohana — not as a box-ticking exercise, but because he's watched enough surfers to know that getting the pop-up right on dry land first makes everything in the water click faster. It looks simple. The results aren't.

White water is your friend here too. Not because it's the beginner option — because predictable, smaller waves give you the reps to automate the movement before you're also trying to read a live wave at the same time. That's not going backwards. That's building a base.

Reading waves: the gap nobody talks about

This is probably the single biggest difference between a beginner surfer and an intermediate surfer — and almost no one addresses it directly.

Beginners react to waves. Intermediates anticipate them.

A beginner sees white water and paddles hard. An intermediate spots the swell building twenty metres outside, moves into position, and is already stroking when the wave arrives. They're not physically faster. They just started earlier because they understood what was coming.

Learning to read waves takes time but it's not mysterious. Before you paddle out, sit on the beach and actually watch: where are the peaks forming, how are the waves moving along the break, where are the better surfers sitting and when exactly do they start paddling? Then go in and try to replicate what you saw. This one habit, done consistently, moves things faster than most people expect.

Where coaching makes this dramatically faster is the local knowledge piece. Yassin has been surfing and reading this coastline his whole life. He knows how the swell behaves at K12 versus the point breaks further north, how the tide changes a break's character across a session, which peak is about to produce the best wave in the next set. That kind of local surf knowledge isn't transferable from a manual — it comes from years in a specific ocean. Guests at Ohana aren't just getting technique coaching. They're getting Yassin's accumulated reading of a coastline he knows better than anywhere else, applied to their sessions in real time.

The bottom turn: why your surfing looks flat

You're catching unbroken waves. You're standing up. But you're going straight, the wave closes out on you, and nothing interesting is happening. The bottom turn is almost certainly what's missing.

The bottom turn is the first thing you do after dropping into a wave — and it sets up absolutely everything that follows. Most developing surfers skip it entirely without knowing they're doing it. They drop in, point toward the beach, and ride the wave until it shuts down. It feels like surfing. From the beach it looks like surfing. But it's leaving the entire wave unused.

A proper bottom turn means angling along the wave face on the drop, compressing through your knees, then driving hard off your back foot to redirect your energy back up the face. When it works, you generate speed, you stay in the pocket, and suddenly you have time and room to actually do something — a top turn, a redirect, a cutback. The whole game opens up.

The tricky part is that most surfers genuinely think they're doing it. The movement exists in their head but not in their body. This is where a surf coach watching from the beach changes everything — because Yassin can see the exact moment you straighten out when you should be compressing and driving. Usually one specific correction, one cue taken back into the water and tried on the very next wave, is enough to feel the difference. That's what good coaching actually looks like. Not a technique lecture — one precise observation at the right moment.

Make it a rule: every wave gets a bottom turn attempt, no matter how small. Nothing else you work on will mean much until this is in place.

Video feedback: the thing that makes everything move faster

Most surfers — even people who've been surfing for years — have never watched themselves surf. Not once. They're operating entirely on feel, with no external reference for what's actually happening. They have a picture in their head of what they look like, and that picture is almost always wrong.

Video analysis is the fastest progression tool available to any surfer. One session filmed from the beach, reviewed the same day with someone who knows exactly what to look for, reveals more than months of solo sessions. Not because everything is going wrong — but because the gap between what you think your body is doing and what it's actually doing tends to be significant.

At Ohana, filming and reviewing footage is built into how coaching works. Yassin watches the clips with guests, pauses on the moments that matter — the pop-up, the bottom turn entry, the weight distribution through a turn — and explains in plain terms what's happening and what to adjust. The reaction is almost always the same: genuine surprise, followed by a next session where the body starts self-correcting almost automatically. Once your brain has the right picture, it's very hard to unsee it. That's when progress stops being gradual and starts feeling sudden.

Consistency: the real accelerator

A single focused week of daily surfing will do more for your progression than six months of occasional sessions. This isn't motivational — it's just how the body learns physical skills.

Daily surfing creates adaptations that four or five days between sessions simply don't allow. The pop-up stops requiring thought. Reading the ocean becomes instinctive. Your paddling endurance builds. The cognitive load of just being in the water drops, and you can start using your mental energy on your actual surfing instead of managing the basics.

A surf camp in Morocco works as a learning accelerator for exactly this reason. Two sessions a day, consistent warm-water waves, coaching from someone who has spent his life on this coast and watched hundreds of surfers go through the same progressions — it collapses a year of weekend sessions into seven days. Yassin has seen it enough times to know how it goes: something usually unlocks around day three or four. A skill that felt abstract suddenly lands in the body. Wave reading becomes intuitive. Sessions stop feeling like work. The shift is reliable because the conditions that produce it — immersion, immediate feedback, the right environment, a coach who knows how to get you there — are all present at once.

Why the Moroccan coast makes all of this easier

The stretch of Atlantic coast between Aourir and Taghazout has become one of the best places in the world for beginner and intermediate surf progression — not just because of the waves, but because of the whole setup.

The swell is consistent. The water is warm for most of the year. The variety of breaks means there's always a spot that matches your level on any given day. K12 near Aourir gives beginners and lower intermediates forgiving, readable waves with space to work on the fundamentals away from crowds. The point breaks further north give intermediates the long, open wave faces they need to start linking turns and building their own style.

Add daily coaching from Yassin, who knows this coastline and its waves intimately, and the environment becomes almost uniquely suited to making real progress quickly. That's not a pitch — it's just what happens when good coaching meets the right conditions meets genuine daily commitment.

The short version

Stay on volume longer than feels necessary. Fix your pop-up on the beach before you try to fix it in the water. Learn to read waves before they arrive, not after. Make the bottom turn a non-negotiable on every wave you catch. Watch yourself on video with someone who knows what they're looking at. And surf consecutive days — more of them than you think you need.

Everything else follows from those six things. They just go a lot faster with the right person watching.

At Ohana Surf Morocco, Yassin coaches small groups and one-to-one sessions for all levels — including video analysis — from Aourir on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. If you want a week that actually moves your surfing forward, see what we offer →