This tutorial looks at how to keep your balance when wing foiling.
To understand foiling balance it helps to look from the back of the board,
along the roll axis or longitudinal axis.
How you position your weight from this perspective is key to staying balanced.
Firstly, it’s easier to balance when your weight is approximately in line with the mast.
Your weight should be roughly upright compared to the deck of the board.
This keeps some pressure on your toes and some pressure on your heels
and helps you stay connected with the board.
It’s important to note that we do lean away from this upright position for a few reasons.
For example, we lean to roll the board and control its course.
Leaning towards toeside pressures your toes and moves the board towards a toeside roll.
Leaning towards heelside pressures your heels and moves the board towards a heelside roll.
If you keep these leans minimal you can control your course and keep contact with the board.
If you lean too far towards heelside, you start to loose pressure under your toes
and then loose contact with the board.
If you lean too far towards toeside, you start to loose pressure under your heels
and then loose contact with the board.
In this example the rider’s weight is tilted too far toeside of the mast line.
In this example the rider’s weight is tilted too far heelside of the mast line.
The power of your wing affects your lean and your ability to balance.
Generally, for your first flights you aim for a slight upwind course in heelside stance.
In that case you need a little power from the wing to maintain foiling speed.
The wing’s force does pull your weight towards toeside.
So, to stay balance, you do need to lean slightly towards heelside.
If you don’t account for the wing’s force you can loose balance.
If you’re in heelside stance, with no heelside lean, and you then power the wing significantly,
you will get dragged and tilted towards toeside.
This can easily cause learners to loose balance, just like this example:
Or, if you have a high heelside lean, with the wing’s force helping you balance,
and you then depower the wing you’ll drop back.
With practice you learn to use the wing to improve balance and course control.
Briefly powering the wing can bring your forwards.
Briefly depowering the wing can help you drop back.
Eventually you can use the wing to save yourself from falling.
Here for example the rider has too much heelside lean and is about to fall.
Their toes have already lost contact with the board.
A quick pump of the wing brings their weight towards toeside and corrects balance.
The total amount that you roll the foil and board has a huge affect on balance.
As a beginner, you’ll find it much easier to balance by sticking to smaller roll angles
only – keeping the mast almost upright.
A small heelside roll is plenty to ride upwind.
Or a small toeside roll is plenty to do a heel-to-toe jibe.
When you use higher roll angles it’s much easier to fall.
With a larger roll you stall or drop much sooner as soon as you loose some speed.
Or with a larger roll, you drop when you loose the force from the wing.
There are some other factors that affect balance,
such pitch (which controls height) and yaw (which means twisting the board).
These foil skills are covered in separate tutorials.
Thanks for watching and if you have any questions or tips of your own
please add them in the comments below.