How to Pop Up on a Foil Drive!

Ryan Arzy: I see people all the time on the takeoff, they're doing it wrong. Once you're planing and kind of skimming, you'll get to your knees and you're on your knees like this. And then you actually want to put your back foot first. So you'll go like this and then stand up. And you actually want to have a narrow stance and be pretty far up on the board to help it skim. You don't want to lift too early. If you have a really wide stance, what tends to happen is you have too much pitch leverage on the whole system. So everything is really, really sensitive. If you come from surfing or any of that, you think you're more stable by having a wide stance. But foiling is really just a subtle game of balance and little movement. So when I'm motoring around, I'm motoring around like this. This is your motoring stance. If you go and try and ride a wave or pump when you're like this, you're not going to get any lift.
You actually have to step back to get the leverage if you want to get on a wave or kick up or any of that. And then I kind of shuffle back. And so you have two different stances. You have your pumping or your wave riding stance. And then you have your motoring stance, which is up here, just really upright and relaxed. If you're riding like this, if you're riding like that, you're just going to get tired. And the whole idea behind riding a foil drive is to just spend a lot of time on foil. So you want to be upright, relaxed so that you're balanced, and it's easier on your body.
A lot of people doing this sport might have mobility issues. That's why you're getting this thing is to help you spend more time on foil. So, a lot of old dudes like myself, they're tired of crowd surfing and they're tired of their shoulders hurting and they're getting on foil drive and getting tons of waves. Yeah. One thing you don't want to do, and I see a lot of people do this, is if you try and get straight to your feet like that, you're probably not planing or you get to your feet and you pitch the board too much and that hurts the foil from taking off. So, it's not a surf pop-up. You almost always get to your knees first. Always. And most people don't realize that. So again, you get going, you get to your knees, and then you actually don't want to put your front foot up first, cuz if you get your front foot up like this, you're kind of in this awkward position where you can't put your hands down to help you get up. And then you're doing like a half squat to basically stand up.
So again, by getting your back foot underneath you first, you can kind of keep your hands down and then pop up like that. So that easy. But a lot of people don't think about that. A lot of people don't talk about that. But that makes all the difference in terms of riding a smaller board. Nice.
And I've seen people that have been foil driving for like a year or months and they switch that takeoff and all of a sudden they're like, "Oh my god, how did I not think of that?" Yeah. Front leg doesn't get in the way, too. Yeah. Exactly.