Your Second Kiteboarding Trick After Learning How to Jump

Hey, what's up guys? I'm Rygo.

Hey, I'm Lucas.

We're coming back with our second video on our Fundamentals: Jumping with Style playlist and we started with the tail grab. Now it's time for round two, so we're going to talk about a stalefish grab. It's pretty similar, but there are some slight differences with what you're doing with your body. These are things for you to think about because we want to help you transition into being a more stylish rider by taking the most basic things and just adding a little tweak to make them better. So let's dive right into it.

The stalefish grab is very similar to the tail grab like we were doing before. Instead of grabbing the tail of the board, we're going to grab in between our heels. Your arm is going behind your legs, not between your legs. It's going to start just like the tail grab: you're going to send the kite into a nice, little jump. Again, if you're already jumping you don't need to be doing anything drastically different, just a nice, simple jump.

Take your back hand off the bar, reaching down towards the board. Turn your body a little forward and poke that back leg out. This is the opposite from last time. For the tail grab, we brought the back leg in; this time we're going to bring it out. By doing that, you're pushing the back leg out, pulling the front leg in, and you're bringing that heel closer to you so the board comes up and it's a bit easier to grab. It's a bit technical, but it's fairly easy to learn, very stylish.

When you come down, it's very similar to the tail grab. When you're in the air, what's different is, instead of grabbing the tail of your board, you're going to grab the board in between your two heels, just behind your legs. You're not putting your arm between your legs; you're putting your arm behind your legs. Another important thing to mention is that you're not grabbing the fin. It's got to be between the feet to be the actual stalefish, between the heels, otherwise it won't count.

You proceed as normal as with a regular jump. Steer the kite forward. As we mentioned in the last video, it's very convenient that the back hand comes off your bar and you still have your front hand on, so naturally the kite will lean forward, bringing you some speed for the landing.

That's a rough walkthrough of the stalefish. What's really beneficial about basic tricks like this is, when you're doing the same jump with these two tricks, what's happening is you're building air awareness. You're starting to train yourself to think about moving in different ways and moving your body in different directions while you're in the air. These things start to compound in your favor so, later on, when you start popping to toeside you can get creative. You could do a stalefish and you could swing all the way around to toeside, or if you were advanced you could do that stalefish, counter-rotate the other way, and come around and land blind.

One thing we want to emphasize with this series is that you're adding a foundation that gets left behind by a lot of riders who are just working on rotations and backrolls. If you're freerider, a lot of people get amped on the double backroll, but when you focus on these stylish things, you're going to be 10 steps ahead of everybody who left that behind, and this is what high level riders like Lucas here actually focus on when they're doing more advanced tricks.

You can add it to any of your current tricks, too. You can add it in any discipline: unhooked, hooked-in, frontrolls, backrolls, big air... You might poke a stalefish grab as you're coming down, and it just makes it look like you're not dangling or looking awkward. You're adding style to the trick. So no matter what level you're at, this is going to level up your riding. There are so many reasons to practice this, and it's just something easy for you to work on to progress your riding so that you don't get frustrated and you stay in that progression mindset.

If you have any questions on this one, drop them in the comments section. If you enjoyed the video, give it a thumbs up, hit the subscribe button, and stand by. We're going to work on more grabs and more advanced rolls as the series progresses. Cheers!