Your Third Kiteboarding Trick After Learning How to Jump

Hey, what's up guys? I'm Rygo and I'm in Hatteras with Lucas, and we're back for Part Three of our "Fundamentals: Progressive Jump with Style" playlist. That's a mouthful, but the whole idea is that we're helping you transition from the first video to the last video. We're breaking down basic grabs, helping you build air awareness, and whatever your discipline and whatever your level, these are easy things that you can practice to step up your riding and look better on the water. Even for somebody like Lucas who is pretty high level, you get your basic tricks, but then you're trying to add grabs to them, you're trying to tweak them out. It looks different, and it almost feels like a new trick when you land it, especially since some grabs make you rotate differently.

The nice thing about this playlist is, if you do practice these things, not only will it give you an easy goal to obtain and focus on, but it's also going to help take your riding to another level in the long run. Today we're going to talk about the Indie Grab. We're building off backhand grabs. We started with the Tail Grab, we have the Stalefish, so let's break down the Indie Grab for everybody.

The Indie Grab is a little different than the previous grabs we've covered because it's going to take a bit of body movement in the air. A lot of the other jumps use a simple send, and we can grab the board immediately. The biggest difference in this one is that your body posture is changing so much. For the Stalefish and the Tail Grab, we didn't really have to change our body posture; you could just jump, have a straight air, and add the grab fairly easily. But in this jump, you're actually going to have to turn your body backwards. You're going to have to tweak it back and almost look behind you. If there's a crowd or a camera behind you, you want to look at the crowd, look at the camera exactly. What happens is it opens up your hips and it allows you to reach for that grab way easier versus doing a straight air. You're balancing it against the harness, so it's making it super hard to reach for that Indie Grab in the middle of your board.

First things first: the Indy is in between your toes instead of in between your heels; you're going to the front of the board now. We're going to pull the back knee up this time, so you're grabbing in between the board, pulling the back knee up, and extending the front leg, trying to add as much style you can. So pull it in, tweak it, straight air jump, and because your back hand is off the bar, as you're coming down the kite is going in your favor; it's going to land forward and it's going to help you land with speed. A big point for me is to turn back, look at the camera, then grab. Make sure you do that; that's the biggest tip that's going to make it way easier for you to learn.

A big point that I'm going to probably have to address in every single one of these videos is the kite motion. Every tutorial I've done for the last six years now, people always ask about the kite, so I'm going to reinforce the point this is just a basic, simple jump. It can be applied to any jump, whether it's a freestyle pop, a sent air... that actually doesn't matter when it comes to the Indie Grab. In these clips, Lucas is just doing a sent jump. He sends the kite up to noon, then he takes his back hand off, which redirects the kite forward and pulls him downwind. The timing doesn't matter as much as you would think, as long as you're going up and then getting pulled forward, downwind. Those are the two key factors to remember.

One other thing we can address is there are two different ways to do the Indie. Lucas is doing the tuck knee, but we do have some shots of him doing between the legs without tucking the knee in, and it looks pretty goofy. It comes down to style. If you grab the middle of the board and you pull both knees in, that's technically against the grab rules. You want to have one leg poked out. Tucking in one knee does add a lot more of that style, so you want to make sure that you have one leg relatively extended and the other one bent as much as possible instead of just doing the "poo stance" with both knees bent. To be fair, there's nothing wrong with it; we all start somewhere and if that's what you need to do to reach the grab, go for it, and then take that to the next level and try to add your poke to it.

I love that attitude. That's the right attitude to have. Just one final point that took me a long time because I never could visualize this when I was learning it is, your arm is touching the outside of your knee. I think we'll get to this later, but for Crail Grabs, I still can't get my arm on the outside of my knee; I have to reach on the inside of my knee. It doesn't look as good as an outside grab and I'm well aware of it, but that's where I'm at. It's all about your flexibility and how you're reaching for the grab. Some people have different restrictions, where your harness is sitting, so whatever works, but the back arm's on the outside of the knee as you're reaching for the grab and you're pulling in that board as hard as you can.

As far as this series goes, just make sure to follow the videos in order. Start with the Tail Grab, work on your Stalefish, and then as you feel good with those two, try this video. Go for the tuck knee Indie, and this will actually help bridge you into more tricks like the Crail Grab and things like that because you're starting to get used to rotating, you're building air awareness, and these things are cumulative. Stick with it and have fun. If you've got any questions, drop them in the video comments. If you found this video helpful, give it a thumbs up, hit the subscribe button, and we'll catch you later. Cheers!

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