I LOVE fitness, so apologies for being a total geek in this area. I am that annoying person who crawls out of bed daily at 6 and does some type of movement, from weights to running, to barre, to yoga, to swimming. Unless I’m getting to surf regularly, I don’t regard my board sports activities as my main fitness, I embrace fitness to keep me doing these sports, to feel great, and to prevent getting injured.

I recognise this kind of enthusiasm isn’t for everyone (my family think I’m a bit insane), but I do think training to be able to do the sports you love, for as long as you want, injury free, is a pretty strong incentive to focus on your fitness.

However, the advice you’re given is often conflicting, and it’s hard to know what really works to support your body for these sports. We got 3 experts together to help you do just that (and apologies to our experts, as we filmed this a little while ago at one of our live online sessions, but we haven’t put it out to the world before now). All of them are board sports enthusiasts themselves, and they tailored their advice to the worlds of skateboarding, snowboarding and surfing for you.

Meet Our Experts

Emily from @moceanfit

Emily wants to get more women moving, adventuring, playing and learning, and giving new sports a go. A surfer, skateboarder and snowboarder, at 40 Emily understands what it means to embrace these sports later in life. She’s a trained fitness instructor, mobility coach and breathing practitioner, and it’s all tailored to the sports we love. She also has some seriously enviable mountain views from her new home in switzerland, where she moved to be nearer to the mountains.

Lizzie from @lizziebirdmoves

Lizzie is an Osteopath, Movement Specialist and author of the book ‘Move’. A keen water woman, after breaking her knee in 7 places during Covid, and being unable to access the operation she needed, she learned how to self rehabilitate her injury and learnt a huge amount in the process.

Louise from @louise_beyondthemat

Louise is a fantastically calming and energising yoga teacher (helped by the french accent), and she used to run the yoga at our Board Women events. She’s also a qualified surf instructor, and more recent convert to skating and snowboarding. She tailors her yoga practice to the needs of all three sports, setting you up to be strong, flexible and recover well. Since this session she’s moved her life to the beautiful coast of New Zealand, surfing and teaching yoga and pilates (yes we hate her sometimes).

The format: an interactive session

The session was a 90 minute interactive session, with movement demonstrations and Q&A with each of the experts. So, grab your kit, and a yoga mat and get ready to find the secrets of staying fit and injury fee for the board sports you love!

P.S This isn’t a high production film as it was a live online event, and we were all in our lounges taking part, but the advice is still brilliant! If you like this kind of content, let us know and we’ll bring you more and think about hiring a studio.

Mental Health awareness week therefore seemed like the perfect moment to bring a group of women together to discuss this very topic.

We welcomed five super inspiring women to our talk:

• Rhiannon, or ‘Ram’ as she’s affectionately known, coach at Skorcha Skate School

• Lisa Baxter, trauma informed practitioner and safe guarding lead, as well as being one of the directors of The Board Mums Club

• Danni Unway, Surf Confidence Coach and Psychotherapist

• Jackie from @fortyandpushing - skateboarder, and skate charity volunteer

• India a psychotherapist from @resurfaceuk an organisational that combines surf retreats with therapy

We talked about so much, and it really was a joyful celebration of how much skate, surf and snowboarding can bring to our lives, particularly in times of need.

One of the biggest themes was the mutual support we bring each other in these sports. Not just those in our immediate vicinity, but even the support from the online community:

“I’m in this loop. You support me, I support you, that sort of give and take, that building resilience, that cheering each other on. You are literally holding each other up after a fall, literally and emotionally. It creates this trust net with you and the others in your community. Even here, I’m talking about it as The Board Mums Club, but I know I’m part of a global community with everybody that’s on this chat right now. And it doesn’t matter if it’s on snow, if it’s on the water, if it’s on a skateboard, I’m part of that. And that connection, really supports my mental health.” - Lisa Baxter

Share

It’s exactly what I’m trying to foster with Board Women, that sense that people have your back, understand what you’re going through, the metaphorical hands as you drop in, no matter where you’re at in your journey.

These confidence sessions are a brilliant demonstration of that community. In this discussion we covered:

• Mid life loneliness and finding your people

• The non-judgemental side of board sports

• The side chats & how they might be the whole point

• Getting your mojo & power back

• The ASMR side of board sports & their power to deregulate

• Normalising highs & lows & getting comfortable with being uncomfortable

• Reframing board sports addiction as a positive

And so much more…

I’d love to hear what you think of this one! The full video is here, or you can listen on your favourite podcasting platform.

These sessions will be happening monthly, and we’d love you to be part of them! Paid Subscribers get every event for free, alongside 10% off merch, and real life events, and paid subscriber only content.

Subscribe now

Tonight’s event is ‘Just Move It’ - helping you understand how to move your body to support your board sports journey. We bring together fitness trainer Emily from @moceanfit who specialises in taking up board sports later in life; Lizzie from @lizziebirdmoves osteopath and movement specialist (and surfer); and Louise from @louise_beyondthemat who specialises in board sports and yoga. The session will help you understand how to rehab your body, how to prepare your legs; and how to recover. Sign up here for the last tickets!

I’ve been fascinated for a while now about what it’s like to get a serious injury, and for the one thing you’ve found that brings you joy, to suddenly be removed from your life. Injury in itself is difficult, recovery can be a long and lonely road, but when it’s a sport you’ve embraced because it helps your mental health (as is the case for many people coming to board sports later in life), it multiplies the difficulty.

And then, as luck (questionable) would have it, I was about to experience this journey firsthand. On a (much fought and saved for) snowboarding holiday with my family, and only on day 2, I caught an edge on my board while trying to get out of the way of a beginner ski-er, and landed the wrong way on my wrist.

My husband, Ben, snowboarded over, asking if I thought I’d need ice. I knew immediately that I’d dislocated and broken it, even though I’d never broken anything before (the angle of my wrist was a give away). Kudos to the Italian mountain rescue teams, after a hike back up to a restaurant and a call, 15 minutes later they arrived on an odd scrambler bike affair, and took me down to the mountain to a waiting ambulance. Within an hour I was hooked up to what looked like a hanging torture device with weights to put my wrist back in place, and within two I was in a cast.

I’m a doer. I need a plan. And I have a (probably unhealthy in some ways) desperate need to be active. My mood and overall mental health depends on it. I sat googling ‘workouts you can do with a broken wrist’ whilst I waited for my x-ray results. It was only when I got back to the hotel with my family that I sat and cried my eyes out, realising the long road I had ahead.

An hour of you tubing ‘techniques to remove your contact lenses with one hand’ (and the wrong one at that) made me want to bash my head against the wall (I have actually mastered this). Realising I couldn’t do up my own bra was a shocker (again, there’s a technique). But still, I got up the next morning, did my first wrist friendly workout and took myself off for a hike in the sunshine while my family went up the mountain. I’m making this sound like I was just brilliantly positive, but I was swearing my head off inside. My holiday felt ruined. My next few months of life felt ruined, but I managed to put it aside initially.

Then we got home. Reality hit with the thud of a thousand elephants. I’ve got two young kids. I work for myself and am the main income earner in our family. No-one was making us dinners anymore, the normal mundanity of house tidying, and getting kids to school resumed, but everything just took so long. I’m someone who normally lives by the life ritual of having the same amount of hours in a day as Beyonce, but this just wasn’t feasible when I couldn’t use a knife, open a bottle, carry a plate. You get the picture.

Things are much improved now, but it’s still a journey with undulating waves of positivity and black holes. I had a cast for six weeks, and am now in a splint for another six. The cast coming off felt like a huge milestone (half of my wardrobe got opened up to me again as my arm finally fits through), but actually it was an unexpected emotional hurdle as I realised my mobility still had a long way to go.

So, it was unbelievably refreshing to bring together a phenomenal group of women who have had similar (some more harrowing) journeys. We had:

• Emily from @moceanfit : Emily has had her fair share of injuries, but she is also an online training and wellness specialist, helping women in their 30’s and beyond train specifically for board sports

• Danni aka @surfconfidencecoach : helping people feel more confidence and joy in surfing & come back from trauma through her coaching, therapy and workshops, in and out of the sea

• Shannon aka @skaterlifeisrad : mum, massage therapist, nurse on a mission to practice and promote safety while learning to skateboard, especially while ageing. Shannon broke her ankle within weeks of starting to skateboard, but came back to it and is now a well known figure in this space

• Amber aka @ambereggleden : skate coach who has been open about skating and being bipolar and how skating helps with neurodiversity and is currently recovering from her second broken foot

• Annika aka @annikarudolph: team rider for Crown Boards, ambassador for the German Long Board Girls Crew, Annika has had numerous injuries but is currently on a long journey back from damaging her PCL

• Lizzie aka @lizziebirdmoves: osteopath, author of MOVES, surfer and paddleboarder. Lizzie’s book covers the phenomenal journey of her self healing (with some co-professionals) her own broken knee during lock down.

I LOVED this discussion. You might think we created a panel that is almost a warning against the perils of taking up board sports at all, and obviously aspects of putting injury front and centre in this way play into a fear we all hold. In actuality, this is a panel of women who are passionate about the sports, fiercely honest about the journey they have gone through, but are keen to get back to what they love.

We talk about:

• the guilt and self blame we face after injury

• feeling that we ‘shouldn’t have been doing the sport anyway

• our need to have a plan, but learning to just go with it

• the stages of recovery, almost like grief

• finding our own way through the journey, going at our own pace

It’s a journey that can be lonely, but it was clear that by coming together, we all felt better for simply having the opportunity to talk to others who would understand what we were experiencing.

A big thanks to everyone who was involved, and I hope you find the content useful, whether you’re injured or not! Let me know below x

____________________________________

We’ll be hosting The Confidence Sessions monthly, ticketed for non-subscribers, but free as part of the membership for subscribers. Check out our other benefits of subscription below.

Subscribe now

Future sessions include:

• Board Sports x Neurodiversity

• Board Sports x Blowing Up Your Life

• Board Sports x Menopause

We’ll also be hosting more hands on virtual workshops on specific skating moves, yoga sequences, and bringing confidence techniques to your board sports. DM us to get on the wait list!

Share