064: BRAD GERLACH - Project Fun
pic: @gerhardimages
What if everything you thought you knew about the “pop-up” is wrong—and it’s the very thing stalling your surfing progression?
In this deep-dive episode, former world #2 Brad Gerlach reveals the powerful truths behind why most surfers plateau—hint: it's got nothing to do with talent or strength. From childhood wipeouts to elite coaching through his revolutionary WaveKey method, Brad breaks down how to surf with timing, connection, and longevity in mind.
Learn why your takeoff may be the #1 thing holding you back and how to fix it using controlled, skeleton-based movement.
Discover how martial arts, diving, and slow-motion training inform the world's most effective surf technique method.
Hear Brad’s personal journey from hyperactive surf-grom to high-performance coach—and the wisdom that can transform your own practice.
Press play now to learn the proven movement method that’s helping surfers of all levels surf better, longer, and with more joy.
https://www.waveki.com/
For a 10% discount use promo code WAVEKISURFMASTER
Key Points
Brad's first surf experience was at age 8, after finding a surfboard on the beach in Encinitas, leading to his addiction to surfing.
Brad's early surfing was influenced by the desire to be the best and the competitive spirit driven by his father's example as a daredevil and athlete.
Brad's father played a pivotal role in his surfing career by helping him refine his technique and approach to competitions.
Brad introduced WaveKey, a coaching method focused on harnessing life energy and efficient movement to improve surfing technique.
The distinction between a pop-up and a take-off in surfing was discussed, emphasizing the importance of three-point contact and proper body alignment.
Common mistakes among intermediate surfers include improper takeoff positioning and counterintuitive body movements during turns.
The importance of balancing strength training with technique and timing in surfing was highlighted, drawing parallels to dance and martial arts.
Brad discussed the benefits of WaveKey for surfers' longevity and adaptability, allowing them to maintain their skills even during periods away from the ocean.
Brad recommended consistent practice of WaveKey techniques, such as short takeoff practices, to improve surfers' confidence and performance.
Brad provided information about the WaveKey website and a promo code for listeners interested in signing up for the course.
Outline
Surf Mastery Podcast Introduction
Michael welcomed listeners to the Surf Mastery Podcast, a show about the art and craft of surfing.
Michael requested listener support through ratings, reviews, donations, and sharing the podcast.
Michael mentioned plans to run workshops as COVID restrictions lift and sought venue suggestions.
Michael sought web designer recommendations and provided contact information for inquiries.
Brad Gerlach's Surfing Background
Brad Gerlach, a former World Tour Pro Surfer ranked second in the world in 1991, now coaches high-level and everyday surfers.
Brad discussed their first wave experience at age 10 in Encinitas, involving a surfboard with a Jesus Christ laminate and no fin.
Brad described a significant surfing accident at age 12, resulting in a broken nose and lip, leading to a temporary vow to never surf again.
Brad eventually returned to surfing, appropriating a younger child's board temporarily before acquiring their own.
Brad expressed a strong drive to be the best, influenced by their father's daredevil acts and the Rocky movie.
Brad emphasized the importance of hard work, intellect, and humility in achieving success in surfing.
Brad's Journey to Professional Surfing
Brad discussed their journey from learning to surf in Leucadia to moving to Encinitas and eventually Huntington Beach.
Brad highlighted the impact of their father's coaching, despite not being a surfer, on their technique and performance.
Brad's father, a former Olympic diver and dive coach, provided valuable insights and coaching techniques.
Brad credited their father for instilling confidence, teaching them to connect with the wave, and emphasizing grace, efficiency, and power in surfing.
Brad introduced the concept of 'projecting fun' and 'projecting power' in surfing, drawing inspiration from Stephanie Gilmour and Tom Curran.
WaveKey Coaching Program
Brad discussed their online surf coaching movement training program called WaveKey, offering a 10% discount with the promo code 'WaveKey Surf Master'.
WaveKey aims to help surfers harness the power of the wave with minimal effort, emphasizing good timing, technique, and intentional movement.
Brad drew parallels between WaveKey and Aikido, highlighting the importance of connecting with oneself and the wave.
Brad explained the difference between a pop-up and a take-off, emphasizing the importance of three points of contact and efficient movement.
Brad discussed common mistakes in surfing, such as improper takeoff positioning and excessive pressure on the surfboard, and offered solutions through WaveKey training.
Longevity and Consistency in Surfing
Brad emphasized the importance of practicing WaveKey consistently for longevity and improvement in surfing.
Brad shared feedback from WaveKey subscribers who reported feeling better and more confident after consistent practice, even during periods of not surfing.
Brad recommended practicing WaveKey for a minimum of six minutes daily, focusing on takeoff techniques.
Brad highlighted the benefits of practicing on closeouts and emphasized the importance of confidence and proper technique in surfing.
WaveKey Fundamentals Course
Brad provided details about the WaveKey fundamentals course, including the seven fundamental skills surfers need to master.
The course covers takeoffs, bottom turns, top turns, tube riding, floaters, and basic airs, with content tailored to goofy or natural foot surfers.
Brad offers a 10% discount on the annual course with the promo code provided, encouraging listeners to sign up and join the community.
Brad conducts live YouTube sessions connected to the course, where members can ask questions and receive personalized feedback.
Transcription
Brad Gerlach
You have to think of it like being intimate with the wave. Project power. Project fun.
Michael Frampton
Welcome back or welcome to the Surf Mastery Podcast. Podcast's all about the art and craft of surfing. If you're a long-time listener of the show... I'd appreciate some support. The easiest way to support this show, to ensure more guests, more episodes, is to just rate and review on iTunes. Just share this episode with a friend. Another way is to donate to the show. There is a donate button on the website. The bottom left of the website surfmastery.com. A few people last month donated $50. Thank you so much. Show some support for the show. The link, put a link to donations in the show notes of this episode. I'm looking at running some more workshops as the COVID sort of restrictions start to lift. So if you know anyone or you yourself have a venue that would be suitable for you, please let me know in the comments. Here on the Californian coast, then please reach out mike at surfmastery.com and hoping to get down to San Diego again, Orange County. And LA. Keep you posted about that. Is anyone out there a web designer or know any good web designers? Please let me know to mike at surfmasterypodcast.com. My guest in today's episode is Brad Gerlach. Brad is a former World Tour Pro Surfer. In 1991 he was ranked second in the world. Brad now coaches high level surfers and everyday surfers like you and I. And this episode is full of plenty of eclectic... surfing wisdom from Brad. We discussed Brad's online surf coaching movement training program that he's developed called Wave Key. I urge you guys to check it out. I've been doing it. Brad has kindly offered us a 10% discount. So if you go to wavekey.com and sign up using the promo code Wave Key Surf Master, so that's Wave Key spelt with its key spelt K-I. Wavekey Surf Master, all in capital uppercase. I will type that out and put a link to the website and the show notes to this episode. Please enjoy my conversation. Your first ever wave.
Brad Gerlach
Kind of, yeah.
Michael Frampton
How old were you? Where were you?
Brad Gerlach
I was in Encinitas and Lucadia and we walked down to the—I walked down to the beach to go swimming with a friend. We got down to the bottom of the stairs. There was a surfboard laying in the sand that was kind of brown or whatever, you know. It had no fin on it. It had a laminate of Jesus Christ on it. You know, it wasn't like a sort of like—it was kind of, you know, kind of wild, that too, you know. It was a really nice, beautiful summer August day. Waves weren't very big and, you know, it's kind of—and I just took it out there and sort of stood up on it. It had no fin, so it just started—I remember my first wave, I just stood up right away and then I just started sliding because I was skateboarding a little bit at the time. And before we moved to this spot in Lucadia, there would be a kid who probably was like 14, but he had a surfboard on the back of his bike with wheels. It's like a trailer that you lay your board on. And I remember seeing him go by, I don't know, "What are you doing?" He's like, "We're going surfing, kid, beat it," you know, whatever. I remember thinking, "That's cool." For my eighth birthday, I got—I used to get a dollar for every year—about eight bucks. I spent a dollar on the ice cream man, not in one go because back then it was pretty cheap. I probably kept going back and getting more ice cream, but I had seven bucks and I bought this Bing. And off—I think off this guy. And one day I went to the beach with my dad and it was all kind of a blown-out day. And I went out there and it was all rough and I just came in going, "I don't like surf. That's not for me." So the time—so two years passed and then when I was 10, I found that board and it was like crystal glass and kind of not—so almost like when I stood up on the board and it started to slide a little bit. I think I did it two or three times and was like, "I'm going to go get that." I still had that Bing. I'm like, "I'm going to go get that Bing." That other board to my friend. And my friend's like, "You are the most annoying kid I've ever met in my life. What are you doing? We're swimming. We're going swimming. We're playing at the beach." I'm like, "I'll be right back. You should do it. Go out there and do it. Like, try it. It's so fun." And so I ran all the way home, got the thing, came back and just started surfing from that day forward. And I was hooked, man. And that was right before going into fifth grade. I'm sorry, she can't, yeah. I surf every day. Could be the best kid. I could be the best kid in fifth grade. Thanks. Chicks will dig me. I was already into chicks and I was already like liking girls and all that. So—and I was like, "Chicks will dig me. I can be the best surfer in school." And by the time I got to school, I was like, "Who surfs? You know? So-and-so has a real good reserve. He's been surfing since he was four." I was like, "Four? Fuck!" I'm way behind. And I surfed every day. And then when I was up in November, I had—I went—my mother worked at a real estate agent. She was—I'm not a real estate agent, but she was working in the office there. And all the real estate guys surfed. And they had like a company party. It was Del Mar. She worked for Del Mar Real Estate. They had a company picnic party at the beach and I, you know, we went. I got it. You know, and I went surfing with the guys and I had sort of grown up in pools all my life because my dad was an Olympic diver and doing diving shows and coaching diving and all stuff. My mother was a synchronized swimmer and a former professional water skier and just—we just—every single house we ever were at always had a pool. I just—I don't even remember learning to swim. But when I was really extremely fucking hyper and so I used to get this—I still am. Yeah. Bye. And sometimes it's fun and sometimes it's annoying to my wife. "You're so hyper." "I'm excited, babe. Super excited." No—and I used to get down—I used to—I remember this feeling of being at the bottom of the pool and getting into like a little ball and then going, and like, and just shooting to the top, you know, and feeling that sensation of the—I love the sensation of the water, you know. And so I took off on this wave. It was at Del Mar, around 15th Street. I took off on this wave and I fell off the board. And I went to the bottom and I was so hyper, I just choked right back up at the same time. The board had gone down into the water and went, "Nyow!" and just went—before I even opened up my eyes, it hit me in the nose. Like, really just—and I didn't pass out. But I remember just going—it was like just full stars just—and not sure what happened. Came up, didn't know what was going on, but my whole—my nose had been like broken in four places. My lip was cut completely, my septum and all this—my whole nose was just basically split, you know, like it just split. And my lips, everything. So I got a—you know, went to the hospital and plastic surgery, two surgeries over a year, cast on my face, my nose giant and swollen. In those classes. Wow. But I vowed never to surf again. A lot of time in the hospital and stuff like that. And so what ended up happening was we lived by the beach. And thank God there's no phones, you know, home video games and none of that, you know. There's nothing to do but go to the beach. So I told my mother, I'm like, "I'm not—I'm never surfing again. I might skateboard. I might—I'm going to be a skateboard pro, probably." I was really into skateboarding. Skateboarding was big in San Diego. So anyway, you know, after a while it was just like, "All right, fuck. All the kids are at the beach. All right, I guess I'll go down there," you know. So when I'm not surfing, I just go down and swim or whatever. And there was a kid, I don't know, somehow I was like, "All right," but he's going in the water and I'm like sitting there. Like, "I'm going to—on those kids' kneeboard." You know, like, "I'll kneeboard." I paddled out with my friends and, you know, Encinitas is such a nice windless, you know, clear water. It's really nice. And I remember this wave. It was like—had this really beautiful—like, it just looked like a water mound. You know, like just a beautiful, blue, green water mountain. How take—all I remember is being on my knees for about, hit five, you know, like a couple of seconds or—and then going like, "What the fuck am I doing?" Like—and I just popped up to my feet and was like, "Whoo!" Because I—well, I probably wasn't going when it felt like I was, you know, because I had to—three months from before. I was like—and it finished that wave. I was like—the paddle back out and I was back out there and I was like, "Back on." And then it wasn't my board. It was this kid who was like two or three years younger. And I was like, "Hey kid, you ought to leave the board at my house. I live right by the beach. You can't put a board on the bus so you could come down and surf every day. You know, your parent—you can't drive. So, you know, like I'm a con artist, you know, telling the kid, 'This will be good for you. It'll be really good for you. I'll take good care of it,' the whole thing." And the kid—I can remember—I remember the kid kind of going, "Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know." But me going, "No, you're actually too young. You don't even know better. This will be much better for you." And I appropriated the board for a little while until the kid finally goes, "Can I get my board back?" And I was like, "All right." Ha. And then I ended up getting my own board. Yeah, that's kind of a long story. Do I remember my first wave?
Michael Frampton
Yeah, so it sounds like you're like—as soon as you discovered, as soon as you found Jesus on the beach and started surfing—but you kind of got hooked straight away. But not only did you get hooked on surfing, you got—it sounds like you already knew you wanted to be an athlete because you were thinking about skateboarding and, like, you wanted to be the best. Like, straight away you're surfing. "I want to be the..."
Brad Gerlach
Best. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it was related by—I don't know if you can see, like, you can't quite see—my dad was jumping out of balloons, meh, into like doing a daredevil act in like Monday Night Football and like on TV and like—my dad was my hero. I was like, "Dude, I have to be the..." Like, I had drive. That is—I still do. I have a lot of drive. And it's good. I have a lot of—like, I didn't understand it totally, but I do now. Relate to all the—yeah, the Rocky movie, the... I relate to some of the Brazilians. I relate to—if you really look at the guys—it's funny, not funny, but it is quite interesting. Aki, Tommy... Aki, Tommy, Kelly. What else? Coming from—at least those guys coming from real—from broken homes. Broken relationships, not maybe, you know—John, maybe no dad. I mean, there's just like so much. POTS. I don't think Paul had a relationship with his dad at all. Or if he did, it wasn't good. And you don't know this, like, you don't know how much this sort of affects you and, like, get out there and you got other alpha males and you're like, "Fuck you, man. I want to... I will. What's your problem?" Yeah. Yeah. And basically it's like, "I want to win." You know what I mean? "Well, I want to fucking win too." And later in life, you go, "Thank God those guys were there because they drove you to be as good as you can be." The power of emotion. It's just—and if you can couple the power of emotion with intellect, and some athletic talent—don't have to be the most talented. I wasn't the most talented. I come from athletic genes, but still, I wasn't the most talented. I'd say—I used to hear all the time, "Man, your friend's really good." I used to hear that all the time. I'd be like—it used to hurt.
Michael Frampton
Did that drive you more?
Brad Gerlach
Yeah. Totally, I was like, fuck it. I'm going to get up earlier. You know, like it just was like it hurt. So if I ever see like or learn of another kid that has got that, I'm like, yeah. Yeah. There's—that's a vital ingredient. Without that, you got some people who are all these naturally talented, you know, sometimes if it's too easy for people, they're like, yeah, I can do it or not. It's, you know. Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Michael Frampton
Well, it's that saying, isn't it? Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard.
Brad Gerlach
Well, and then you got to add in—you got to add in intellect. And you have to add in humility, because that's the thing that I think a lot of athletes have—are stubborn. I was. And the stubbornness is what gets you a certain way because you're like, goddamn it, I am not coming in until I make that turn. So I used to stay out until the dark and I'd be like, fuck, I got to make it before I come in. I’d get so mad. But like, yeah. Then there's a point where your will or your, you know—it stands in your way. For me, what I think I was quite gifted in is being, in a couple of ways—not athletic, well, athletically, but not coordinated. I wasn't that coordinated, I think, but I was—but I'm hyper-observant. And I am able to use my sense of humor and I always used—I came from, you know, pretty much no money. So I didn't have a car, I didn't have this, I didn't have that. So I just learned how to be likable and to adapt to whatever situation by cracking some jokes or being funny or making the situation more fun. If it was more fun and you brought me than if you did it, you know, like, how could I do this? How can I get myself to the beach? You know, like—I mean, having that kind of—I look back on that and I—it wasn't like a—I mean, I just looked over at a guy and I was like, I'm like, that guy's got a car. You know? Maybe he can take me to the beach. I'm going to go see if I can be friends with that guy. Like, okay, if I have a genuine friendship, not like a full—not like a user situation, more like, hey. We just got to—can we laugh and have a good time? And then let's jump in the car and go surfing, great. So rather than like, my mom's taking me to the beach, I guess I'll just stay home, you know—no way. Not me. I was like, all right, I'll skateboard, fuck it, three miles away. And then during—that was a big—so when we moved from Encinitas, where I learned to surf—sorry, Leucadia—and we moved to Encinitas, kind of three miles from the beach, and I wanted to surf Beacons because that's what I knew. That's what my friends were. So I got up before school and I skateboarded there. That whole way I would have it designed. I would be able to predict, here comes that tree that folds over. Here it is. Okay, MR inside Sunset Bowl. I would mimic the way his wrist would—and I'd be like—and this is like 6:30 in the morning, you know, and I'm in there going. And then by the time I got down to the beach, I'd be sweaty. And I'd be fired up and my other friends would be like, it's pretty bad today. You know? And I remember not a single person out in the water—a seagull. But yeah, we're feeding the seagulls or whatever. And I was like, I'm out there. I'm hot, sweaty. I'm not skateboarding all that whole way just to not get in the water. And on top of that, another person told me, like, if you want to get good, you have to surf every day. The guy spoke kind of out of the side of his mouth. He's like, you want to get fucking good? He said fuck every other word. You want to get fucking good? You got to fucking surf every day. There's kids in Australia that are fucking 10 years old. They're better than Mark Richards. They just fucking can't get out of school yet, but they're fucking coming. You want to fucking do it? You got to fucking get out there every day. And I took every word. I'm like, okay, I'll do it. Because I was not the best kid. Sounds like. It's just like those impressionable years and those things that I took on, man. If I didn't do that, I just wouldn't—I wouldn't have got as good.
Michael Frampton
Yeah. So that whole journey from then to going towards turning pro, was there any major plateaus in your technique and performance that you remember?
Brad Gerlach
The most major thing was when I was about 15. I won the junior national title and the whole series of the NSSA. And all my friends that I competed with kind of all faded, and I was the only one left. So we moved to Huntington Beach. So I moved to a new area with my best friend. And usually when you go to a new area, you move there and you're alone and you're like, okay, I need to meet new friends. I had a rekindling of my best friend, who was—he was a better surfer than me. And so he—but he was the best guy, and we just pushed each other all the time. So when I moved to Huntington, that was huge—like juice in my surfing—but it was a juice in socializing. It was a very social, fun place to live. And I kept losing in these NSSA events. And I just kept—I couldn't figure out the competition. I was making all these mistakes and like a lot of wave choice mistakes. And I realize now I did because I have ADD, and I just wasn't able to like—I’d get so mad at myself. I'm like, why did I do it? People are like, dude, you just—I took that closeout. I'm like, I know. I don't know why. I don't know why, you know. Like it was just driving me crazy. And because ADD, I think it really helps me with like how I'm a coach, how I can hyper-focus on something. I needed help in just being able to switch my energy into how to wait for the waves and feel the waves coming and do all this stuff, but I didn't have a coach or someone that could help me with that. And each weekend, my friends would be like, we went partying, did this and that, and it was so fun. And I felt like my life was kind of like—I was going to these contests. And I was just like losing out. And all my friends are having the best time on the weekend, surfing and having fun and laughing. And I was like, that's like real life. This contest thing is kind of just this middle life, you know. And I was like—I came back and I just told my dad, I go, I think I'm going to quit because it's just—go to bed early on Friday and go to the contest and I fucking lose and I'm like—and I certainly—I know I surf better than most of the guys there. What the fuck do I lose? I guess I'm just not that good. You know, I don't know. And he goes—I go, you know what? I think I might go back to school. 'Cause I was kind of going to night school, and like I just didn't—you know. And he goes, no. Go back to school? He always had a funny story about—he's like, go back to school? Fuck. There must be something wrong. You know, I'll come down and take a look. Okay. So he came down to watch me. And this is like a total—like, if there was ever like a fork in the road or whatever it is—he watched, he came down. I surfed. I felt good. I came out like kind of a little bit with swagger in my step, like, yeah. What do you think? And he's just like, you looked terrible. And I was like, what? He's like, your fucking arms are going all this way. And that piece is fucked a lot too, which I actually quite like it. But Hungarian, I don't know. And they’re going this way and going that way. They're flying all over the place. I'm like, I need to do that. You know? Like what? He goes, no, you don't. And I go, you don't even surf. What do you know? He goes, well, I know I don't surf, but I know when something's wrong and that's wrong, you know, or something like that's not good. And I'm like—I was just blown away. I was like, what a dick. But like, whoa. Is there something wrong? Like, I was kind of like, whoa. And then we went back to the beach. Then went back to the beach. Then went back to the beach. And he started to explain things and movement and all this stuff. And he has just a wealth of stuff because he grew up in Hungary. He started diving when he was 10. He was the best diver in the world from—in '59 and '60. He had defected from Hungary in '56 and couldn't go to the Olympics in '60 when he was at his peak because he had already competed for Hungary in '56, and the Americans wouldn't let him go. The Olympic rule wasn't like that. But all the best divers were in the US then, and he won two years in a row. He was just super good. And then he even coached like Greg Louganis for a little bit. Like he's just—my cousin is—she was in the Barcelona and Seoul Olympics for Hungary diving and now she's the Boston—University of Boston—diving coach. So the coaching and the teaching and all that is in the DNA, you know. My uncle was the diving coach for Hungary and for her dad and for Qatar for a while. So yeah, it's just—my dad tells stories of his coach who was like pretty much raised in a Siberian prison camp. And he's a little guy, but he was the arm wrestling champion of the entire prison camp. And he's just a technical genius. Some old-world genius shit and that's come through. That's in me. Thousands of hours of conversation with my dad. So the changing of the—of right then and there, what my dad—first he had to learn all the terminology with surfing and this and that and the other. And he would say stuff and I'd be like, I don't know what you're saying. He's like, well, your cuts look good and your snaps look fucked or whatever. And I'd be like, what is a cut? And I'm like, you know, we had really funny—some fun, some funny stuff. Until he got a video camera. He'd be like—I’d come in and I’d think, all right. He'd go, you look great. You're looking good. And in my mind, I'm like, I know what he's talking about because that one section, I just hammered that thing, you know? And he goes, but a couple of things didn’t look so good. And I was just saying, that’s probably some big rail. Yeah, I caught a couple of rails or whatever. And the thing, like the wave would come, I'm like, this is the one that I really ripped on. And the pinnacle moment came when I thought—and I'm like, fuck, that doesn't look good. As I'm thinking to myself, that didn’t look anything like how it felt. My dad’s like, that looks like shit. As you can tell, he’s really blunt. And I go, yeah, I agree. And then something else I did that I didn’t even remember or take in or whatever—he thought, that looks good, right there. There it is. And he's like, that's it. You know? And he would like—and I go, yeah, right. And then I’m like, I don’t remember that. He’s like, well, you have to fucking know what looks good. What looks good has to feel good and you have to have that connection so that you know how to go out there and when you’re in a competition, you know what to do. Because back then, you know, they really—they read out your scores, but it was like, you know, you kind of had to know, it’s probably an 8.5 right there. You know what I mean? Or, you know, or that was probably only a four or that was this or that was that, you know. So he’s like, you need to know this stuff. And without his influence in my surfing, I don’t know, man. I don’t know if I—I used to marvel at how many ideas my dad had and how his brain would work. I'm like, how does he come up with all that stuff? And now I’m a complete machine. Continual ideas just wah wah. I’ve got so much. And then I’m thinking about my students and watching surf. Like I just have so much. But he really was—I used to kind of think, fuck, man, he never passed down how to use a hammer and a screwdriver and a this and a that. You know, like he didn’t show me how to like—you know this. But then later when I became a teacher, I’m like, that’s what he showed me. Gave me the skill to be—and the confidence, the deep confidence—to be a teacher. And once I chose being a teacher, I was like, that’s why I’m such a—I’m like an astronaut. I just search and I go out into space and I gather all this data and I bring it back down for other surfers to benefit, you know. And I’m like, it all like made so much sense.
Michael Frampton
I'm guessing like as a diver and a dive coach, your focus is grace and efficiency.
Brad Gerlach
Power. Power and beauty. Power, beauty, intangible stuff. He used to tell me all about projections. I project. Project power. Project fun. So when someone's watching you, they're going, whoa, that person is—they look like they're having so much fun. Projects.
Michael Frampton
Project fun. I've never heard that before. Well, look, all you have to do is watch Stephanie Gilmore. She's the epitome of it. She looks like she's smiling on just doing this. She looks like she's having so much fun. Then go look at somebody like, or something, you know, he looks like he's just working. You know? You're just working hard and you're like, of course you can cut it apart technically and go, "That was sick, and that was sick, you know, and that was really good, and that was high level, and that was this." You spin that around, you go, hey, Kalohe, project some fun. The idea in itself right there would be like, hey. That's a good idea. I did that a lot. And whenever I didn't project the fun, my dad could tell and he'd be like, you tried too hard. Look at that, it's not—you’re grinding and you know I need this? As well as other things being able. So my Wave Key and my teaching, it's not common knowledge of this. It's not like I—this is taken from surfing. So many things are taken from—well, not from surfing. One of the things my dad would say—I would go out and warm up. And this is how I helped Conner a ton. And that's how I knew how to help Conner. But he would watch me surf and I wouldn't be surfing well. And he'd be like—and I'm like—I always think I can fix it. And I'm like, fuck, I'm just getting in rhythm of the waves. I got to go in. So I go in. I'm like, yeah. He's like, you're just fucking standing there. You know, your body's not going down and up. You're just fucking—you're standing in the same position, trying to do everything in the same position instead of—he's like, just go back out there and go down and up. Don't even try to fucking do turns. Down and up. Down and up. Try it. Go back out and go—you know who has that heaps is Dane Reynolds. And then I would start to do it. And then I could—then I just let the maneuvers go. And I was just—bring her in. Vroom. And I'm like, whoa. He's like, what? Not just projecting fun, but power. Not force—power. Springing off the wave and stuff like that. Like you have to have good technique too. If your technique's off, it's quite hard to do this up and down thing. But when your technique's good and you can add this element to it, it takes a whole—it's not force. And I know this because I used to think it was force. And in a—you know, the fact that surfing for me when I was young was a release of my anger against my mother. And then my dad not being around. And my drive and people, you know, people saying this other person was better or whatever, I was pissed off. And so I would force a lot of stuff because I thought that that's—and I heard a quote yesterday or something from Einstein, "You can't solve a problem with the same thinking that caused the problem." And so you hear the vernacular and all the stuff within surfing is rip, tear, shred, fucking kill it, bash it, fucking, you know. So I'm over there going, yeah, I'll fucking bash it harder than anybody. You know what I mean? And part of that attitude is good because people are like, I can feel it. But then you get Tom Curren over here. And he's just surfing circles around you. Because he's so well-timed and not forcing it, but using the power of the wave with killer technique. And no matter how much you're trying to kill it, you're nowhere near him. Nowhere near him. He's blown out of the water. You know, so, you know, it's like—the cool thing is when you have this discovery, you go, whoa. It's an endless world of—I can just keep going in that direction. And never reach an end. But it doesn't matter that I reach—I don't need to reach it, as long as I'm going in that direction. And surfing is the medium.
Michael Frampton
The word key, spelt K-I. Why did you choose that word and what does it mean?
Brad Gerlach
Well, I was going to choose chi. But chi and ki mean the same thing—life energy. In Tai Chi, it's not just a series of movements. There's energy involved in all of the movement and it's—you tap into this energy. And it moves you. In a very powerful way coming from a very deep source. I chose "key," Wave Key, because my goal is to help people harness the power of the wave without excessive muscle or force, or to do the most radical shit with the minimal amount of effort. So that any of the effort is intentional. And express it—not strained. With good timing and good technique. The intention is to connect in with the wave and to feel the wave's full power. You're going to lessen your chances of getting injured. And you're going to be able to surf for a lot longer. Longevity. Years. Surfing may come in your later years. One of the inspirational people that I never met but have gleaned a lot from is Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido, who said Aikido is a transcending violence martial art. It's a self-defense. There isn't striking. Now, there's different forms of Aikido. Steven Seagal's much more aggressive. That's counter to what Morihei Ueshiba was teaching—to transcend the violence, that you do not hurt your attacker, that you love your attacker. And Aikido is very circular. It's built for multiple attacks. What you try to do is not hurt your attacker. Eventually, you're invisible, and the attacker can never get you. And eventually, the attacker runs out of energy and has the realization that, "Since I can't even grab this person, they probably could hurt me pretty badly and they chose not to." And so then that person walks away less violent and less revengeful and all this kind of—it’s very powerful, good shit. But what—the thing I got so much from Morihei Ueshiba was that his best Aikido was done in his seventies when he lost all—pretty much all of his muscle, because he relied more on ki. And ki is coming from the center. It's coming from the center of ourselves and coming from the center of the universe. And they talk about it, you know, and they go really deep esoteric in there. And so that's the direction of Wave Key is—you know, you learn the technique. But you're not copying me. I'm just giving you sort of the structure in a way. Kind of similar to music, I suppose. You learn music, but you don't copy music for the rest of your life if you're going to go on to be a composer and write music and all that stuff. You learn the structure, but—you can break the rules and you can do this and you can do that because you already know. You know music. You know how to. So I'm at a split. There hasn't been any formal teaching in surfing. And I've searched. So all of this is self-taught. And I know there's a lot of people that have copied it and replicated it and tried to replicate it on skateboards. They were doing that in the '50s. I was doing that with my friends when I was 14. We were going to show—I was doing that on the skateboard when I was 14 years old. No, sorry, 13. You know, I was pretending—Larry Birdman was pretending I'm a skateboarder. He was surfing. It's all there. I bring a technical there. So what are you doing with your skeleton? And—to place your weight over your feet. Your bones over your feet to be able to control the surfboard. And it’s—how do you do a one-foot wave with barely any power, or a six-foot wave at Backdoor, or Chopes, or a long point wave like Jeffreys Bay, a super blown-out left-right-left suck bowl shore break fade out into another thing? Like there—what do you do with your body through all of that stuff? You couldn't memorize any of it. But when you build body awareness, you see it. That's it. And you connect into the wave—the better you get, the wave tells you what to do. Shows you what to do in a way. And that's what they said in Aikido too. My sensei in Aikido—not Morihei Ueshiba, but the guy who learned—he said to me, he's like, yeah, at first, you know, the attacker's coming. At first you're like, whoa, it's all happening so fast. Then you get a little better and it's like, okay, I know what to do. Then when you get on my level, it's like coming at full slow motion and I have time to look and go, that's really interesting. And that—and I'm like, that's exactly what it's like with surfing. At first it was like, drop it in. Whoa. My God. I want to go that way. The board's going this way. Then as it got better and better, it all started slowing down. To the point where I'm like, I need to surf someplace more radical. And then you go there and you're like—it starts all over again. Then you go radical, more radical till you're black diamond and you know—and you go in like full—and you go into these really high level because it slows down enough for you to be able to read and know what to do. Now, not saying it's like always—I know what to do. I still make mistakes. And I see Slater make a mistake. I see everybody making mistakes. That's what keeps us coming back for more. So it's about your own... Sometimes when people make mistakes, it's because they're not paying attention or something else is going on or something, you know, they're not as connected. So with Wave Key, I teach people how to really connect to themselves. And that's what you do in Aikido. First, you connect to yourself. And then you're able to connect to the attacker. I go through that a lot in Wave Key—like how to take the tension off so you start from no tension, so that you put the tension into it. Rather than starting in a tense place, you don't know where you are. So you can build tension in—you build the tension in on purpose so that you can release it in the turns and all this stuff. It's pretty incredibly awesome to me for my own training still. So cool. And I learn something new—I go straight to the floor and I go, let me work this out. And I'm able to feel in my feet what rail I'm on, whether I'm on the toe side rail or the heel side rail, and where the position of the most power is, when I need to get off the back foot, when I need to be on the front foot to accelerate. Yeah, it's been—and I don't surf much since I've had kids. I had two knee surgeries. Where I live, it takes a long time to go surfing. So I don't get a quick surf. I just kind of just go, you know what, I'm going to surf when my kids get a little bit older because I just—I want to be a good dad. I want to be here. I don't want it to be too heavy on my wife. My wife's such a beautiful person and so giving and all this stuff. But if I take too much, that whole giving thing—I don't want her to do it all. You know what I mean? So I just kind of—I do. I just do Wave Key. I teach. And occasionally when I get to surf, dude, it's like—yeah. Ooh. And so I'm able to slow down and get a lot of joy out of even a closeout.
Michael Frampton
This. Let's get into the details maybe on one aspect of WaveKey. Now I've heard you speak a little bit about the difference between a pop-up and a take-off. Can you go into that a little bit more maybe?
Brad Gerlach
If you do the takeoff in slow-mo, you realize it's not a pop-up. You're not popping anything. In fact, the popping part is a lot of times the problem because it's inefficient and it sends you. There might be a time where your entire body is not touching the surfboard. And so in the WaveKey takeoff, I try to get you with three points of contact, you know, immediately. So that your back foot goes down first and your hands are—you replace the weight in your hands with your front foot without your hands coming off the board. Because you got to think the surfboard is on water, so any tiny little thing you do affects the surfboard. Tiny. You're just—and I think this word "pop-up" comes from—it may have come from the guys in Waikiki from the Beach Boy Day when they had—coming from Kentucky and they're out there on a 12-foot surfboard and you could probably get—you know, you're riding on a little, you know, very horizontal type of wave and you know you could probably pop your feet and you're up, you know, and you look like—you know, and you look like those movies in the '50s and they're going, "Yeah!" you know? And so I'm not exactly sure where this word pop-up came from. But I think being a teacher, words bring up images, and you want the images of your student—you want them to imagine a sophisticated way of getting up on the surfboard. And when we're talking about shortboards—because I'm pretty sure your podcast is more about shortboards than it is about longboards—and I'll leave longboarding off to the experts. But the shortboard takeoff, you're tilting the surfboard on the takeoff. A lot of times when you're taking off, you're trying to put yourself in a position where you're in the most powerful part of the wave to get, you know, in the deepest part so you can get the longest ride and you can get a lot of speed on the drop and all these types of things. So you do lots of different types of things depending on the wave. But you want the rail of the surfboard to engage in the drop so that it slips down the wave faster. As well as—I think with the pop-up, people are thinking that the surfboard stays in a flat position, and it doesn't. It turns on one side or the other. And so a lot of people don't get their front leg in the right position, myself included, when I started studying it. When I was younger, I did. And then as I got older, I think if my hand is my foot and my zipper is my stringer, I think what was happening is because my left foot on the left side of my body would go straight forward, it ended up being like this. I didn't know it. Felt the same to me. And then you get into a tube ride, and your head is kind of right here. And you're coming out of this tube ride, you think you've made it for sure, and some tiny little bump or some tiny little thing hits your head and you fall. And you go, well, how the fuck did that happen? My God, what a coup, what a—right? But all you needed to do was going—yeah—and then your head's underneath you. It's martial arts, right? Like in Aikido, they have this thing—I think it's called Kazushi. And so it's the movement and you bring yourself to center—connecting to yourself. So you're connected like three or four inches below your navel and in the center of your body is where your energy is. And then you send it all the way out to your limbs and all the way there, still connected here. So when the attacker comes to get you, for instance, just basically you're going to grab your arm or something like this. If you aren't rigid—and not that you're noodley—but your energy is not in your arm. They can't feel it. For a moment. They can't feel where you are, so they keep reaching until they can feel the stability because we're on two feet. We're not on three. So when the person grabs the arm, and you're rigid, there's the third leg, there's the tripod, there's the physical law of that part, and they know where you are and they know what to do. When you're not there, they keep reaching and get slightly off balance, and you move your center in such a way and put them on the floor, relaxed and softly, and be like, "Are you okay?" That's really cool. But that's the same thing with surfing. If your foot is not underneath your head—if it's slightly off—and I'm talking a fucking centimeter, and you're coming out of a tube, you can get knocked off. And that's when you see—you're like, how did that top-level pro at Backdoor—he's coming out of the tube and he fell right there? What happened? And I just look and go, his foot was probably this far off. And then you look at Slater and you look at John and you look at the very best tube riders and you look at where their feet are, and they're there. They're there. And on the big wave guys too—where their feet are as they're dropping in on a 10-foot surfboard. So I got—I started coaching and working with Keala recently. And she's been taking a bunch of falls. And it's all because of where her head is at. So I can tell her that, yeah, hey, your head's up. But she's got to train. Like you said, in slow motion. And the slow motion—like I don't recommend doing WaveKey fast because I don't think—you don't need to do it fast for one, because when you're riding a wave you're going to—I need to speed up here. I need to slow down. If you do WaveKey too fast, you're going to bypass critical parts of your nervous system that need the information to know what to do. I pretty much—even though I've been working with—like Tyler Watanabe is my longest consistent student—and we just don't do it fast. I've been working with him almost eight years. We just don't—we don't go to the point where—I mean, we can. He does it so—he does it better than I do. And I could say, all right, let's speed it up a little. And maybe we will. Or you can do different speeds. But that slow motion thing is really—and when I studied Aikido, I did it all in slow motion too. Slow, without getting hurt.
Michael Frampton
Yeah, there's an expression: slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.
Brad Gerlach
Yeah, it makes sense.
Michael Frampton
Yeah. You can't go fast if you're not smooth. And you can't learn how to be smooth if you don't go slow.
Brad Gerlach
Yeah, no, I always—I loved—I loved that science fiction thing by Frank Herbert, "The Dune." Did you ever remember that book or that—it was called Dune, and it was science fiction on another planet, and they had—they're on this other planet and they had a force field. And they would fight another person in a force field. And the only blow that could get through the force field was a slow one. So they had to find such a way and time it in such a way to where they can—in slow—and then it would go through the force field, and we could get them. And I was always like, that is so cool. There's something so intelligent about that, you know? But yeah, that's why I called it WaveKey. WaveKey was taken, and actually now that it's called WaveKey, I like WaveKey better than WaveKey. It's funny because some people call it WaveKey like K-E-N-G—why? And that could work too. You know? So, you know. But it's deeper than—it is a bit of a key, but...
Michael Frampton
I like how you just—before you described the takeoff as shifting your body weight from your chest initially, but then from your hands to your front foot. Now to transfer the weight from your hands to your front foot is not easy. I would say 95% of listeners do not have the strength and mobility to do that.
Brad Gerlach
It's not strength. So that's the difference—it's using your skeleton. Not your muscles. So they probably have too much strength. Their torso is too wooden. As we grow up doing push-ups. Peace. And your torso takes a lot of hits and things, and we hold stuff emotionally. Plus, when we're paddling, you know, we're like this for hours. I mean, paddling is a counter—counterproductive to having a loose, relaxed torso. So we have to do mobility things to loosen, to do. And I have hurt knees because my torso was too tight before I learned how to—from my incredible mentor, who passed away last year. I stayed with her for 15 years. Feldenkrais. And being able to access—I still do, I continue to do that. And I think that I would attribute my—that to me—to my surfing looking less wooden than people who are 30-plus years younger than me. When I surf, I look less like a piece of wood than they do. And that is by what I learned—not because I'm just naturally loose, and I've been smoking doobies, and I'm just this loose old man. No way. My dad's way looser than I am and he used to tell me all the time, "Just loosen up." And I'm like, "Yeah, great idea, Dad, but how?" Great idea. My dad didn't spend his life going like this. My dad's legs are all big and he's climbed ladders and dug off things, you know what I mean? But he's like, "I'm fucking loose," you know? It's mental. It's a mental looseness. And I'm like, I get it, but I don't know how. How? So that's when—studying Feldenkrais since 2005 and doing movements and doing all that stuff—it's so much in WaveKey. WaveKey is not exercising. It's a learning method. Like Feldenkrais. You're learning all the time by practicing. You're learning. It's been wonderful. I can teach beginners. I can teach—the beginners are kind of limited because they don't have wave experience, you know, so, you know, we just stay within that. The takeoff. And when they're ready, start to move, you know? I can find weakness—or not—maybe areas where there's less awareness in the very top-level surfers. Name them, I can find something. It's not a negative. It's just—take if you—my dad said this one too. He's like, "You can't just stay at a level. Plateauing isn't plateauing. You're not staying at the same level. You're either going up or you're going down. You're getting worse or you're getting better. You're not plateauing." So if you think you're plateauing, you're getting worse. And you're like, fuck, you know? How do I get better? And I think that's a—and that is what I'm confident that WaveKey and what I do with WaveKey help surfers get better. In—not sure which area. Like, hey, you want a better cutback or just smoother transitions in between turns, which will help your cutback and timing. You know, it's just—yeah, I'm on maybe almost 12 years of teaching, of developing and teaching this. So it's not like I—shit, quarantine—yeah, this is a good time to release, like, you know, some online shit.
Michael Frampton
It's just—yeah. You know. What are the most common mistakes that you see out there with the sort of average intermediate surfer?
Brad Gerlach
Their takeoff, most people's takeoff is pretty—they don't get in a good position for control until they're outside the power of the wave. So then the wave finishes, and they're like, "Yeah, just got my feet right," you know, or, "I just kind of started to connect." So that's probably the one I see. The other one I see is surfing is so counterintuitive. It is the head. The head moves off-center all the time, and you can see how that affects. I watch the rail of the board, and you can see it dig. And it's—you cannot accelerate if you lean over. Your body stops twisting, goes into your nervous system, smarter than you, and it just goes, "You're not going to fuck me up again. I'm going to stabilize you so you don't fuck me up." And you're—and you got—you listen to the WSL and they're like, "Sweep that arm through," you know what I mean? It's so primitive. Put the arm through. You're not going to be able to put the arm through if your nervous system is going, "I'm going to fall over." So I'm not going to sweep my arm through. And you're like, "I can't seem to get my fucking arm through," you know, no matter how hard I try. And you know what I mean? And it's getting that, like, security and confidence underneath your feet. And when you feel it in your feet, your upper body can do whatever. It can do whatever it allows you to, because you don't—you're not leaning this way and leaning that way. And I hear coaches say, "Lean into the turn." The words are so important. "Lean into the turn." Define that. What does that mean, "lean into the turn"? It's not leaning into the turn. And I can tell you why. You know, I can break it all the way down to where it's not leaning. Now, Gabriel Medina—he can lean into the turn because the guy's so fast, proprioceptive, you know, he's like leaning on the turn intentionally because he wants to add this expressive thing to his backside air. Fucking whoa. Of course he can do it. Average surfer? No. You're going to dig rail, you're going to slow down, you're going to miss this section, and you're going to be like, "Fuck, now I got to go get another one." And another wave doesn't come in, or six guys battle out, or, you know, and you're like, "I blew that one and that was the best wave of the morning." That's the purpose of studying and practicing WaveKey. So you don't blow the wave in the morning because you never know when that thing's going to come. You never know. Ready man. It's the same in fighting, obviously. You know, if you're practicing, if you're training fighting and all that stuff, you never know when someone's going to jump. But you know if your training is up, you'll probably be able to deal with it instinctually. And I think that this is new for surfing because people are—you know, you hear stuff—you're just born with it, or just surf. Just surfing—if you're doing something wrong, you're going to continue. You're never going to fix it on the wave. You're going to fix it on a wave? It's all—even in the fucking wave pool—you're not going to fix it, dude. It's all happening too fast. You can't think. Slow motion in a controlled environment. Get the confidence. Intellectually understand what to do. And then you have to experience it by going through it and going through it so that your nervous system knows it. You don't have to think about it. It's like martial arts. You're not going to be a black belt—even if you're a super good fighter—you're just not going to be a black belt in jiu-jitsu just because you're a super good fighter. Now, you're going to be one faster than someone else probably because of your body awareness. But still, there's technical things that you're going to go through and go, "Brilliant. Wow, I don't even have to try. Homo." That's what goes on in WaveKey. And visit.
Michael Frampton
It's kind of like—it makes me think of dance. Like when you see a dance teacher teach a student a new choreography, they teach it very slowly and very deliberately. And the dancer will need to learn it forwards and backwards. And only then would you start thinking about speed and performance.
Brad Gerlach
That's—so yeah, this is great. So there's the choreography. There's the technical, right? It needs to be shown. So there's that. Then the speed part of it is connected to the music. You can't do it faster than the beat, or it looks—no matter how fluid and all—it'll look fucked. It's the same in surfing. You cannot do shit faster than the wave. Otherwise, it looks terrible. You're ahead in the power. And then you start forcing shit around. When you make a mistake on your timing, you can force it because—to get—because you've made a mistake and you force it a little bit to get yourself back in over your board or, what, you know, whatever. You know what I mean? But the ultimate best surfing I've ever seen and I've ever done myself has—well, I paddle back out after the wave and going, "That was so effortless. Body doesn't—I didn't tweak a single thing. And that was a lot of anti-gravity-defying shit right there. That felt fucking good." You know what I mean? Like—and there wasn't—I think too, like, when I listen to—like, people have a different relationship to the water and like, pushing against the water might feel good. It might feel good. It did to me a lot. And there are certain times when I'm in a good leverage zone and I actually might have a bit of attitude going and I want to push the water a little bit, you know. But there's definitely people who have homes, right? They sort of live in the pushing water homes. And they don't even feel good until they push a lot of water. But the thing is—to grow, to learn, to go deeper, to go—there's time to push and time not to push. What I noticed with my, you know, with Connor, for instance, and my student Taro—Connor likes to push the water a lot. And it works well if he's in certain types of waves, and then it doesn't work when he's in other types of waves. And so—and I know that because that's exactly what I felt too. I pushed the water all the time. And that's when my dad was like, "You look like fucking shit." And then we had arguments and then we watched the footage and then I'm like, "You're right." You know? There's waves that require less pressure for you to go faster, to accelerate. So you can get to a part of the wave that maybe—you time it just right, and then you can add your personal content to the wave. You know? But what I noticed with the whole surf world going jock—and I know it because Tom Carroll was training. Tommy Curren was training. I'm like, well, I can train. So I started fucking lifting weights and doing Chek training. I've fucking done every training too. Dancing, everything. I've been a scour—I’m just, you know, a learner. So what happened was when you got strong—this happened to me in the '80s—I was getting really strong and I was just powering my bottom turns. Like just grinding into my body. It's like burying the nose up. So there's only this much support. And not getting that great of an off-the-top. And I remember my coach at the time, his name's Greg Day. He's like, "Dude, you're fucking..." I mean, as a single still photo, it's going to look insane. But you're not getting the kind of spring and drive that—you know, to get off the top. You got to like lessen the pressure on the bottom turn a little bit. I'm like... And I watched it and I was like, "Fuck, you're right." But you know where that comes from? That comes from training. Because you're training, you're getting strong. So you're like, "Give it to it. That feels good right there." So it's dangerous to be doing a bunch of weightlifting, you know, squat work and all the power lifting and all this kind of stuff unless you have the mental sensitivity to go, "I know when to use it and when not to use it." This is where intellect comes in again, you know? So I watched my young student—I didn't start with Connor until he was 17. So he already had a lot of pattern and a lot of load. Connor's built like a fullback. He's a super strong guy. He's short, but he's fucking strong. You shake his hand, you're like—he's kind of like, "Bam," you know? So he just wants to give it on those waves. So I had to work with him about this, like lessening the pressure. I call him in. "Hey, just same exact attack. I'm gonna dial it down just a little bit." He'd go back out and he'd come back and he'd go, "God, that felt so much better." I'm like, "Well, you looked a lot better." Taro—going from really good pressure on the surfboard and then training and stuff like that—and he's training with my Feldenkrais sensei. He's trained better than probably any other surfer in the world. That's—I know other conversations, but he started getting really strong. He started putting the pressure into the board more and going a little slower. And I'm like, "Okay." I caught it before it became a habit. Caught it right there. Because we have such good relationship and so much rapport and so much conversation over years and years. He's like, "Okay." Yeah. I was 17 years old. You know what I mean? So he didn't go like three years of just grinding it out. I mean, even those WQS guys talk about—the WQS is a grind. I mean, I know it's a grind to travel, but when the waves are shitty, they're like, "It's grindy out there." That's the way they describe it. It's grindy. The grindy part comes from the fact that they're all on their back foot too much. Grinding instead of popping off of that back foot and springing and gliding. I joked—I said to him and my other student, Maxim, I said, "More of a glide. It's like glide and pop." They loved that. Cracked up and stuff. But like—it is gliding. There's so much gliding involved, you know, and that's all timing and technique. And then, yeah, well, with the dancing thing, it's basically like, you know, that dancer has to be so supple, so mobile, such good timing and in tune with the music. Not just to choreograph all the moves, but to express what the—especially with the ballet, right? Like the Swan Lake—express the animal or the story through their movement so that you don't notice that the dancer's personal problem comes through. Like the dancer has to be a vehicle, you know, and it's when you see high-level surfing, like some of the stuff John did at Margaret River a couple years ago, you know, like some of the ways—some of the way Kelly was moving in Bali, last Keramas, some of the stuff that you see, you know, you go, "Ooh." You know? It's so exciting to watch. You know, that's when they're not in the way. They're not limited or in their head or doing too much or too little. Full extension, right in time with the wave. So that's what WaveKey is. That's what I'm—and it starts with the fundamentals. It starts with the takeoff. And some of the people are like, "Dude, I already know how to take off, man. I've been surfing a long time." I'm like, "Yeah, but, you know—hey, you're dudes. Let's just start here. This is where we start. You don't like it—you know, I don't know, I think you should trust me, you know. But, you know, I—because, you know, the fact that you want to move forward is a good thing. But like, trust me and do it and you'll be there, you know."
Michael Frampton
Yeah, you have to, there has to be a balance. You have to do, you have to have some sacrifice in order to get better. I mean, anyone who's studied an instrument knows that. It's very hard to learn a song and play it. And it's this very slow and deliberate practice that sounds nothing like music leading up to that. And I've personally spent a lot of time practicing the takeoff... movement. Because years ago, I realized my takeoff was horrible. And I just couldn't—I couldn't transfer the weight from my chest to my hands to my feet without my hands leaving the board, and I realized I was making mistakes. And I'd say that's the one thing that has improved my own surfing the most is just getting that sorted, because I always tell people, if I snap my fingers and all of a sudden you're standing on your surfboard with your feet in the right place in the right part of the wave, surfing's easy. And that's the takeoff. But that's my point with the cutback and the top turn. The actual turns—if you can—the turns aren't that hard. It's getting into the position for the leverage to do the turn that's hard. That's the part you don't know. That's the part no one talks about. That's the part that—how do you train for that? But when you go surf a wave that's got a perfect bowl and it sets up for you, right? Like you're like, I think I can—I think these are the type of waves I need to be able to get better. You know, you still mess those ones up too. But...
Brad Gerlach
Yeah. I think, let me give you this. Because I was working with a guy yesterday, and he surfs a wave that’s got like a real suck-out thing and a backwash on it. And so again, I'm like, look man, you have to be—you have to think of it like being intimate with the wave and intimate with your strength. If you push away from the surfboard, are you intimate? No. No. You've got—how do you keep yourself—how late can a boogie boarder take off? And I still call them boogie boarders. How late can a boogie boarder take off on a wave and make it? They take off so late, right? Because they're intimate. They're fucking right there. You know what I mean? And so how do you do it with a pop-up, popping away from the surfboard? People are like, you got to be quick. Well, fuck yeah, when you do it—when you do it like that. You have to be extremely quick. How are you going to do that when you're 60? Like, you know what I mean? Well, guess I got to go ride a stand-up cruise board. Once I'm up, I'm good. You know? I'm not doing that. So it's about your skeleton. It's about your bones. And your bones—they last past your life. Your bones, you know—do stuff to keep your bones strong, of course. You could do weights and things like that for bone density and do things like that. And you got to be very strategic and careful as you grow and as you get older with all that stuff so you don't tweak anything. But basically, you stay intimate with the surfboard—with your head. You need—your back has to be—your back has to round and do all this stuff. So I go through all that. I'm going to do another live stream soon and go through this—intimacy on the takeoff. And your confidence too—when you're really close like that, your confidence on your takeoff, on everything. It's when you get far away from it, you start to go, whoa, it's a late drop. But when you're right down with it, you can make the latest. Both John and Kelly are so intimate. They drop so close. And you can start thinking, that's kind of cool. You can just use—you can say, I'm going to get cuddly. Here comes a nuts black one. I'm going to get cuddly with it. Versus—you know, like it's—dude, it's just—it's so cool. You know, in a way, it gets you excited for the next time that that's coming. You know, the best place to practice is closeouts because nobody's out there and you can go out there and farm them one after another, and nobody goes, you blew that closeout. The wave pool is one of the worst places to practice stuff because everybody is watching. Everybody's right there going, "Okay, so, that guy sucks. That guy's supposed to be a pro, and he just fell." I ate shit at the wave pool the other day. And I was underwater thinking, this is great. It's great for WaveKey. You know what I mean? But yeah, still make mistakes. But anyway, that's kind of...
Michael Frampton
What we've been talking about is so important for longevity too.
Brad Gerlach
Dude, you know what? Dude, you surf all your life, you have all this experience, and what? You get older and you're not supposed to reap the benefits of it? The other thing with WaveKey is you could be doing WaveKey and decide, hey, you know what? I want to spend a season in the mountains. I'm not going to surf for four or five months. You know what I mean? A lot of people think, shit, if I don't surf for four or five months, I'm going to lose it altogether. You know what I mean? And so they're a little bit chained to the ocean. You know, and it's like, I think if you're practicing WaveKey, you could go off and do—you could go live somewhere like, you know, off in the middle of nowhere for two years, do WaveKey on your holidays, get a few surfs in, come back to—you know what I mean? Like, you know, you'd be surprised at how much better you would surf away from the ocean. So in a way, it's kind of cool because you—I think what's given me a lot of my life is all the time I've done outside the water, experiencing all kinds of different stuff in life. And I can bring that back into, well, that's similar to this and that's similar to that. I can take a piece of this and put that in there and those sorts of—you know. And injury too. Like injured and go, I can't surf because I got a cut or your earache or I don't know what it is, you know, you can't surf. But you can keep yourself in tune so when you go back to surfing— I mean, I hear that all the time from the feedback from the—and call them subscribers. Sounds corny, but I like corny shit sometimes. From all the subscribers that are signed up to WaveKey, I get a lot of feedback saying, man, I didn't surf for three weeks. One guy said this the other day, I didn't surf for three weeks, but I stayed consistent with my schedule—WaveKey—and then I... And then I got to Hawaii and I felt better. I felt like I was better. I'm not surprised. I'm only surprised that the person's doing it consistently because that's the hardest part of all of this—is doing it.
Michael Frampton
Yes. Just doing it. Yeah, you just have to.
Brad Gerlach
Do it. Not for very long. Like I tell people, hey, you know what? Do the short takeoff practice frontside and the short takeoff practice backside. That's four minutes. Warm up for two minutes, that's six minutes. Just do that. Every day. That's your minimum. If you can't—Michael, if you can look at a wave—it might be Neos, it might be John's, it might be Chip Stern's, it could be some suck-ass wave that scares the shit out of you—but if you look at it and you own your takeoff and you know, chances are you're going to make the takeoff. Those waves start to look fun. Those waves look fun to Kelly Slater. He doesn't look at it, "Fuck it, I hope I make the takeoff." And when I towed giant waves, I was like, that looks fun. 'Cause I know I'm not going to fall on the takeoff because I'm already up. When everybody started going back to paddling, I'm like, ooh, I get stuck inside. And I don't know. I better be ready for that. But the takeoff—the take—and that was before I developed the WaveKey takeoff. But now, waves that—I mean, you still have to have balls and courage and stuff like that, and you still have to test it out and make sure it works in the water. But I would recommend doing that. Go surfing some closeouts. Closeouts are way—going to certain closeouts is way better than going to the gym. I got a question for you. What are these things surfers doing in quarantine? There's 14 days of quarantine up in Sydney. What are they doing? Yoga. Okay. Okay, cool. When you get out in the 14 days, you're going to be better at yoga. Great. Jumping jacks? What are they doing? What about Italo? What was Italo doing at 3:30 in the morning before his first wave at The Box?
Brad Gerlach
He was doing WaveKey, bud. He's doing his own version of WaveKey.
Michael Frampton
Exactly.
Brad Gerlach
I mean, that’s—that—all of—as soon as he did—as soon as he said that, I was like, there's a case in point right there.
Michael Frampton
Yeah. And his first wave should have been a 10, but I mean...
Brad Gerlach
It completely should have been a 10. It was so technical.
Michael Frampton
Yeah.
Brad Gerlach
He—now he—has an advantage because his head is always in the center.
Michael Frampton
His vestibular system is insane.
Brad Gerlach
Yeah, he's like a gymnast. He's like a gnarly Olympic gymnast. You know what I mean? I could still find places where it can be better, but you know, that's the kind of athlete that's—you know, most of the athletes that are the most fun to work with, because you make a suggestion and they go, "I never thought of that. I can try that right now."
Michael Frampton
Awesome. Brad, thank you so much for your time. What's the website? Where do people go to find out more and to sign up to WaveKey?
Brad Gerlach
It's wavekey.com. And I will give you a promo code, so anybody who is interested will get a—10% off. It's a year course. So we do allow people to pay in monthly installments, but it's more expensive if you pay in monthly installments. And if you want to cancel, you just send us an email and cancel. But I highly recommend signing up for the year, which is less than—like a—used to be like even a decent used surfboard. One year in your life—your surfing will change forever. It's whether you use it. If you don't—if you sign up and don't use it—well, you know. I can't really help you. What I do is I come on either every week or every two weeks and I do a live YouTube that's connected to the site. You can only see it if you're a member. And I will do something that pertains to each one of the forums, and I may go over something that happened currently. Like when the Pipe Masters was going on, I went through the ultra-late takeoff—what John, what Kelly, what these guys are doing—so I bring it. You get a—you know, it's kind of like I'm your teacher, you know. And you're able to ask me questions via my Instagram or through the site. You can ask questions. I usually am able to get back to you. You know, it's been able to manage all the expectations. And it's a fundamentals course based on—there's seven fundamental things that surfers need to know to be good. It's being able to take off on any wave. Bottom turn, which sets you up for all different types of top turns and, you know, and tube rides and all this stuff—you know, you got to learn that. Top turns. Right now there's just a fundamental basic top turn, but the frontside top turn is extremely difficult to do with good timing. So it's all the timing that I do. You do that, then there's the cutback with the rebound. Then there's tube riding. Then there's a floater, and then there's a basic air—just a straight air. Frontside and backside. And it's set up for—if you're goofy foot, you just press—it asks at the beginning when you sign up, you know, are you goofy or natural? If you press goofy, everything is in goofy. You press natural, everything is in natural. So I've got goofy-footed students that I flipped some of their footage over into natural. I got natural-footed students flipped over into goofy. So you don't have to compute anything. It's right for you.
Michael Frampton
Awesome. Well, I urge listeners to sign up and join me. I've signed up, I'm doing it, and we'll make sure we get that promo code. And of course, there will be links in the show notes to this episode, to Brad's website and all that stuff as well. Thank you so much for your time, Brad. Appreciate it.
Brad Gerlach
I was really looking forward to talking with you because I think we've been talking back and forth for a couple of years, and it was really fun. It was a really fun conversation. Thanks.
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