My 2020 Kitesurfing Goals – Build Yours Too!

Has your kiting stagnated?
Have you plateaued?
Would you be interested in a way to keep yourself learning and motivated?

And I’m not talking videos or camps, both of which are definitely ways to help achieve this but most of us need something more. Something that links all those videos, session, camps together, helping you reach long term goals and most importantly keeping you excited and stoked for kiting. At the end of the day, a kiting session needs to be fun and make you smile and laugh more often than not. Ultimately, Progression has always been about me creating the tools that I wish I had to help me keep learning and stay motivated. It’s evolved over the years but I’m always looking at my kiting, my progression, and seeing if there are ways that I have managed to keep myself excited about kiting, over the last 20 years, that I can adapt so you can share those techniques too.

I have a new product/service that is in the early stages of development that myself and my business partner Danny are starting to look into and for me, the easiest way to test out new concepts is to try it out on myself. And the starting point for this new idea is all about Goals! It’s about realising what you what to achieve and then finding the right, realistic path to how you achieve them. So today I’m just going to share my goals with you, put them out there and I hope by the end of reading this you’ll share some of your goals in the comments and we can all work on reaching them over the next 12 months.

Here’s my goal list for my kitefoiling (you can do this for kiteboarding and kitesurfing, I’m mainly foiling so this is my focus but I’ll have goals of the other two disciplines too in due course). I’ve broken the trick/techniques into three stages – New, Consistency and Polish – more on why those groupings existing below…

Goals 2020: Rob Claisse

Discipline: Kitefoiling

NEW:

• Toeside –  drop to sitting (LFF)
• Pirouette (Lazy Susan?)
• Strapless Air – Back roll transition
• Strapless Air – Pop shuvit
• Sitting on the board – standing up (RFF)
• Powered T2H Carve, foot change mid carve
• S-Turns – Super tight and short T2H Carves back and forth, foot changing mid turns
• Push  tack drop to seating on exit
• 360 Handstand Tack

CONSISTENCY:

• Roll Tack (LFF)
• Riding Parallel Feet – Tack
• Strapless Air – Board off landing foiling (LFF)
• 360 – Carve H2T => Tack T2H (LFF)
• Seated Push Tack to standing

POLISH:

• Roll Tack (RFF)
• Sitting – Feet on the nose – Riding and Gybes
• Tack – T2H – No Hands (LFF)
• Sitting on the board (RFF)
• Tack – T2H (RFF)

Commitment:

• Long term: 180 days a  year. So close to 50% or 1 out of every 2 days.
• Short Term Streaks: 20+

RFF – Right foot forward
LFF – Left foot forward
Where I haven’t mentioned a specific stance than I’m currently attempting equally in both directions

Structure Explained

The Stages – NEW / CONSISTENCY / POLISH

I group my goals into three stages:

• NEW – this is something I can’t yet do. I may never have tried it or if I have given it ago and got round its been a bit of one-off or fluke
• CONSISTENCY – These are tricks or techniques that I can do some of the time, maybe 1 in 10 times up to 50%, I understand most of what I need to do but I need to improve my muscle memory and figure out the small mistakes.
• POLISH – I can get around this trick or technique 4/5 times but I want to make it smoother, more stylish, build up confidence so I can do it without thinking or in situations where I am under pressure.

COMMITMENT is an important consideration, as the amount of time you can commit to your kiting will have a massive effect on how realistic it is that you will reach certain goals.  And we want to consider both long term and short term commitment:

• Long term, over the course of a full year, roughly how many days will you go kiting in  this discipline
• Short Term Streaks is looking at how many times a year do you think you’ll get the opportunity to kite 4-5 times in a  single week – for most people, this will probably be kite holidays but may you are able to kite after work during the summer or just fortunate enough to kite regularly during the week.

For instance, you might get out on average once a week, so long term about 50 days a year, and have two kite holidays a year, so 2 opportunities for Short Term Streaks.

Choice of tricks & Techniques

Granular / Break it down – you’ll see that I have been very explicit about what I want to learn. I don’t just stay a Tack. I don’t just stay a Roll Tack. I include the stance – left foot forward is generally my strong side, right foot forward my weaker side – so I plan to tackle these as separate goals. And wind and water conditions, along with kite size all have an impact so I sometimes include those too. A trick I  need to polish on my 8m, powered up in water flat might be New for me when its 10 knots on my 15m in rolling swell.

The key here is to break things down so you have smaller goals to achieve, this way  it is easier to focus on very specific things rather than ambiguous ideas that cover too many options. And you are more likely to achieve that goal, tick it off – and that achievement is important as it keeps you motivated. So…

• Be realistic – how much do you kite each year? How good are your underlying kite skills? What conditions do you predominately get to kite in? Your overall goals need to reflect all of these areas – though some can be focused on specific situations: a trick you want to focus on when on holiday or somewhere with specific conditions.
• Be adventurous – take the point above into account but also aim to push yourself within your limits with some stretch goals. Something we say a lot on our camps – the only way you will learn something new is to try it that first time. Something that seems out of reach always starts with just giving it a go and even if you crash and get nowhere near, you’ll have at least taken the first step.
• Timescale – At the moment my list doesn’t say when I think I should be able to start moving a trick on to the next stage – so how difficult I think it will be for me to learn. This kind of detail will get added to the goal list but at the moment it’s in a more detailed spreadsheet version, but that isn’t quite ready to share yet!

For now, I keep my list in a note on my phone, this way I can quickly check it before I go  out kiting and pick a few tricks to work in that session –  but more on how to  structure a session around your goals in  a future post,

Build your Goal List

I’d love to hear what goals you have for the next 3/6/12 months, and I hope giving your goals some structure may be the starting point for you to actually start achieving them. Below is  the basic template you can copy and paste into any document and then start adding goals for 2020:

I’ll be following up this post with other building blocks that will help you achieve these goals, as we work on this new product/service but always remember that our premium coaching videos are there to help or check out our 2020 Foil and Wave camps for an easy way to jump-start your progress and get a sneak peek into many of the frameworks we already use when coaching you in person.

UPDATE: I actually wrote my initial goal list on Christmas day. But since then some tricks that I had been work on for some time have suddenly jumped from NEW to CONSISTENCY, whilst other new ideas have been added – so this goal list is something that evolves. I’d suggest writing out your first list and then update it every month but keep a copy of it at each stage so you can see how you progressed when you look later in the year.