Now, as mentioned, learning wingfoiling is pretty easy and fun. However, this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t come with its own difficulties.
One of the most common mistakes when first trying wingfoiling, is probably hanging on the wing too much. Especially for people with a windsurfing background, when we feel that pull created in the wing, our natural reaction is to pull back with out weight and hang against it. In wingfoiling however, you should always be trying to keep your body and weight over the centre of the board. If you don’t manage to break that habit and stay upright you will most likely end off constantly falling off the board and tiring yourself out. Once people manage to get that first little problem under control, as well as some other little details that will most likely occur along the way, then its time to get into flying on the foil. The usual problem here is that people have many times formed the impression that to pump your gear onto the foil you only need to pump the wing, using your hands. On the contrary, however, pumping the legs correctly is more important in getting up on your foil for the first time. Once you start working with those legs, flying is just a matter of time. That’s not to say that the moment you get flying there are no more problems. Besides the fact that for someone getting onto a foil for the first time in general it will feel super weird and unstable, a very common problem is edging too much. This means putting too much pressure on your heels, making the board tilt into the wind. Why is this bad? Because unless you are already comfortable on a foil this will most likely cause you to suddenly carve into the wind and faceplant back into the water. Keep in mind that this seems to be a problem especially for kiteboarders! Finally, the most common mistake on the first flights, is that people tend to keep all that power they were previously trying to generate in the wing, while now being on a foil. But a foil is a foil and it doesnt need that much power, especially when you still lack the technique to control it. Keeping all that power in the wing will just lead you to breaching out of the water with the foil and once more, faceplant! We do love a good faceplant though!!!!
Although this blog has been mentioning common mistakes for everyone starting wingfoiling, we do urge you to have a look at our YouTube video about common mistakes between windsurfers and kitersurfers: