Skimboarding Safety

Morgan Just: Hi! I am Morgan Just with Victoria Skimboards, teaching you how to skimboard today and right now we are talking about safety. When you cruise down to the beach and it is nice sunny day, you don't want to get sunburn, you don't want to get skin cancer. Always put some block on, make sure you are protected from sun and make sure you got it all over yourself, make sure you get somebody to rub your back and get it all over you.

After you get that down, check the conditions, make sure if you are a beginner, you are not going out there in too bigger surf and just get whomped that way. You can break your neck, bad things could happen to this going out over your head.

Also check for like riptides, conditions like that, and if you do happen to get stuck into a riptide, what you want to do is swim sideways, say the riptide sending one direction. It is going this way, you want to swim sideways diagonal to it and to get out of it, to avoid it. Never go swim against it because you are just going to end up getting sucked out to sea no matter what, but if you swim sideways, you swim out of the line of the riptide.

After that watch out for rocks also. Make sure you are not going to be skimming directly into a rock or near a rock, you might as well just avoid rocks altogether. Also, look for under water rocks, go out before you skimboard and check the bottom, make sure there is no rock that you can't see, and no matter what you are going to come in contact with sand, it is impossible to avoid.

So make sure you are in good physical condition to handle that and you are not out of shape, you are not going to just hit too hard, you want to feel good. So skimboard a lot, run, jog, make sure you are in shape, so you can handle the impact and the beatings that you are going to take. So you are taking a little bit, no matter what.

A couple of common injuries with skimboarding are knees, and wrists, ankles, fingers stuff like that. A lot of people injure their knees, I would say that's the biggest injury in skimboarding. A lot of people injure their MCL and their ACL; this is the ACL and this is the MCL.

This one is worst, it will burst your whole knee part. The MCL is pretty bad, it will take about six weeks to heal. So you want to be in shape and in proper condition to handle the impact of the sand. So definitely keep yourself in shape and make sure you are not going to just go out there and get over your head, and go into some bad injuries. Now, we have talked about the safety issues, now we are going to go onto the real stuff, basic Skimboarding.