Weightlifting sucks. Don’t try it. Before you completely lose your shit, know that I was only being facetious just then. In retrospect I feel pretty rotten about it too, so relax. If there is a singular fitness philosophy that directly benefits your surfing – never mind your overall happiness and success in daily life – it’s picking up heavy shit…specifically (and exclusively) with the goal of adding sheer mass and bulk to your frame. In fact, if you want to be the best surfer and human that you can be in this life, research has shown that it is of the utmost that you spend the lion’s share of your time in the gym rather than in the ocean, at some bullshit job, or in some dead end relationship. You are no doubt already nodding your head in agreement as you read this because you are incredibly smart and strong. Nonetheless, here are just ten reasons why I love weight lifting so very much and am absolutely certain it is essential to being a great surfer. Add yours below!
1. Honorably dedicating your life to picking up and moving around heavy things gives you a completely natural, desirable, and functional physique that commands respect. It’s important and useful to at least aspire to be so muscular that “they don’t make wetsuits for your body type.” The more space you take up from sheer girth, the higher your wave count goes. Not only because of all the respect you get, but because with all that necessary strength you’ve accumulated, you can inflict greater carnage upon your fellow surfers as you physically assault them. Which if we can be honest, is the whole point of surfing.
2. Becoming much more muscularly massive increases your newtons, which increases the amount of water you’ll displace when torquing that beefy, natural frame of yours. Wanna know what feels better than spraying christmas trees all over the skinny pussies that you’ve been beating the shit out of all day at your spot? Other than the absolute satisfaction of having just completed a grueling calf/forearm day at the gym, nothing.
3. If some is good, then more is better. This is true with absolutely everything from hand jobs to hand grenades, but nowhere more so than with lifting weights. It’s good to pick a hobby that continually reinforces this crucial life lesson with tangible payoffs.
4. Lifting weights teaches delayed gratification. Sometimes forgoing a perfect swell for a perfect week at the gym can really seem like the most idiotic decision in the world. Especially when all your boys are getting stupid pitted while you’re shrugging hundreds of pounds over and over, looking at your throat veins in the mirror. But in a fortnight when your good for nothing friends’ froth is gone, you will have a perceivably bulkier neck from all your hard work.
5. It’s safe, easy, and anyone can do it. You can’t drown lifting weights. You can’t get sucked over the falls and slammed into the reef. You can’t get attacked by a shark. You can, however, get snaked while waiting in line for that incline bench press. This too warrants a fight. Fighting in a weight room is much safer than fighting at sea. For the most part. It’s also much easier and generally more cordial, for whatever reason. Further, it’s just a tremendous high intensity, full body workout in and of itself.
6. Being inside of doors, in a gym with other perspiring people really just grabbing and picking up that heavy stuff and then setting it back down again in in a repetitious and routine manner is a wonderful, meditative way to spend your precious time on this earth. You gotta do something. Why not do that?
7. It’s super fun. Inarguably more fun than surfing even. When lifters know the gym is going to be going off in the morning, they can’t catch a wink of sleep. What do they say? Only a weight lifter knows the feeling of that six am hernia?
8. You’ll forge lifelong friendships and rivalries, the latter being more useful long term. Spite, the great motivator. You can’t help but become acquainted and uber competitive with those you obsessively heave pounds along side with. And like being in the lineup, it’s all about spreading your pee around so people know who’s boss on an olfactory level. (Slightly more challenging in a weight room environment, but equally important to do.)
9. It’s key to simply take up as much space as you possibly can in this life. We are already small, relatively and cosmically speaking. Just be gigantic for the sake of it. Require 12,000 calories a day just to sustain your girth. Struggle to wipe. Keep adding surface area. You can be huge. Bury those demons down deep, under layers and layers of hypertrophic muscle mass.
10. When you’re more powerful and massive, you break more boards. Breaking boards makes you a better surfer. Even if they’re not your boards, and even if you’re not breaking them while surfing exactly. It’s just that you’re ‘roid raging on the beach just crushing everyones equipment. It makes you better to feel with your hands all different shapes of boards, and to know their weaknesses and strengths intimately.
Now get after it.
