Activity Profile in Surfing: A Case of Study

Background: According to the International Surfing Association (ISA), surfing represents all types of wave riding, of which shortboarding is a part and is characterized by the use of surfboards with a short dimension and volume, which is the modality addressed by this study. The activity profile in surfing is a subject that has been studied by various authors using time-motion analysis, which is a reliable method that uses detailed analysis of video recordings (1–3). Purpose: The aim of this study is to characterize the activity profile of a surfing session, based on the proposals already made, with emphasis on the work developed by Secomb et al. (2), with the objective of proposing an improvement to the models previously presented by other authors. Methods: A surfing session lasting approximately 28 minutes, was filmed with a Portuguese athlete (67kg, 1.66m) who has competed at national and international level. The time-motion analysis of the session was carried out and the percentages of the total time of the various activities were calculated to obtain the activity profile of the session. Results: The top three activities in which the surfer spent more time based on the total time of the session were “paddling to return to the lineup” (31.54%), “general paddle in the lineup” (29.52%) and “stationary” (25.4%). The activities “wave riding” (4.95%) and “duck dive” (4.89%) were very similar. The three activities with the lowest time spent were “sprint paddle for the wave” (2.62%), “miscellaneous” (0.78%) and “recovery of the surfboard” (0.30%). Discussion and conclusions: In relation to the values presented by other authors (1,3), there are some variations, which can be explained by aspects such as the characteristics of the sample (skill level), characteristics of the environment (size and direction of the swell and the speed and direction of the wind) that differ. When compared to Secomb et al. (2), the activities that showed the greatest discrepancy were “stationary” (lower in the present study 20%), “general paddle in the lineup” (higher in the present study 13%) and “paddling to return to the lineup” (higher in the present study 10%). There were two activities outside of the Secomb et. al (2) model, “miscellaneous” (0.78%), presented by Farley et. al (1) and Borlow et. al (3) and “duck dive” (4.95%), proposed by the authors, although the first one had very little expression. The second one is similar to and even with a little higher value than “wave riding”, which is the main goal in surfing. We conclude that the times spent in each activity differed a little from other studies, which can be associated to the fact that this was a single session with a single surfer, reason why the results can not be generalized and it needs further investigation to confirm. So, we recommend for future studies that they follow this model, with the duck dive activity separated from the miscellaneous and analyse the statistics between the number of duck dives and the time of each bout spent paddling to the lineup.