Wakeboarding Trick Tips for Beginners

How to Get Air

Synopsis: The quintessential wakeboarding trick: the all-important wake jump. Here we teach you to get air. To jump. To fly.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying." He was, of course, speaking philosophically. But his words can be applied to wakeboarding quite literally.

Before you can fly with the big dogs, you need to learn to walk. That's what this article is about.

You can't throw massive raleys into the flats without having learned the basics. The wake jump is the foundation for just about every trick in the sport of wakeboarding. It is the first run on the ladder to greatness.

The first thing you need to get erased from your mind is your notion of "jumping." On land, you achieve lift by forcing your legs into extension, propelling yourself into the air. In the world of wakeboarding, this will get you nowhere. You do not need to muscle yourself into the air with your legs.

Your lift comes from a combination of rope speed (accumulated as a result of building up rope tension) and upward momentum from the wake. Think of a wake jump not as a "jump" but more of a ramping action. You are using the wake as a jump.

The first concept we need to introduce is the progressive edge. This type of edge basically means that your edge starts out mellow and gets harder and harder as you approach the wake. You should be cutting your hardest as you go over the wake.

The progressive edge takes a while to get used to. Most new wakeboarders will be over-zealous and try to scream at the wake as hard as they can. They end up getting a lot of slack in the rope and zero pop. This is exactly the opposite of what should happen.

If you have a good progressive edge you will build line tension (not slack)!

For your first few jumps, start just ten or fifteen feet outside the wake on your toe side. Cut towards the wake progressively putting more weight on your heels. When you get there, stand up tall. Don't lift your knees up or try to "jump." Just extend your knees and stand tall.

If you're not getting the desired results, you need to wait longer. Many people stand up too soon or stop cutting before they reach the wake. This kills all of the momentum you've built up and leads to marginal jumps. Cut until the top of the wake, then stand tall.

It will take a bit of practice to get your wake jump looking good. It's well worth it, though. Once you are consistently landing small jumps, you can start trying to clear the wake (see our article for helpful tips).

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