Top 10 Reasons Why Kiteboarding Is Good for You

 

Besides burning calories, kiteboarding has other important benefits:

  1. Kideboarding tones the body, especially the upper area, arms and abdomen. Strengthening your abdominal area resulting in turn in a physical improvement of the abductors and legs too. You increase the strength in your arms by holding, the kite in legs by bending over the board to ride, and the muscles of the hands by grabbing the bar.
  2. Healthy heart. Kiteboarding also combines aerobics and resistance exercises, perfect for keeping a balance weight, toning your figure and gaining physical strength, all of which keep your heart healthy.
  3. Increases coordination and concentration. You are focusing on several tasks at a same time, and you must keep the kite in the air with one hand while you enter the water grabbing the board with the other hand.
  4. Balance. Also riding on the board is great to improve your balance.
  5. Stress relief. With any sport you eliminate stress, but if it is an extreme sport adrenaline rushes are much higher, creating a great feeling of wellness.
  6. Immune system boost. By boosting endorphins and reducing your stress levels, you also boost your immune system.
  7. Better reflexes and adaptability. The way of navigation and jumping in kitesurfing, in which you have to constantly make decisions about movement and position of the bar, body, board, etc, makes you resolve difficult situations on the water, increasing your reflexes and reaction capacity.
  8. Respect for nature. Like any sport in which you interact with the environment, kitesurfing fosters respect for the ocean, animals and nature in general, as well as makes you breathe fresh air away from the city smog.
  9. Community and networking. When you practice kitesurfing you become part of a community and meet other people that enjoy the same activities, which helps you to interact with people with common interests and tastes, improves your relationships and your ability to communicate.
  10. New experiences and sensations. Kiteboarding allows you to experience new sensations, like the feeling of flying, increasing your level of happiness.

So, the more you practice the fitter and happier you will be — and we just happen to have a great way to help you with that…

Kiteboarding is fun and addictive. Once you feel the pull of the kite, you’re hooked and you’ll never be the same. You become obsessed with watching the wind (and wind forecast), and every time you see a body of water you think, “Can I kite there?” And in addition to enjoying the outdoors and the water, you’ll get a great workout.

So go fly a kite!

WHAT IS KITEBOARDING?

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Kiteboarding is a surface water sport combining aspects of wakeboarding, snowboarding, windsurfing, surfing, paragliding, skateboarding and sailing into one extreme sport. A kiteboarder harnesses the power of the wind with a large controllable power kite to be propelled across the water on a kiteboard similar to a wakeboard or a small surfboard, with or without footstraps or bindings.

Should I Use a Board Leash While Kiteboarding?

One of the inescapable hardships of kiteboarding comes in the form of losing your kiteboard. It happens to everyone, from the new kitesurfer to the advanced rider. And sometimes, after a particularly high velocity crash or in wavy conditions, it can seem impossible that you’ll ever recover your kiteboard with how far you were dragged. Naturally, that led to some kite surfers attaching leashes to their kiteboard so as to never lose it. You may find yourself asking the question, is a kiteboard leash right for me? The forthright answer to that question is no, you should not attach a board leash to your kiteboard. The answer boils down to simple physics.

With minor falls, a leash attached to your kiteboard doesn’t pose much of a threat. But then again, small falls are easy to recover from, and the board is nary a far distance away. Larger, more powered falls is where the danger in a leash manifests itself. Effectively, you have a powerful, unwieldy kite attached to you that has a tendency to pull you across the water for several meters before depowering. In the event the board submarines, or goes underwater, a stupendous amount of resistance is going to be created. When that board finds its way out of the water, it is going to be propelled at you at an incredible speed. You might be fortunate and be missed, or merely grazed by the kiteboard. Or you may be less lucky, and get knocked out or have a chunk taken out of you. Helmets and impact vests found their way into kiteboarding precisely for this reason, and even still they don’t offer much protection from a kiteboard coming at you at mach 10.

Reel leashes are sometimes employed as a safer alternative, but can still pose a danger. The intention with reel leashes is that they are only connected after a wipe-out, attaching the board to you so it doesn’t drift away as you work to relaunch your kite. Risk is still present however, as the kite can launch off the water more powerfully than predicted, causing you to be pulled suddenly across the water. From personal experience, I’ve found that if I crash next to my board, the best option is putting it on my feet and using it as leverage to help relaunch my kite. The added resistance prevents you from being towed downwind by the kite as much, making relaunch easier.

Rather, instead of attaching a leash to your kiteboard, there is a much safer solution – learning how to body drag! When body dragging, you’ll effectively use your body as a rudder. If you are comfortable steering the kite with one hand (a skill that can be honed with a trainer kite), use a hand to further drive yourself upwind towards your downed kiteboard. Keep in mind that drastic turns can undo your progress as the kite pulls you downwind, so tack as straight as possible and turn only when necessary, steering the kite gently. Practice several times before actually going out on the water, setting upwind targets to drag to. Not only will this make you a stronger kiteboarder, but it’ll make sure you spend those windy days on the water instead of in a hospital bed!