Hi all you OMBE people!
Regarding the shortboard walk-up (off knee instead of toes):
I'm finding I have a lot of difficulty keeping the rear leg's knee between the arms as it moves forward to it's place near the rear of the board. Rather, the knee wants to move to the outside of the arm. Some of this is because my default popup for the past few decades has been the "chicken wing" popup, some of it feels like a restriction in hip flexion, and some of it feels like there's not enough room for the knee- like the knee hits the chest. This is compounded, I think, by my body proportions-- long legs, short torso and arms, relatively speaking. It's particularly difficult if I focus on keeping my head above my hips while looking down the line during the walkup. If I let the knee move the outside of the arm, the shortboard walkup is much easier, but tends to require a bit more focus in avoiding a side-on stance. (Moving to a forward facing stance with a good coffee cup is one of my biggest hurdles.)
I'm not sure how much of a problem this actually is, so I don't know how much effort I put in to correcting the issue. I do know, however, that I really like the way the walkup feels on my longboard, where the extra room afforded by the use of the toes largely eliminates the issues above, and I like how it tends to put me automatically into a more forward stance.
So: I could focus on correcting the knee-outside-of-arms thing, or I could let the knee drift outside the arms and focus instead on a slight pivot of the rear foot to improve my use of the forward facing stance.
What do you guys think?
