Pilates for surfers.

This is not a separate programme or a set of surf-specific exercises invented to fill a niche. It is private reformer Pilates — the same method, the same principles, the same unhurried hour — with the emphasis placed on what surfing demands. The distinction matters, because what makes you better in the water is not a surf-themed circuit. It is genuine capacity built properly and then carried outside: a surfer who trains the method well ends up with a better body for surfing as a side effect of having a better body.

Surfing is not a symmetrical sport and it does not distribute its demands evenly. You lie prone for most of a session, which shortens the front of the shoulders and locks the thoracic spine. You paddle with the same two arms in the same narrow arc, hundreds of repetitions at a time. You pop up from the floor at speed, which asks the hips to go from flexed and loaded to open and stable inside a fraction of a second. Then you twist, repeatedly, through a mid-back that has spent the last hour being told to stay still.

Most surfers respond by surfing more, which builds the pattern but not the capacity underneath it — and eventually the low back or the lead shoulder starts collecting the difference. The gap is rarely fitness. It is rotation you do not have, a shoulder that cannot stabilise at the end of a long paddle, and hips that are strong in one direction only.

Thoracic rotation comes first, because almost everything downstream depends on it. When the mid-back turns properly, the lumbar spine stops borrowing range it was never meant to produce, and a turn gets its rotation from where the rotation should come from. On the reformer this is trainable under load and under control, which is exactly what the water cannot offer.

Shoulder stability is the second piece. Paddling endurance is not just a conditioning question — it is a question of whether the scapula stays organised when the arm is overhead and tired. We build that with controlled range, then add repetitions until it holds up at the end of a long session rather than only at the start of one.

Hip mobility and pop-up power follow. A fast pop-up is a hip that opens quickly against a stable trunk, so we train the opening and the stability as one thing rather than two — that is how it arrives in the water.

Underneath all of it sits low-back durability. The reformer loads the posterior chain and the deep trunk without hammering the spine, which is what makes back-to-back surf days survivable in a way that more surfing alone does not.

Sessions run about 60 minutes and are programmed individually — the principles stay fixed, the sequence does not, because the useful work on any given day depends on what you did in the water yesterday. On the reformer that means one instructor, one machine, one person on it. On a mat it means the same hour, wherever you are staying.

Before your first session we talk through your surfing, your history and anything that currently hurts. If you are in Popoyo for a week, we will build for the week you have. If you live here, we will build something that stacks over months.

Surfers at any level, including people who have never touched a reformer. You do not need to be flexible, strong or experienced to start — a private session is the one setting where none of that matters, because the hour is built around wherever you actually are.

And you are welcome to drop the surf emphasis whenever you like. Plenty of people start here and end up simply doing Pilates, which was always the underlying offer.