How to choose a Wakeboard

We recommend choosing your wakeboard based on these factors: 

• Your experience
• Your weight and size
• The terrain where you want to ride (boat, or park /winch)
• Your riding style (air-style, sliders, all-round, skate)

Particularly for a beginner, picking up the right board is crucial. A short wakeboard will be more maneuverable for tricks and spins, but too unstable and hard to learn with. A longer wakeboard will be heavier but also provide added stability, easier landings, and glide more easily through choppy water. But if you pick a board that is too long, it could make it harder to initiate turns and be less responsive for advanced riders. This said, for a novice, it's safer to go longer, as this provides more stability due to the increased surface area on the water, which is ideal for beginners.

Wakeboard Rocker

The term “rocker” is used in the boardsports industry to define the arch of the board, running from one tip to the other.

A wakeboard can have 3 different kind of rocker:

• Stage Rocker: flat in the middle but with more angled tips. It sacrificesa bit of speed for a more explosive pop.
• Continuous Rocker: A smooth curve that will make your board more predictable, but also faster.
• Hybrid Rocker: A mix of the two above, combining a mellow rocker with less extreme angled tips. Good for all-roundwakeboards and intermediate riders.

About your body weight and size, the best idea is to always check the official size guide for every board, provided by its manufacturing brand.

Park Wakeboards

Cable park specific wakeboards are usually larger and with a flatter rocker, to provide less drag, plus easier and smoother landings (which is always nice). The tips are chined-up, to don’t get caught while jumping on top of sliders. These boards are more flexible, for performing stylish nose and tail presses during slides. Talking about slides, another key feature of these boards is the “grind base”, which makes them extra resistant when hitting rails and other park features.

Air Tricks

Air-tricks lovers will prefer harder boards, with a more pronounced rocker and molded water channels rather than a flat base, to get a better “scoop” and powerful pop off the water.

Boat Wakeboards

Boat-dedicated wakeboards are stiffer, for a powerful pop that will make you jump “wake-to-wake”. Being that the pull of the boat is significantly more powerful than that of a cable park (but this depends also on the driver), these boards can also afford to have a heavier construction.

Boat boards feature molded or removable fins, and sometimes water channels, that can help the rider to edge better, boost higher, and land smoother and in control.

Hybrid boards

Park boards and boat boards are very specific items, so neither would perform well in the other environment. But if you ride both in parks and behind a boat, and can afford to have only one board, hybrid boards are also available on the market.

Hybrid boards feature a medium flex, softer through the tip and tail for park sliders, but stiffer between the bindings for a solid pop off the wake. These wakeboards also feature simple base designs and removable fins.

WAKE-STYLE.COM WAKE SHOP

At Wakestyle, we're passionate waboarders, for further tips and suggestions you just need to ask us and we'll always be happy to help you! 

If you are in the Netherlands, you can also visit us! Our wake shop is in Bussum, just 20 minutes away from Amsterdam, Almere, Utrecht, Hilversum and Amersfoort.