Love Ridingbumps.com and riding bumps in general. You have a great website and I am trying to learn prone paddling-on my sup board right now- and was wondering how the rudder system works? Are most rudder systems the same on unlimited boards or does each maker have there own system. Thanks for any info and it would be interesting to see a video or diagram of how the tiller rudder works. thanks

Hey there. Thanks for the note. I am not sure if we are going to have great news for you today but I think we can maybe possibly keep you out of the doctors office. First an analogy.

Lets say you wanted to take up distance running but all you had in your closet were those boots that Gene Simmons from Kiss wore on stage. Yeah the platform boots.  In this analogy, prone paddling a SUP is more or less like marathon training in Kiss Boots. As you can probably guess running down the road like Gene Simmons in Kiss boots is a recipe for disaster. Sooner or later you are going to get injured. More importantly, running around in Kiss boots doesn’t really even give you an impression of what it would be like if you were running around in a styley new pair of Nikes or Hokas or Matts new favorite Altras or whatever. Yeah they are both kind of sort of like running but not really.

In our opinion that is what you are doing with your SUP. By prone paddling the SUP board you are setting yourself up for injury. Because the SUP board is so wide you are going to have your arms paddling at an angle that is not conducive to shoulder health. Moreover, you are not going to be able to use the large muscles of your upper back and you are going to be relying on the small muscles of the shoulders. If that isn’t bad enough we expect you are going to get a rub on the inside of your arms.

Barring the inevitable injury, the main problem with prone paddling the SUP is that it wont really give you an idea of the overall awesomeness of prone paddling and you might not understand why so many paddlers are turning to prone paddling.

The bottom line so far is that we recommend stopping what you are doing and go find a prone board to try. The problem is that we hear your anguish – unless there is a prone community in your area that can be difficult. Even where we live with lots of paddlers, we don’t know anyone who rents boards.

Our best recommendation is to go to a big SUP event where Surftech will be in attendance. It is a few months away but maybe take the opportunity to check out the Graveyard race at the Carolina cup and when you are not racing check in with the Surftech or one of the other prone paddlers in attendance and see if you can borrow a board for a few minutes (or hours 😉

Diffing deeper into your question – you asked about tiller systems. Although the different tiller systems vary a little bit on the brand, they are generally the same. You steer the unlimited boards with your feet and just nudge the tiller from side to side. It is not a complicated mechanism and really not something that we think you should focus on just yet.

In fact. You might be better off looking at a stock prone board or a 14 foot prone board to get started. Those boards do not have tiller systems. You just steer with your hands. Here is some more information on that topic.

Thanks!!!!!