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KitesurfingOfficial

The Trick Tree

Kiteboarding tricks

Every trick, mapped as a progression: what it is, what it needs, what it unlocks. Mark what you've landed and the tree shows your next move.

122

Tricks mapped

121

Sourced guides

403

Named sources

Source: KitesurfingOfficial Trick Tree · as of October 2026

FoundationsAirstyleBig AirUnhookedWaveFoil
Jump to the tree Read the history

The Tree

Your progression, as a map

Foundations feed five branches. Log what you've landed and the tree shows what unlocks next, with your Trick Book on your rider profile.

Progress: 0/122 landed

Foundations0/9
Airstyle0/28
Big Air0/19
Unhooked0/27
Wave0/25
Foil0/14

Foundations

The base skills the branches draw on: riding upwind, transitions, toeside, your first jump and the load & pop. All five branches start from riding upwind, and each takes from the rest what its tricks need.

Airstyle

0/28

Everything you can do without unhooking: the grab ladder, rotations and their doubles, inverted variants, board-offs and styled transitions.

Big Air

0/19

Height and the loop family: downloop landings and heli loops at the bottom, megaloops and rotation-kiteloops at the top. The King of the Air discipline.

Unhooked

0/27

Wakestyle: the chicken loop comes off the hook and every trick starts from a clean pop. No branch has a longer chain of prerequisites: from the surface pass and blind landings up to the handle passes and mobes.

Wave

0/25

Directional boards, strapless: from the waterstart, carves and jibes through tacks and pops to strapless rotations. Bottom turn and top turn are the wave-riding alphabet.

Foil

0/14

Flying on the mast: waterstart and carving jibe open it, then footswaps, tacks, carving 360s and — once the foil is boring — jumps and rotations.

Your next tricks

Foundations · First steps

Riding Upwind

Riding upwind is the skill of holding an edge so that you get back to the point you started from instead of drifting downwind.

Open the guide

Basics

What are kitesurfing tricks?

A kitesurfing trick is any maneuver beyond straight riding: rotations like the backroll and frontroll, jumps and grabs, kiteloops, unhooked wakestyle moves, wave turns and foil transitions. What separates them from random airtime is technique — each trick has a defined entry, a kite movement, a body movement and a landing, and each builds on skills you already own. That is why this page is a tree and not a list: a kiteloop is not harder than a backroll in some abstract way, it simply requires jumps you can already control.

Riders sort tricks by discipline, and the tree follows that language: Airstyle covers hooked-in rotations and grabs, Big Air is height and kiteloops, Unhooked is the wakestyle school where the chicken loop comes off the hook, Wave belongs to directional boards, and Foil covers flying on the mast. All five start from riding upwind, and each branch draws on the foundations it needs: toeside, the sliding and carving transitions, the basic jump and load & pop. The foundations row also holds the two pops in and out of toeside and the carving upwind 360, which no branch trick requires.

History

Where these tricks came from

The first trick era belonged to wakeboarding. Through the early 2000s the boards were heavy, often ridden with bindings, and the dominant style was wakestyle freestyle: unhooked passes and load & pop, judged in competition and defined for nearly a decade by riders like Aaron Hadlow, Youri Zoon and Gisela Pulido. Then the sport looked up — Ruben Lenten pushed the megaloop, Big Air became a discipline with Red Bull King of the Air as its stage, and the kiteloop ladder in the Big Air branch is that shift written as a learning path. Both schools are still here, which is why this tree has two of them.

The rest of the story — the patents, Maui, depower, foil and the Olympics — is in the history of kitesurfing.

Sources: IKSURFMAG — Who invented kitesurfing? · Elite Watersports — The History of Kitesurfing · Addict Kiteschool Tarifa — The Evolution of Kitesurfing: From Freestyle to Big Air · Peter's Kitesurfing Handbook — Progression and skills

Realistic timeline

How long do tricks actually take?

~10 sessions

One published progression handbook puts the basics — kite control, waterstart, first rides — at around ten sessions.

20–30 sessions

Core board skills: confident upwind riding, transitions and toeside sit in the twenty-to-thirty-session range.

30–50 sessions

Intermediate tricks — rotations, downloops, first kiteloops — arrive in the thirty-to-fifty-session range. Wind time decides everything.

Methodology

How the Trick Tree works

Every trick is a node with prerequisites: a locked node names what it still needs, and it unlocks once you have landed everything it builds on. The five difficulty dots are our own banding. Where a school, magazine or handbook files a trick at a level, that goes into the dots, and so does what the trick is built on. A trick a magazine files as entry level can still carry five dots here when it sits on a long stack of prerequisites. No syllabus grades a doobie loop at all, so its dots come from what the sources describe and what it builds on.

Every guide on this site is built from named sources — school curricula, instructor tutorials and magazine technique libraries — and each page lists exactly which ones. Where schools teach a trick differently, the page says so instead of pretending one version is universal.

Keep building

What trick progress feeds on

Beginner guides

The step-by-step guides underneath every trick: waterstart, riding upwind, your first jump.

Open

Kites that boost

The Kite Index scores every kite's jump and hangtime — find the wing for your branch.

Open

Flat-water spots

Flat water makes first rotations easier to time — find your training lagoon.

Open

The Tree

All tricks by branch

FAQ

Kiteboarding tricks: questions riders ask

Which kitesurfing trick should I learn first?+

Before any trick: riding upwind, transitions and a controlled basic jump — the IKO and VDWS syllabi treat these as the independence milestones. The first real trick most schools teach after that is the backroll, because the rotation starts naturally from an aggressive edge and the falls tend to land you on your back.

In what order should I learn kiteboarding tricks?+

Foundations first (upwind, transitions, toeside, basic jump, load & pop). Every branch opens straight from them, and none asks for a rotation at the start. Airstyle is where the first rotations live: it begins with grabs, the backroll and the frontroll, then grows into rotation transitions. Big Air runs through boosting higher into the kiteloop ladder, Unhooked through riding unhooked and popping, then the raley, Wave through the strapless waterstart (bottom and top turn then open the riding on the wave itself) and Foil through the foil waterstart and the carving jibe. The backroll and frontroll come back higher up, where later tricks in every branch except Foil build on them. The tree on this page encodes those prerequisites.

What categories of kiteboarding tricks exist?+

This tree maps six: Foundations (the shared base skills), Airstyle (hooked rotations and grabs), Big Air (height and kiteloops), Unhooked (wakestyle pop tricks), Wave (directional riding) and Foil (hydrofoil skills) — the same split kite curricula and academy apps use.

Do I need an account to log my tricks?+

Yes, for logging: a free rider account keeps your Trick Book with you on every device instead of stranding it in one browser. Reading the tree, the guides and the sources needs no account at all.

Where do these trick guides come from?+

From named, linked sources: IKO and VDWS curricula, instructor tutorials from kite schools and shop academies, and magazine technique libraries. Every guide lists its sources at the bottom, and steps that cannot be traced to a source do not get published.

What is the difference between hooked and unhooked tricks?+

Hooked-in, the chicken loop stays on your harness hook and the kite's pull runs through your body — that is how Airstyle and Big Air tricks work. Unhooked, you take the loop off the hook so the full pull runs through your arms; the kite stays low, every trick starts from a load & pop, and that school is called wakestyle.

What is Big Air kitesurfing?+

Big Air is the discipline of maximum height and kiteloops. It grew out of Ruben Lenten's megaloop era and found its stage at Red Bull King of the Air in Cape Town, where riders top twenty meters in forty-knot winds and stack rotations and board-offs onto their loops. In the tree it is its own branch, built on the kiteloop ladder.

What is a kiteloop?+

In a kiteloop the kite flies a full loop through the power zone mid-jump, pulled with the back hand — pulled with the front hand instead, the same move becomes a downloop. It is the defining Big Air trick, learned low at two to three meters before it is ever taken high.

What is the hardest kitesurfing trick?+

There is no single answer — it depends on the branch. The tree's top tier holds the unhooked handle-pass moves: the KGB, the back mobe, the front mobe, the 313 and the blind judge 3, where a rotation and a bar pass happen in the same beat. Big Air's ceiling is the late backroll kiteloop, with the double kiteloop and the doobie loop mapped above it. Every one of them decomposes into prerequisites you can climb one node at a time.

How long does it take to learn kitesurfing tricks?+

It varies with wind time, but one published progression handbook puts the basics at around ten sessions, core board skills at twenty to thirty, and intermediate tricks like rotations and downloops in the thirty-to-fifty-session range. The honest constant: every trick in this tree waits until its prerequisites are landed, and skipping steps is what stalls progress.

Land your first node today

Riding upwind is where every branch starts. Open the guide, then come back and mark it landed — the tree takes it from there.

Start with Riding Upwind →Explore the Learn hub