Our oldest guest so far was 78.
I mention that first because it is the question underneath every email we get from someone in their 40s, 50s or 60s, even when they do not ask it directly. They want to know whether they have left it too late, and whether they will be the oldest person on the beach looking foolish.
The answer, after coaching adults here since 2009, is no on both counts. People arrive convinced the water belongs to somebody younger, and then spend the week finding out otherwise. The specifics change every time. The pattern does not.
Is 40, 50 or 60 too old to learn to surf?
The myth is that surfing is a strength sport. It is not. It is a timing sport with a paddling tax attached. I have watched triathletes flounder for three days because they insisted on muscling the board, while somebody who had not exercised properly since university stood up before lunch on day one and kept standing.
Surfing is also non-contact and low-impact, which matters more the older you get. Nobody tackles you. Your knees take nothing. You fall into water from roughly waist height, off a soft board, in a spot our coaches picked because it is forgiving.
The genuine requirement is swimming. Not speed, not distance. You need to be able to fall over, come up, and stay calm about it. If that describes you, the rest is teachable.
What actually changes at 40, 50 and 60
Almost every article on this subject says “40, 50 or 60, age is just a number” and then treats the three as identical. They are not identical. After coaching adults for this long you notice fairly clear differences between the decades, and knowing which one you are in tells you what to prepare for.
Starting at 40+ versus starting at 20
| What matters | Starting at 40+ | Starting at 20 |
|---|---|---|
| Patience | Advantage. You let the skill build instead of forcing it | Often rushes onto a smaller board far too early |
| Taking coaching | Advantage. You listen, ask, and apply the correction | More likely to nod and then do it their own way |
| Wave choice | Advantage. Happy on the fun ones, no ego attached | Ego picks the wrong wave and pays for it |
| Time and budget | Advantage. Can invest in a full coached week | Usually piecing it together on a budget |
| Flexibility | Work needed. Hips and shoulders need loosening first | Naturally more mobile |
| Recovery | Work needed. Day three can feel heavy | Bounces back overnight |
The two rows marked “work needed” are fixable with a few weeks of stretching before you fly. Everything in the advantage column is close to impossible to teach. That is the whole argument, and it is why we so rarely worry about a guest’s age on the booking form.
What a week actually looks like
You get around seven sessions across a week, roughly two and a half hours each, with about half of that under direct coaching and the rest practising what you were just shown. Here is the shape it usually takes. Yours will wander off this, because everyone’s does.
The board matters more than your age
If you are booking lessons anywhere, ask what they will put you on before you pay. A rough starting guide by body weight:
Reading about it is one thing. Doing it is another.
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| Your weight | Board length | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Under 70 kg / 155 lb | 7’6″ – 8’0″ soft-top | Stable, and still easy to carry down the beach |
| 70–85 kg / 155–187 lb | 8’0″ – 9’0″ soft-top | Good glide, catches waves with less paddling |
| Over 85 kg / 187 lb | 9’0″ – 10’0″ soft-top | Maximum float, most forgiving of a late pop-up |
Ignore anything short and good-looking for now. It will cost you the week. Our full guide to beginner surfboards goes deeper if you are thinking about buying one for home. If you learn with us the board is matched to you and included, so this is really advice for anyone booking elsewhere.
How to prepare, and what not to bother with
The advice you will read everywhere is to get fit first. I would put it differently: do not wait to be fit, and do not train for surfing specifically. Nothing on land properly rehearses paddling, and people who spend three months preparing tend to arrive with expectations that get in their own way.
Two things are worth doing in the weeks before you come.
- Loosen your hips, ankles and shoulders. This is the one that genuinely changes your first day. The pop-up is a controlled squat under load, and stiffness there costs more than weak arms ever will. Twenty minutes of stretching most days beats an hour in the gym twice a week. Our surf fitness exercises are a simple place to start, and the yoga sessions during your week are aimed squarely at the same thing.
- Swim, ideally in open water. Not for fitness. For calm. Being tumbled by a small wave is completely harmless and briefly disorienting, and having done something similar before means you laugh instead of panicking.
Beyond that, come with a sense of humour and low expectations for day one. Both are more useful than any workout plan. The surf level guide is worth a skim if you want to picture where you will start.
The physical case for it is real, incidentally. The American Heart Association’s activity guidance asks for 150 minutes of moderate movement a week, and a single morning surf covers a good share of that before breakfast. The Mayo Clinic’s work on exercise and mood covers the other half of why people come off the water lighter than they went in. Neither is why anyone books, but both are true.
Clare started at 52
My wife Clare co-founded this place and spent well over a decade around surfing without any real interest in doing it herself. She started at 52. She is 56 now and paddles out with her own group of surf friends whenever the day allows, and she is faster to the water than I am most mornings.
Clare surfing
I mention it because she had every excuse available. She was surrounded by good surfers, which is intimidating rather than encouraging. She had watched thousands of beginners and knew exactly how awkward the first week looks. She did it anyway, in her fifties, and it took.
Where you learn matters more than when you start
We looked at a lot of places before choosing Cabarete, and the reason we stayed is Playa Encuentro. The beginner section is inside, roughly chest-deep, over a flat limestone floor that is mostly covered in sand. No sharp live coral, no rip pulling you out, nothing that punishes a beginner for being in the wrong spot. The water sits around 27°C, so no wetsuit and no cold-shock nerves.
The other piece is that Encuentro has several peaks along the same beach. You will not outgrow it in a week, or in five years. And it is 25 minutes from Puerto Plata airport, which sounds like a small thing until you compare it with the four-to-eight-hour road transfers common in Costa Rica.
More on the break and the seasons in our guides to surfing in the Dominican Republic and when to visit Cabarete. If you are weighing up islands, we compared them honestly, our own bias included, in learning to surf in the Caribbean.
One alternative worth knowing about: if paddling is the part you are unsure of, wingfoiling asks much less of your shoulders and has become the thing a lot of our over-50 guests switch to. We wrote separately about wingfoiling in your 40s and 50s.
