Surf Ski Training
Whether you’re surf skiing for fun or for serious sport—like competition level sport—you still need to do some training to get anywhere. Surf skis aren’t the easiest things in the world to handle, so some surf ski training regimes would do you some good. Here’s a typical surf ski training week you can pattern your own schedule to:
Monday: Rest. Yes, Rest. Especially if you’ve raced on the weekends or have had similarly physically tasking practice sessions.
Tuesday: One to one and a half hours of paddling. Use skis on flat water. Here’s how you can break down your one and a half hours: 20 minute warm ups first, then two minute sprints of 500 meters separated by slow cruises of eight minutes in between. The sprints you can do from a standing start. You can even do this with a group of individuals with different skill levels. Simply regroup after the two minute sprints and slow cruise together for the entire eight minutes. During the sprint, don’t try to concentrate on all or many aspects of the stroke at the same time. Try focusing on individual aspects in different sprints, like full arm extensions on sprint 1, then breathing in sprint 2, and so on.
Wednesday: Aerobic leg exercises. You can run, visit the gym, it’s your choice. Doing aerobic leg exercises builds respiratory capacity and resilience, and it shapes up leg muscle groups. It’s also a good preparation for any sort of distance event.
Thursday: You can choose to do the sprint sessions, or visit clubs for high intensity exercises that help overall paddling performance.
Friday: More rest. This is the ‘in-between’ rest period for the week. If you missed some sessions or exercises, you can do those.
Saturday: Practice. Duplicate the conditions you’ll be under in the race you’ll be entering, and do long distance, slow trips in those conditions for two and a half hours. If you’re not entering in any event, try to do the two and a half hour exercise in conditions similar to the environment where you surf ski. This is to familiarize yourself to the conditions and environment where you’ll be racing or skiing. If you continually practice for long hours in a completely different environment, you won’t be able to apply much of what you practiced on the actual surf skiing area you’ll be going to. It’s true that in the future you will need to be flexible enough to deal with any environment, but take things one step at a time. Like in the sprint sessions: one aspect of the stroke at a time.
Sunday: Repeat the Saturday session. It is important to actually make the full two and a half hours just like the day before—remember, practice makes perfect. It isn’t a cliché for nothing.
Tags: how to surf ski, surf ski practice, Surf Ski Racing, surf ski trainng
