Posts Tagged ‘surf ski practise’

Surf Ski Paddling In Extreme Choppy Conditions

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Surf Ski Skills Guide

On Saturday morning, I competed in a surf life saving endurance race, paddling my surf ski over a 12km course in the ocean. There was not much swell on the day, but the night before, a good stiff wind had blown up, leaving the ocean angry on race day, frothing, and boiling in extremely choppy conditions. The chop was running in all directions with minimal consistency, varied between 0.5 and 3 metres on the faces and with a 20 knot wind to boot, it made for a very difficult race.

I’ve had it so good recently that I’d forgotten just how challenging these types of conditions are. Often you just go into survival mode, doing nothing other than trying to keep your craft upright. Having fallen off before the first turning buoy myself, I got angry. I searched my memory banks and remembered all the techniques you have to follow to be effective in these conditions. I employed these tips to immediate effect.

At the end of the day and in retrospect, it was really great having the hit-out in such difficult conditions. Once you get past the survival point, choppy water is just so good for your surf ski strength conditioning. I woke up on Sunday really sore, with a deep and satisfying muscle soreness that I hadn’t experienced for a long time.

Having returned, I reviewed Surf Ski Supremacy and added a new chapter. The new chapter covers these types of extreme ocean conditions and the 5 things you can do to move from survival mode and into competitor mode.

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Surf Ski Training Essentials: Getting Race-Ready the Right Way

Monday, May 17th, 2010

How can you break down training, practice, and rest into a surf ski training week schedule that allows conveniently wraps around your lifestyle, but can also effectively get you ready for an upcoming race? Let’s analyze what you need to do: training can be further broken down into paddling training and body training, done in more intensity than practice sessions, practice is simply practice, but those sessions need to be longer than the training sessions, and of course, rest and recovery. If you want to use a complete seven day week, here’s how you can make them all come together.

Alternate a hard week and an easy week for six weeks before the competition. The hard week’s details are as follows:

Day 1: You can simply rest if you’ve just been in serious training or practice the day before. Normally you should train: do some running, visit the gym, or swim. If you really want to paddle, do no more than 30 minutes to an hour of stroke correction.

Day 2: Some flat water training. About one to one and a half hours of flat water paddling to get your body gradually into the mood. Don’t try paddling in big wind to avoid damaging your wrists for the rest of the week’s long paddles.

Day 3: This is a required rest and recovery day for the coming four days. This week is scheduled to include a four day cycle of training and practice to help accustom your body to similar conditions during a race.

Day 4: More flat water training. Again, one to one and half hours of flat water paddling, though you can paddle downwind this time. Try breaking down your session into two minute 500 meter sprints interspersed with eight minute slow cruises to rest your body without getting slack. During each sprint, focus on different aspects of your stroke like full shoulder turns, breathing, full arm extensions, and so on.

Day 5: More of the same, only faster. Do much of the same thing as you did the previous day, only a level higher and faster. And focus on your weak spots during each sprint.

Day 6 and 7: Practice sessions. Do two and a half hours of practice during both days. Try to imitate the environment and overall conditions you’ll be under in the race, then practice. The next day, practice downwind.

Day 6 and 7 are normally the weekends, but it should be the two days you don’t have any work to do, as they entail more time than the training schedules.

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Some Pointers for Surf Ski Training

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Learn To Surf Ski

Preparing for a race and don’t know the best way to get ready? Need good training and practice sessions but can’t find the time? Do you even recognize that practice and training are two different things? It doesn’t matter if you’re an intermediate paddler or just a beginner, if you surf ski for leisure or serious competition or sport, you have to train and practice. Here are some pointers to keep in mind during surf ski training.

The difference between training and practice. Do they seem the same to you? If they were, they won’t be called any different from the other. Think about other sports. Basketball players can train in gyms, but they can’t practice their sport there. They build up their bodies, stamina, and strength in training, but what they do in practice is what they’ll be doing in the hard court. It’s the same with surf ski training. You can train in gyms, or simply run for aerobic leg exercises that give you stamina, and build up muscle groups in your legs. You can train different aspects of your paddling, like breathing, full shoulder turn, and full arm extension in flat water. But when you practice, you duplicate the environment or the conditions you will be under during the competition you’ll be joining in. What you do in practice is what you’ll do in the actual event. How you will play is how you practiced.

How much training and how much practice. Practice is preferably done during weekends—or whenever it is you don’t have work for the day. You’ll need more hours in practice than in training, though training should be more intense. Training schedules can stretch for one to one and a half hours during a regular day, but as mentioned before, should be intense enough to build up your paddling capacity and acumen. That being the case, training sessions should not be done too often, and never when you’re tired to begin with.

A good surf ski prep week. So keeping all these in mind, if you plan a seven day surf ski preparation regime, you should distribute the days to three things: training, practice, and rest. You can allocate three days to training separated by two rest days, and the remaining days (presumably the days when you don’t have any work to do) should be spent on practicing. Training sessions should be done both on water and on land for paddling specific training (like technique and skills) and body training (for stamina, strength, resilience).

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