Designing Paddling Performance: Types of Strength Exercises
Welcome to our fourth blog from the technical Friday series!
In the previous posts we discussed how to assess your paddling speed, how to asses where are you with your athletic development and how to make better decisions when planning your paddling future. In the last blog we addressed overtraining as a big and important issue – an enemy stronger than your competitors. And today we are finally ready to start discussing training!
In the Northern hemisphere most paddlers are still in the middle of heavy winter training and only the lucky, best of them, are down south somewhere already paddling in singlets. So the next few Friday blogs will discuss conditioning for paddlers and offer suggestions for you to implement in training until temperatures are at least above zero and you can all paddle again.
Today we want to start a discussion about dryland conditioning, especially strength. It is a complex topic where most athletes and even coaches struggle to have good answers to important questions:
- What types of strength do paddlers need?
- How to best train strength in such a technical sport?
- How much of it we need, how much is too little and how much is enough?
- How well do dryland strength exercises transfer to water performance?
- Can we measure useful strength?
So today we offer you a table of types of exercises and means of conditioning for paddlers we use at TiP. We believe this table will help you categorise the exercises you use in your training and consequently decide if you are using exercises from the whole span of categories the table suggests and/or if you tend to neglect some (mobility could be one or specific strength perhaps). Most of all we would like for you to see this table as a reminder that there always has to be a clear goal behind every exercise you use.
Now it’s time for you to go to our Free Resources page and download the complete table – and take your understanding to the next level! Enjoy 😉