Friday’s technical blog starts a series of articles on Paddling Technique
We will spend spring and summertime on our blog writing about paddling technique. In our Friday blogs we will take you onto a voyage of understanding what is kayaking technique, why is it so important, where to start changing it for the better and finally when and how to train for it. At the end of our journey, you will have a lot of tools to evaluate and improve paddling technique.
Why do we believe technique in paddling sports (as in many other) is so important? Wasn’t paddling fast about strength, endurance, speed, tactics and mental toughness? It still is! But when you look very deep into what is the essence of paddling and what is the core around which to build a training system, you see it is technique.
The rules of technique influence how you will train because inevitably wrong technique will limit the expression of all your abilities and capacities. Making technique the center of your thought process will force you to give a meaning and purpose to anything you will do during the daily training grind.
Giving a clear purpose to anything you do in training helps you strip the training process of all the bulk and unnecessary content. You will cut out everything you were doing just because it was always done, because it is what others do, because you felt it was important… Having a clear meaning and purpose for every exercise and activity will help you really work on what makes the boat go faster. The coming blog posts are meant to help you get better at getting better.
In the past 13 blogs, we have laid out some basics about how to train. We have shown you how to evaluate and plan performance, how to categorize training intensities and strength exercises, we have given you some basic session examples and wrote about how to construct a session in more detail. Finally, we have talked about rhythm, tempo, balance, mobility, and coordination – this was to show you there is much more behind a great paddling performance than big muscles and big hearts.
Today’s article explains our premise why technique is so important:
The influence of technique on paddling performance please download, use, share and like 😉
Come with us on this wonderful journey of discovering how to find the perfect stroke!