Category: Kayaking

More kayak workout videos

I won’t bore you with the whole thing. Instead I’ll bore you with short excerpts from the workout. This was last Thursday. I’m still having problems with my left shoulder, seemingly a problem with the trapezius muscle, hopefully nothing more permanent than that. So Dan’s been playing around with the format of the work out a bit to get me working up a sweat and improving and reinforcing good technique.

This video is fairly early in the work-out. It looks like my forward hand is dropping too early, and we worked on that later in the work-out.

This video is late in the work-out. I felt more warmed up than tired out, and I think it was going very well. I do notice I’m not opening my left hand at all, though, which is bad. But I don’t think I’m dropping my forward hand as much, and I think I’ve got a decent catch going on.

Today’s workout

After the usual stretching and ball exercises, I did 4 sets of 5 minutes on the Kayak machine, keeping the speed around 5mph and then speeding up to 6mph for the last 30 seconds or so. This is what the first set looked like from the back:

(I can’t quite figure out how to get “embed” working in WordPress, so this is as close as I can get):

And this is the second set from the front:

I’m not sure, but I think that shows that I’m not really getting my left arm up and forward as well as I’m getting the right arm.

Another evening on the KayakPro ergometer

My kayak training schedule lately has been generally

  • Tuesday evenings at the RIT gym either with or without Dan doing stretches, core strengthening, and weights
  • Thursday evenings at Dan’s doing stretches, core strengthening and the ergometer
  • Sunday afternoons at Dan’s, either doing the same as Thursday or (not since Thanksgiving weekend) paddling with others.

Dan told me that he was busy Thursday, so we decided to switch around and do the Thursday workout today and I can do the RIT gym without him on Thursday.

In some ways, what Dan and I have been doing is we tore down my old stroke and built up a new one with better technique. But that means that I’m using muscles I’ve never been using before, so I get tired long before I would have at the end of the season. The initial core exercises tire me a bit, which is good because it means I’ll have those muscles built up to help me balance in the boat, and to develop a better torso twist. But the real test is on the ergometer.

In the past, Dan has had me doing 10 good strokes, concentrating on good technique, then putting down the “paddle” and doing some stretches, then doing 10 more good strokes, etc. In the last couple of sessions, I’ve stretched out some and had some longer sessions of a few minutes at a time. Today it was a real stretch-out session – after a 2 minute warm up, I did two or three sessions of 5 minutes and one of 3 minutes. My left shoulder and arm were quite tired and sore, because I’m keeping my left arm higher than I used to – new muscles getting used for the first time. And I was trying to adjust my stroke on the machine to have less jarring so it would be more like my paddle, but that meant that I still had a bit of a tug on the ropes when the “paddle” was in the “out of the water” position.

I’m really curious to discover how sore my elbows are going to be on Thursday morning. For the last couple of weeks the pain in my elbows, especially on my left elbow, has been really bad. Almost to the point where I’m wondering if I need to stop some or all of the new exercise regime. I hope I can discover if it’s the ergometer or the gym that’s doing it.

Using the Speedstroke kayak ergometer

As part of my new kayak racing fitness training, I’ve been doing some sessions with Dan on his Kayak ergometer, a kayaking equivalent of a stationary bike or a rowing machine. It’s a great training tool, but it’s not perfect.

It uses a fiywheel like a rowing machine. The first couple of times I used it, I used a fairly gentle “catch”, which means that when you lift up the paddle shaft as it passes your knee, there was still resistance, which obviously wouldn’t happen in a real boat because the paddle would be out of the water and moving through the air. Last night I discovered that if I really hammer the catch, you actually get the flywheel up to speed early on, which means it stops resisting if you slow down a tiny bit after lifting. That felt a bit more realistic to me, but was hard on my elbows and they were sore at the end. One of the reasons I loved the paddle I bought, a Bacsa VIII-max, is that is is long and narrow which gentles out the catch a bit. I’ve got to figure out a way to gentling out the catch on the Speedstroke.

Dan refers to the Speedstroke as “the most important boat you’ll ever own”. Seeing as how it’s just about the only way to work on your fitness and technique for 1/3rd of the year in this part of the world, I can totally understand why he says that. Too bad it costs as much as a good racing boat.

We worked a lot of torso twist. It made me realize that one of the things really holding me back from getting good twist is this gigantic pad of unstretchable fat on my stomach. I really need to work on getting rid of that. Too bad diet food tastes so unappetizing. I keep hoping that I can paddle enough to burn off enough calories that I can live on sugar and fat.