In the early part of the year, when the competitions are still months in the future, I sort of plan my training month to month. Here we are in a new month, so it's time to begin a new phase.
For paddling, that means turning up the volume a little. Last month I was getting down to the river twice a week, and I'll be making it three times a week this month. I'll lengthen my sessions a bit, too: I've been paddling for an hour each time, but in the next couple of weeks I'll be stretching that out to 80 or 90 minutes.
It's on the strength-building front that I really adopted the habit of monthly routines. I got the idea some fifteen years ago when I read The Barton Mold, William T. Endicott's case study of world and Olympic champion Greg Barton. Here's an excerpt from the book that I posted last February, when I was addressing this same topic. (The Barton Mold is available in PDF format on the International Canoe Federation website, here. This excerpt is from the section entitled "How Barton trains.")
Barton takes two or three exercises from each of [his categories of lifting exercises] and makes up a routine consisting of 10-12 exercises, which he continues for three or four weeks. He then creates a new routine. Some exercises would stay in the routine, but a number would be different.
I do this is because I think it helps to get over plateaus. I'll change to another
exercise that works the same muscle, but maybe from a little different angle.
As soon as I start the new exercise, I can make improvements right away.
But pretty soon I reach a plateau. Then maybe I'll go back to the old one and
find that, sure, maybe I've lost a bit initially, but not much. And then after
a week or two, I've actually surpassed where I was. It's a way of tricking your
mind and body into improving beyond what it felt was a barrier.
For the last few weeks I've been focusing on my core. As I move forward I plan to continue some core exercises but also incorporate some other stuff. The strength routine I have made up for the month of January draws, once again, from the videos I have cited in recent posts that star Jingjing Li and Daniele Molmenti. Both are Olympians in whitewater slalom, and Molmenti won the gold medal in men's kayak at the Games in London last summer.
Here is my routine for January. The exercises are difficult to describe and I don't know what any of them is called, so I'll refer to the time at which they occur in either the Jingjing Li video or the Daniele Molmenti video:
1. Rubber band exercise at 5:42 of the D.M. video
2. Exercise ball exercise at 2:55 of the J.L. video
3. Rubber band exercises (hand paddling?) at 6:56 and 7:10 of the D.M. video
4. Core exercises at 4:40 and 5:03 of the D.M. video
5. Rubber band exercises at 8:42 and 9:30 of the D.M video
6. Exercise ball exercise at 3:10 of the J.L. video
I did a very light version of this routine this afternoon, mostly just trying to familiarize myself with all these different movements.
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