Today was the latest in a long string of dreary cold days, and I had to claw through my Seasonal Affective Disorder to get myself out the door and down to the river. The bright side is that I paddled during the nicest part of the day. This afternoon the temperature is dropping and the wind has picked up to howling proportions.
I think for most of the coming season my paddling sessions will generally be around 60 minutes, but I'm thinking on Sundays I'll go a bit longer than that. Today I paddled for 70 minutes, and threw in some surges of 30-60 seconds, so that it was what runners call a "fartlek" session.
Yesterday I started gathering exercises for my January strength routine. I'm pretty sure I've talked about this before, but I'll share again the way I go about doing strength work. Back in the mid 1990s, before I'd met Greg Barton in person, I got my hands on The Barton Mold, William T. Endicott's case study of the world and Olympic flatwater sprint champion, and was captivated by Greg's approach to strength training. Basically, Greg would put together a routine with an exercise for each general muscle group (abdominals, upper back and lats, biceps and triceps, and so on) and stick to that routine for about four weeks or a month; then he would make up a new routine with a slightly different exercise for each muscle group.
Greg's reasoning went as follows: when you start up a new exercise routine, your body thinks, "Whoa! I've got a new job here! I'd better start fortifying the relevant muscles right away!" As a result, you see some notable gains in strength in the first couple of weeks. But after a while the body starts to "coast along," as it were, and you hit a plateau in your improvement. By changing up the routine and substituting the old exercises with new ones that work the same muscles from a different angle or in a different hierarchy, Greg figured you could "trick" the body into thinking it was doing something entirely new and make it adapt accordingly. You can read this entire section of The Barton Mold here--look in Chapter 5, "How Barton trains."
And that's more or less how I've been working out ever since. In the last couple of years I've also become more mindful of issues brought up by Ron Lugbill in his slalom racing blog: doing some movements fast so the body will be used to moving fast when you put it in the boat; and focusing on the different phases of a lift, such as the downward (negative) phase rather than always the upward (positive) phase.
For the coming month, I want to keep working on my legs and core without neglecting my arms. An exercise I've planned to do this month for a while is one that I saw in a video posted on Face Book by Casey Eichfeld, who was a wee lad when I was racing slalom fifteen years ago but is now a perennial member of the slalom national team. I can't figure out how to link to this video, so I'll just tell you it's a core exercise in which you maintain the pushup "up" position with your hands on one stability ball and your feet on another. I have found it very difficult, so far managing to stay up for only a few seconds, and I hope I can get the hang of it as the month goes along.
Several other exercises come from this video, made by a guy named Michele Ramazza who's apparently into extreme whitewater racing (at least, I think that's what he means by "Freeride Kayaking").
And then there's an exercise I've known for some 20 years: front and lat raises. You stand with a pair of dumbbells, raising your straight arms in front of you, then to your right and left, "crucifixion" style.
I'm still experimenting and will post my January strength routine in the next couple of days.
No comments:
Post a Comment