Upon incorporating everything here into your workouts, this will be a breeze. Photo: Myles McGuinness
It’s a trying existence being a landlocked surfer. Even more so as I hail from the UK with my nearest break being a two and a half hour journey away. It’s a fickle wave and the vacillating nature of the prerequisites for it to work means that ideal conditions are sporadic at best. As such, my surfing is routinely punctuated with weeks, or more often months, of poor conditions.
This stochastic surf is not only a source of great frustration but also means it is difficult for me to use surfing to get fit for surfing. We all know that to capitalize on a session you need to be in great shape, and any conditioning trainer will tell you that the cornerstones of a fitness training plan are: duration, intensity and frequency. With regard to surfing, these parameters are dictated by the environmental conditions thus making it problematic for surfers in general to plan water-based training workouts.
Furthermore, despite my surfing sessions lasting several hours, only a small duration is actually spent riding the waves resulting in a limited training effect. It is clear then, that in order for me to capitalize on each session and improve my surfing, I need to be physically conditioned beforehand.
Qualitative analysis of surfing
A quick and dirty trawl of the internet produced a plethora of surfing related training plans with the overwhelming consensus that an exercise could be made surf-specific by performing it on an unstable platform. Hmmm, I couldn’t fault the trainers’ enthusiasm in their blogs and YouTube clips, but having been schooled in exercise physiology, I wasn’t overly convinced by their rationales.
So I decided to put my years of learning and research into practice and analyze the physiological demands of surfing. It quickly became apparent that there is a paucity of academic research in the area, although recently it seems to be attracting increasing interest.
The first step in the analysis of any sport is to define the activity. Alberto Mendez-Villanueva and David Bishop, who are exercise scientists working out of Australia, have described surfing as a sport comprising high-intensity bouts of exercise punctuated with medium-intensity activity. Further analyses by American surfing conditioner Clayton Everline and others have attempted to characterize the activities of a typical surfing session. For simplicity, I have condensed these into five main areas:
1) The paddle-out.
This requires the surfer to be in a prone position and paddle out to the line up mainly under propulsion provided by the arms. When paddling, the surfer is typically in vertebrae hyperextension with only the abdomen in contact with the surfboard. This posture allows circumduction at the shoulder and affords the surfer the best opportunity to view the surrounding waves. Depending upon the conditions, the paddle out may require duck dives that require the surfer to powerfully push the surfboard under approaching waves before resurfacing and resuming the paddle out. This maneuver may be required several times before arriving at the line up.
2) Sitting and maneuvering into position.
Once in the line up, the surfer may sit balanced on the board, face out to sea and wait for approaching waves or be required to paddle into position and counter the effects of drifting or rip currents.
3) Power strokes.
Once a wave has been chosen the surfer must turn to face the shore, assume a prone position, and quickly accelerate the board in order to get on to the approaching wave. The acceleration is achieved by employing several powerful paddle strokes.
4) The pop-up.
Once the wave has successfully been caught, the surfer must drive explosively from the prone position to the upright position.
5) Maneuvering the board.
Once in the upright position, the surfer must powerfully maneuver the board along the face of the wave. The stance is typically a quarter to half-squat position, feet slightly wider than shoulder-width with one foot near the rear and the other towards the middle of the board. The above activities are subsequently repeated in a sequential manner for the duration of the surfing session.
