Boost Your Paddle Fitness
How to improve your paddle strength

By Clayton Beatty BSc
www.totalsurfingfitness.com

Sometimes I wish I had an outboard motor on the back of my surf board so I could just zoom back out to the line up after a wave. Unfortunately such surfboard motors don’t seem to exist, so there has to be another way.

The obvious way is to improve my paddle fitness, so the task of paddling doesn’t seem like such an effort during a heavy session.

In the following functional exercises, I am going to show you how you can do just that. By increasing your muscle strength, you will be able to paddle faster and stronger with less fatigue, which means more waves and more fun!

Inverted Row

Upper back and arm strength are important for surfers because we use these muscles heavily when paddling. The stronger these muscles, the faster you can paddle into waves.

The following exercise helps strengthen your upper back and arms, as well as helping to stabilise your shoulders. Having your feet on a stability ball means your core muscles will be working harder as well. If you workout at the gym this exercise can be performed using the bar on a smith machine.

• Grab hold of the bar with an overhand grip, slightly wider than shoulder width apart.

• Balance your feet on a stability ball and keep your body straight by bracing your abdominals.

• Pull your chest towards the bar and then slowly lower yourself to the starting position.

• Do 3 sets of 8-12 repetitions with one minutes rest between sets.

Back Extension

Due to the nature of your body position whilst paddling, with your upper chest and shoulders off the surf board, your erector spinae muscles (muscles that run down the back of your spine) are copping a battering.  Your lower back is therefore prone to fatigue and injury.

The following exercise will help overcome this problem by building strength and endurance in these muscles. This should help to decrease any lower back fatigue and decrease injury risk.

• Lie with your stomach on the stability ball and toes on the ground with feet wide apart for balance.

• With your hands on the side of your head and keeping your back straight, slowly raise your torso using your back muscles until your upper body is parallel with your legs.

• Slowly lower back to the start position.

• Do 3 sets of 12-15 repetitions with one minutes rest between sets.

Incorporating these functional exercises into your training schedule means you will be able to paddle harder and faster than ever before. But beware… this means you may get more waves than your mates and they might not appreciate this as much as you…

For a complete functional training program designed specifically for surfers, which includes training for core strength, balance, cardiovascular fitness, upper & lower body strength and flexibility, visit www.totalsurfingfitness.com.

Clayton Beatty is the fitness expert behind TotalSurfingFitness.com, a website dedicated to functional training for surfers.

Clayton holds a BSc Degree in Human Movement, is a Certified Fitness Trainer and grew up surfing the Margaret River region in Western Australia . If you would like to learn more visit his website at www.totalsurfingfitness.com.