A Simple but Effective Way to Train Your Balance and Footwork

I remember when I did my first SUP race at the Cold Stroke Classic in January 2011 I felt pretty good paddling on the right but felt uncomfortable on the left and really unconfident moving around on my board.  The best racer I met that day was Chris Hill, from nearby Topsail Beach, who took a lot of time to talk to me about SUP and some of the tricks that he’d learned.  Not only was this my first experience with the cool stoke of SUP where people help each other out and share their experience, it was also an opportunity for me to learn some useful things I still use today.

Chris told me that a good way to work on my balance and ability to move around on my board was to lay a 2x4 on the ground and then cross step back and forth on it, just like you do on your board when you are moving forward or back surfing, downwinding or doing turns.  I got home and starting doing it and sure enough it helped.

If you cross step up and down a 2x4 you’re training your balance a little, but what you are really training is your agility and coordination so that your feet know what they are doing when you try to cross step on an actual board.  People unfamiliar with that motion generally have the balance to do it, but what they don’t have is the coordination.  Their feet get tangled and that’s what causes the problems with balance.  If you lay a 2x4 on the ground and start cross stepping back and forth you’ll find your coordination improves really quickly and it will definitely carry over to your board.

balance training cushion

If you want to train your balance effectively you’ll have to take this simple drill to another level.  What I did was place my six-foot 2x4 on top of two balance training cushions.   These cushions are about 14 inches in diameter and about 2 ½ inches thick.  They’re partially inflated so that they are a little squishy, which makes them unstable if you stand on them.  One side is smooth and the other is covered with little knobs.  I place my cushions knobby side down and lay the 2x4 on top between the two cushions.  Then I cross step back and forth on the 2x4.

On these balance cushions the 2x4 is pretty unstable, tilting from side to side very easily.  You’ll find balancing on the 2x4 quite difficult and cross stepping back and forth very hard.  As you can see in the video, now you are truly working on your balance as well as your agility and coordination. 

I’ve made this a daily part of my gym routine each winter and it’s had a big impact on my balance and ability to move with precision and confidence on my board.  Each spring when I return to the water I have better balance on my board then I had the previous fall, and that is without paddling regularly for at least 3 months in the winter.  Additionally I’ve found the muscles in my lower leg (calves and tibialis anterior) have much better endurance despite doing little to target those muscles specifically. 

While the best way to develop the balance and footwork you need on your board is by doing balance and footwork drills on your board, I’ve found walking on the wobbly 2x4 incredibly effective because it trains the proprioceptors in your feet and lower legs.  Proprioceptors are sensory receptors in skeletal muscle, tendons and joints that detect changes in body position and forces exerted on the body by integrating information they collect about joint angles, muscle tension, muscle length etc.  As you’re moving on the 2x4 and it wobbles, the proprioceptors detect that wobble by the minute changes in muscle tension it creates.  Sensory neurons take this information to the brain which determines an appropriate response, which is then carried to your muscles via motor neurons.  When the muscles receive the message from the brain they make the adjustments required to maintain balance.  The more finely tuned this system is the better balance you have and the more naturally and effortlessly you make the necessary adjustments required.

I find walking on the wobbly 2x4 much harder than moving around on my board.  Because it really challenges my balance, if done repeatedly it really fine tunes the proprioception required to maintain that balance.  Though balancing on my board is an entirely different skill, the neuromuscular pathway required to maintain balance is the same and the work I’ve done on the wobbly 2x4 to train it bears almost immediate benefits when I get on my board.

Once you’ve become proficient at walking up and down the 2x4 on the cushions, carefully and at slow speed, try to speed it up.  You can add difficulty by keeping your hands on your hips.  Lately I’ve actually started to hold a ten-pound medicine ball with my arms stretched out in front of me.  I generally do cycles (back and forth) of 10 to 20 reps in both regular and goofy stance, and usually do three to four sets.  It usually takes between five and ten minutes at the end of my gym workout.

This simple exercise has made a big difference in my balance and confidence in moving around on my board.  Try it; especially if like me you are frozen off the water for part of the year.  I bet it will make a big difference for you as well.

Performing the Exit Correctly to Maintain Speed Between Strokes

I've done a lot of writing recently about what the latest National Team accelerometer/GPS technology can tell us about the SUP stroke.  I think I can safely draw the conclusion that one of the most important factors to paddling fast on a SUP board is one's ability to maintain speed between strokes.

Of course there has been some discussion about whether or not pulling with a negative blade angle past your feet slows you down.  I think I demonstrated that it doesn't by looking at some acceleration and velocity curves generated by this technology.  The theory is that pulling with a negative blade angle past your feet causes a drastic pitch change in your board (i.e. the back of the board drops), which results in a loss of speed.  In fact it is true that change in pitch is one of the factors that can cause your board to slow down excessively. However, if you're paddling properly the potential for a loss of speed is far outweighed by added acceleration you can get at the end of the stroke.

You should note that it is as much of a mistake to intentionally pull past your feet as it is to exit artificially early such that it prevents you from loading your blade effectively.  I honestly don’t believe determining an arbitrary point to exit is the way to go.  Instead, the stroke you choose should be based on what feels good to you and what appears to work best for you in terms of a) generating speed (accelerating), b) maintaining speed (not decelerating) and c) what is sustainable for the distance you are racing.  You've got a wide range of approaches to paddling you can experiment with in determining what works best for you.Whether you choose a lighter geared stroke and exit earlier or a heavier geared, longer stroke and exit later I believe your success at keeping the board running between strokes is going to depend on how you move your body at the exit.

There are two factors that determine the rate of deceleration between strokes, the drag in the water and the change in momentum in the whole “system” of you, your paddle and your board.  Drag is affected by pitch, which we have discussed.  Extreme changes in pitch can slow your board down.  Small changes in pitch resulting from extra acceleration gained at the end of the stroke will most likely not.  Change in momentum is affected by the centre of mass of the paddler in relation to the centre of mass of the board.  Picture walking forward on your board with your paddle out of the water.  As you walk forward your board is actually moving slightly backwards.

Now consider what happens when you exit the water.  If you pull the paddle through too far past your feet and the blade reaches too negative an angle, it is likely that you’ll be really bent over at the waist when the paddle finally exits the water.  Then, once the blade exits you’ll be standing up straight and getting ready to move forward to the next stroke.  This motion of standing up with the blade out of the water is going to move your board backwards, just like walking along your board will as described above.  You can try it for yourself.  Stand bent over with your paddle out of the water on your stationary board in calm water.  Now stand up straight by bringing your hips forward underneath you and your head and shoulders up.  Quickly look behind you and note how your board is responding.  You’ll see it has actually moved backwards slightly.

This backwards movement will occur when you’re paddling if you pull through way too far and stand up straight after your blade has exited the water.  Your board won’t actually stop moving forward and begin to move backwards, but it will decelerate.  It will move forward at a slower rate as a result of this movement, meaning you’ll end up carrying less speed between strokes.

So how do you prevent pitch changes and momentum changes from slowing you down?   It all comes down to what you do at the exit.

We should all be familiar by now with the idea of pulling yourself to the paddle.  The fact of the matter is, if we execute our exit properly with can actually “push” ourselves by the paddle as well.  The most important thing about the exit isn’t where it occurs relative to our feet or any other reference point you can think of, but rather HOW it occurs.

When you are pulling your loaded paddle through the water your hips are helping with the pull and are moving backward with the paddle.  The most important thing about the exit is that the hips stop moving backward and begin to move forward before the blade has exited the water.  In fact this change of hip motion from backward to forward is what should initiate your exit.  It’s a subtle movement, and when done really well the hips are moving only slightly ahead of the paddle.  However that small, subtle movement is the difference between pushing off your still loaded blade at the exit to enhance your board’s forward run, and causing it to decelerate due to the momentum changes discussed above.

Before I describe how to visualize performing the exit it is worth taking a look at some very good examples of a well-executed exit.  In each case you can actually see the board (or boat) accelerate off the back of the stroke.  This acceleration results from the paddler pushing himself past the supported paddle at the exit before popping it out of the water and allows the paddler to maintain speed much better between strokes.

In the first video we see David Cal of Spain winning the C1 1000m final in Athens in 2004.  I include this in this discussion of SUP paddling because he does such a great job of his exit that  it clearly illustrates what I have been describing here.  You’ll see his paddling side hip rotate back to initiate his pull and then both hips move back during the pull.  You’ll very clearly see as the paddle passes vertical his hips start to move forward and that this motion initiates the exit of his blade from the water.  You’ll also see how much his boat appears to accelerate off the back of his stroke, allowing him to maintain more speed between strokes.  Cal’s time of 3:46 in this race was a world best for ten years and was only surpassed at last year’s World Championships in Moscow.

 

The next video is of the 200m event at Lost Mills in 2013.  If you watch the whole video you’ll see lots of examples of some pretty good exits and a few of poor exits.  I invite you to try to identify well-executed ones and poorly executed ones.  From 0:46 to 0:56 seconds there is some great footage of Travis Grant, who though he is sprinting isn’t moving so quickly that his hip motion is hard to discern.  You can see the same motion in his paddling at the exit as you see in David Cal.
 

 

The last video is of Danny Ching in the 200m event at Lost Mills in 2014.  You’ve probably seen it before.  Danny covers the 200m in an incredible 47 seconds.  His stroke rate out of the start is a mind blowing 103 strokes/minute and he settles to a very high 89 by the first switch.  Yet I am sure you can see the same hip motion that you saw in Travis and, in a canoe, David Cal, especially when he is passing directly in front of the camera. 

 Click here for link to Danny Ching video

 

You’ll note that both Travis and Danny load their paddles very well.  They aren’t just scratching the surface of the water.  You’ll also note that both pull the paddle blade past their feet before it exits.  This fully loaded, high stroke rate paddling they are doing is incredibly hard.  Their power output is very high and you can see the way they both react at the finish that their efforts would not be sustainable much past the 200m they were racing.  However in longer races they are doing the same thing, just not as quickly and dynamically and probably not with quite as much load. 

 
So how do you perform an exit like that at a reasonable pace that you might use in your typical 5-mile SUP race?  To me, the key to a successful exit is to visualize your hips initiating the exit rather than your bottom hand.  When I pull through the water, my paddling side hip leads the stroke as I am loading my body weight on the blade.  When my blade reaches vertical I’ve achieved my maximum load on the blade and begin to think of unloading the blade.  This unloading includes standing up straighter on my board.  Rather than think of the “standing up” coming from my low back muscles I like to instead think of trying to push myself into a stranding up position with top arm pressure directed down my paddle shaft.  This ensures that my blade stays loaded through the latter stages of the stroke and ensures when I start my exit that there will be enough pressure on the blade to allow me to “push off the water” with it as I exit.

As I am unloading I begin to think of my hips “reloading forward” for the next stroke.  Remember as we catch we want our paddling side hip rotated forward to allow both reach and an effective generation of force against the loaded blade once it’s secure in the water.  Since your hips have to get forward for the next stroke, visualize them reloading forward as you are finishing the stroke you are on with the blade still in the water.  As soon as they’ve started to move forward you need to get the blade out.  You don’t want it staying in the water after your hips have begun to move forward as you’ll just be dragging the paddle.  Get the push that the reloading forward against a buried blade provides and then get the blade out of the water.

Another way to visualize the exit is to imagine yourself paddling from one stroke into the next.  There should be a cycle of continuous movement in the stroke and the end of the stroke is no different than anywhere else in the stroke in that regard.  Get rid of any image of pulling a stroke and finishing it, then starting the next one like you see rowers do. 

In a previous blog post I included a number of useful drills for SUP paddling.  I recommend taking a look at the exit drill again to help you as you try to get the push off the back of the stroke that the exit provides.

 

Performing a really effective exit is not easy.  Lots of people get confused because they have to change the direction of their hip movement from backwards to forward while most of their body is still moving back.  It seems that asking part of your body to move one way while the rest of the body Is moving another is the confusing part and I’ve seen paddlers get all twisted up so they look like pretzels while they try this or move their hips with such exaggerated motion they look like hula dancers.  I’d suggest looking at the videos I’ve included and reading the descriptions I’ve provided a number of times so you have a good mental image of what you are trying to accomplish as you work on your exit.  Then I’d recommend doing the exit drill.  Remember not to over do it.  Do it for five minutes or so and then paddle normally for 15 to 20 minutes before trying the exit drill again.

In time you’ll be able to do a well-executed exit and you’ll begin to see the benefits it brings in terms of helping you maintain speed between strokes.