Mental Training & Nutrition Seminar

Mental Training is one of the biggest tools a paddler can use to gain an edge over competition and oneself (at times we are the mental block).

How would it feel to:

· Have an edge where you can be immersed in the present so that you are totally unaware of distractions?
· Increase the rate at which your technique improves where you are feeling the catch and grabbing the water powerfully with your blade?
· Compete in the zone more frequently?
· Stop the negative self-talk and have an unstoppable attitude?
· Visualize the movie of that great performance and the movie comes true – you experience that great performance?

The above are just some of the things that mental training can help you with in your paddling adventures.

Please contact Lori Jorgenson or ways to enhance your mental training specific to paddling.

Nutrition and Your Race Season

Treat your body like a machine you want to perform at it's best and you'll reach goals yets to be realized beforehand. Your body is the ajoining half of your mental game advancing you through competition and into recovery.

Refreshed, energized, quick, comfortable, clean and powerful - all of these reflect your nutrition as an athlete.

Please contact Holly Heaver for Nutritional Tips that span:

Early in the season
Sprint Regattas
Distance
Irons
Hydration
Recovery

Everyday eating for performance: You’ve heard it all before…….lots ‘o carbs, adequate protein, moderate fat, a variety of fruits and vegetables, emphasize whole grains, stay hydrated…….

Hydration & Recovery

Your body is a machine that needs fluids to operate efficiently. In fact, your body is more than 60% water, and even light exercise can deplete that percentage. No fluid means no function, and suddenly it's you stranded during a race with an overtaxed body. This loss of fluid is called dehydration. And hydrating, or adding fluids, is the key to keeping it from happening to you.

Hydrate well leading up to race day (drink an extra 4-8 glasses of fluid during the 2 days before to overhydrate).

Up to 2 hours before your race start, drink another 2-3 glasses of water and another glass or two 5-10 minutes before the start. You may need to consider the temperature when deciding on whether or not to use a drinking system as a hot day will increase your fluid requirements.

Following your race, start your recovery by eating a carbohydrate-rich snack with some protein as soon as possible. A yogurt smoothie or chocolate milk make great choices since they’ll also help replenish your fluids. Follow this up by having a meal within a few hours.

Keep up with the water intake to replace lost fluids and you’ll soon be ready and nourished to resume training for the next race.

Nutrition for Distance & Iron Races

For races shorter than 60-90 minutes, you likely won’t need an extra energy source.

It is often not practical to get “solid” calories in while paddling continuously. However, if you do bring liquids in a bottle or drinking system, using a sports drink will provide you with some calories in addition to fluid. The sugar and sodium in a 4-8% solution (40-80 calories per 8oz) will provide some fuel and help your body to absorb the water more quickly. It may even enhance your endurance and give you the edge you need to push hard through the line!

Nutrition for Sprint Regattas

During sprint regattas, you will have opportunities to eat and drink between races. Avoid doing so too close to race time to prevent anything from “talking back!”

What works for one person, might not for another so go with what you know will settle well.

Consider snacking every 1.5 to 2 hours on carbohydrate-rich foods which include some lower fat protein. Pasta salad with some meat or cheese, ½ a turkey sandwich, yogurt and fruit, milk and a muffin are just a few examples. And of course, stay hydrated!

Spring Tune-Up

It’s already April and racing season is just around the corner. Are you ready? In addition to being prepared physically and mentally, is your nutrition plan ready to help you perform at your best?

Use your training time NOW to help prepare you for races to come. Consider what you will eat prior to the race. Will you need an energy boost during the race? How will you hydrate? All these questions should have well-defined answers long before race day. And remember the athlete’s adage, ”NEVER try anything new on race day!” There’s a reason for that! Try out your new strategies well before racing season to find out what works for you. Pre-race meals, sports beverages, drinking systems etc. – they all need to be tested.

Early in the season, most races will either be sprint regattas or iron distance leaving longer irons and change-out races for later in the summer. In any case, starting race day with a well-tolerated meal (avoid potential irritants such as coffee, high fiber or high fat foods IF they are known to bother you) is a must. A high-carb breakfast which includes some protein 3-4 hours before the race will provide enough calories and protein to get you fueled and ready to go. A few choices include: rolled oats with nuts and fruit and low fat or soy milk OR a bagel with peanut butter and banana and low fat yogurt.

Practice your strategies as best you can during training. Find out what works and what doesn’t. Keep searching to find your own magic bullet which gives you plenty of energy to complete the race and recover quickly so you can resume training soon after. Good nutrition will not assure you of a podium-finish. But, fueling up in the days and hours before and after your race will help you feel your best, perform your best and get you ready for what’s to come in your training plan.

Stay tuned for nutritional tips for:

Early in the season
Sprint Regattas
Distance and Irons
Hydration
Recovery

Everyday eating for performance: You’ve heard it all before…….lots ‘o carbs, adequate protein, moderate fat, a variety of fruits and vegetables, emphasize whole grains, stay hydrated…….

Perception vs Facilitation of Efficiency

When paddling what forces cause the boat to move? As a paddler what do you do that impacts how efficiently the boat moves? How does the energy you expend translate into forward boat movement? How does your preception of what you are doing actually affect the boat? These are some of the questions we'll be addressing at the next seminar.

What separates a good stroke from a bad stroke is the amount of work (or power) that goes into moving the boat forward. If the boat bounces up and down, this is waste. If the boat turns, and you are wanting to go straight, this is waste. If your body absorbs the energy rather than passing it to the boat that is waste.

A paddlers goal is to maximizing the amount of energy that pushes the boat forward while minimizing waste. One can imagine the power flowing through the body in order to push the boat forward. In order to maintain structural integrity the paddle must obey Newton’s third law ("To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction") – conceptually this leads to there being Power Circles within the body when we paddle.

By talking through the power circles during the upcoming seminar, doing some visualization and isometric training, individuals will be able to connect the power generated efficiently pushing the boat forward. The connection is intuitive. Your goal is to feel.

Mental Training

The mind-body connection is powerful. For everything you think in your mind, your body has a reaction. All athletes can improve and one way to improve is to become well-versed in performance enhancement techniques.

Athletes spend so much time physically practicing to get an edge on the competition. Yet what teams and athletes can really do to get an edge is right in front of their nose, or more accurately, right above their shoulders!

You hear the same thing all the time, "Sports are 90-95% mental." Athletes and coaches at all levels say it, but how many of them do something about it? What teams and athletes can do to get an edge is develop this aspect as common practice. Our most powerful resource is the mind and most of us are not utilizing this influential resource. Training your mind is just as important as training your body and the athletes that have realized this have excelled. Keep in mind that mental training is equally as important as effective technique. Giving both the same amount of attention is the ideal approach.

Mental Training can take on different forms.

Visualization – You can do this as you commute on the train/bus. Close your eyes and walk through different areas of training. Take yourself all the way through a start envisioning every stroke, catch, rotation, and return. Envision paddling behind different people and see yourself doing different things to follow or blend with them. Envision a weakness in your stroke that you want to improve and make it better in your mind’s eye.

Meditation – Again this can be done anywhere you can stop and focus inwardly. Center yourself and concentrate on calmness equaling power. Focus on something that makes you feel strong and breath that image into every ounce of your body. Take deep breaths and expand your lungs. Breathe in the image that brings you strength and feel how it energizes you from head to toe allowing you to feel calm and focused. Explore through meditation how to convert this image to actual power application.

Mental Training will develop your toughness as an athlete. It can give you the greatest confidence, compose you under pressure, assist in teamwork, and benefit your communication skills if you put your mind to it. Work towards incorporating mental training into your active training by dialing in these methods while you practice. If you put your mind towards incorporating mental training into your program your overall performance will benefit.

The physically stronger athlete or team doesn’t have to lead to win every time. Rather, the athlete/team with the greatest confidence, composure under pressure, teamwork and communication skills can compete and win across the board with mental toughness as their ace up the sleeve.

Stay tuned for more on Mental Training at our March seminar.

Common Errors

• Missing the catch
This refers to pullback being activated before the catch is “locked”, thereby reducing the effective power in the first half of the stroke. If you are using good technique there will be heavy feel on blade for whole time blade is in water (from catch to exit).

• No or minimal rotation
Some people crouch forward with a bent back, and assume this is rotation. Think of having a rod up your back, and you are rotating around the rod.

• Bent bottom arm
• Top hand stays forward or drops toward gunwale
If either of these happens, and the bottom arm is pulling back, then the blade must go out of 90 dgrees, and into 45 degrees or worse, thereby losing most of your forward power. Putting water into the boat or lots into the air is an indicator of this.

• Poor timing
We not only need to enter the water together but also exit together. If you have a short stroke you will tend to exit early, which increases the chance of “pushing” (rating too high). People at back of boat especially need to be careful as it is “softer” water. They need to especially concentrate on reach and digging blade deep in water.

• “Dragging” the exit
This refers to a paddler taking pressure off the blade half way through the stroke. The paddler therefore starts to move forward through the water, instead of backwards, it creates drag rather than forward momentum. A lot of water is seen splashing behind the paddle.

Stay Active

Portland is snowed in! The most snow on record since 1968 this has tossed a hitch in some work out plans.

Keeping in mind safety at all times, but don't let this weather halt your productivity in staying physical. With the side streets safe from most traffic, with any driving slow at best, get out and take a walk. Pack some energy and make it a hike. Snow shoes or cross country skis make for great exercising in snow and with the right attitude you can keep your heart rate up and keep your cardio steady during the storm.

Power, Exit, & Return

Power

Power propels the boat forward. Our goal is to maximize the power we can harness and have everyone lock in and pull through together.

After you begin your pulling back through the water your blade should remain perpendicular as long as possible. There should be strong resistance against the blade for the whole stroke in the water. If you pull back too far and either bend your lower arm or push your upper arm down too low you will lose the resistance and instead slow the boat down. The power phase starts well ahead of your body and ends at your hip - not behind you.

Points to consider for effective power:
• Leg drive with outside leg. This engages the leg, hip, abs and back.
• Sit up and maximizing your leg, abs, and back muscle groups.
• Outside shoulder should come back slightly behind inside shoulder, with back upright.
• Bottom arm remains substantially straight.
• Top hand remains parallel to water surface, comes back toward outside shoulder, not down toward gunwale nor keeping it forward as a pivot.

Exit

Your exit needs to be swift without a lot of displacement of water. Keep power throughout the exit.

Remember that the exit is quick out of the water but slow through the air during recovery. This can be challenging to master but important for sustaining energy over long distances or short sprints.

• Exit at hip. Arms should be straight at exit. Slightly bent after exit.
• Turn top hand thereby feathering the blade.
• Keep bottom arm reasonably straight. If arm is bent it will be “choo-choo” action, which takes much more energy, reduces effect toward end of power phase, and the blade will be too high above the water in the return phase.

Return
This is moving from exit toward setup phase. This is as important as the power phase as this is the period in the stroke where you are setting your body up for another burst of energy.

• Relax
• Keep blade close to water.
• Blade in feather position, especially in early stage.
• Relax arms, hands, back and shoulders.
• Keep bottom arm reasonably straight.
• Start moving into rotation and get ready for set up.

Set Up & Lock

Set Up
Following is a detailed breakdown of proper technique to enter the water correctly.

• Start your rotating for the stroke from hip.
• As you rotate your hip forward lock into your core and reach paddle forward. Reach by showing your chest to the opposite shore.
• Keep top arm high but with the shoulder down. Your upper armpit should be at 90 degrees to your torso.
• Bottom arm straight reaching forward for the plant. Think in terms of lower arm doing a punch.
• Paddle at 45 degree angle forward for catch.
• Head up to expand chest and see what you are doing.

Blade Lock
Following is a detailed breakdown of proper technique entering the water and getting a good “catch” of the water.
This is a separate function to the power phase.

• While rotated and with chest to opposite shore think about keeping the blade moving forward, the same direction as the boat, before you hit the water. Goal is to maximize your reach and stoke length upfront.
• Enter the water at 40 degrees. • Blade should be fully submerged before you pull back.
• Bottom arm remains straight.
• Keep rotation to maximize reach.
• Keep head up to expand chest and see what you are doing.
• Should be minimal noise on entry. If you make a loud splashing noise it means either the blade is not fully buried and/or you are pulling back early.
• Activating the catch before pulling back is essential. These are 2 separate functions and this one is called “locking” the catch (beware not to take shortcut).

Feel

As paddlers get comfortable they tend to concentrate less on technique and more on power. If you are trying to develop good technique to optimize your power you must learn good technique first. If you do so you will be stronger than just muscling through the stroke.

Feel your body as it moves through the stroke. Feel the water and the varying conditions that you are paddling in. Feel the people around you and how you are blending together. Feel where the crew is applying power through the stroke. Feeling what you are doing is an aspect of mental training that translate into better technique.

Feel each one of these points of technique as you are performing them.

• Rotation from hip (not just leaning forward).

• Straight bottom arm (not bent like “choo-choo” action of broken arm going in motion of arm on train wheels). Bigger paddlers especially fall into this trap.

• Use whole body (including leg drive, abs and back), not just arms.

• Keep paddle as perpendicular to water on 2 planes (as seen from side and behind) for as long as possible.

• Timing is crucial (look diagonal and in front, take timing from top hand).

• Exit at hip.

• Maximise reach. The longer the blade is in water ahead of your hip, the more you are contributing. Reach farther than you have been without leaning farther forward. Rotate deeply through your core.

• Head up at all times.

Feeling what you are doing while you are doing it is difficult. It requires concentration and separation. Concentrating on what you are feeling in each part of your body. Separation from your need to be powerful and muscle the boat forward. Try to incorporate a concious effort to see yourself. Take the time to realize what you are doing. Don't let habit take over. Stop. Look. Feel.

Observe Technique

If you watch a paddler with good technique you will see the following:

· The bodies large muscles doing most of the work

· Relaxation of the muscles not engaged during the effort

· Structurally sound body mechanics

These points are all intertwined and play an equal part in good technique. It's important to not only observe what you are doing but also to feel what you are doing while paddling. Without one of these items the others will, in time, fail and injuries or strained muscles will occur.

Rotator cuff injuries or strain

Coaches should be careful not to advocate technique that exposes athletes to injury. One of these injury causing movements is having the top hand above the head exposing the top shoulder to injury. Moving the arm up and down at the shoulder is asking for an injury involving the rotator cuff. Take the time to consciously look at yourself objectively while you are paddling. Where is your uper hand through the stroke? Can you draw on the above points during your stroke? Observation is key to improvement. You must observe and process to change.

The rotator cuff muscles control rotation of the shoulder. These muscles are put under a great deal of strain especially when your arm is above your head repeatedly. The rotator cuff is a group of muscles which work together to provide the shoulder joint with dynamic stability, helping to control the joint during rotation (hence the name). Due to the function of these muscles, sports which involve a lot of shoulder rotation – for example, dragon boating, outrigger paddling, kayaking, etc. – often put the rotator cuff muscles under a lot of stress. (notes from sports injury clinic).

While you are paddling concentrate on your shoulder and arm and feel what they are doing. Are they moving up and down instead of locking into your core and being an extension of your back. Watch the person ahead of you on the boat. What is their shoulder and upper arm doing during the stroke? Your shoulder should be down at all times and therefore providing a strong extension of your large back muscles to plant, pull, and move the boat forward.

Goble Goble

Happy Thanksgiving
Good food equals good performance.

Let’s Talk Technique

The best time to change technique is during the winter months or off-season. Fitting technique into a periodization plan is recommended. Technique training sessions fit well in the beginning/ends of cycles. Be sure to account for poor weather too when planning technique sessions. There is nothing worse than having a technique workout planned when one cannot feel the canoe because of many layers of clothing and numb hands.

Perfect technique is not the same for everyone. Different body types, different body geometries causes us all to move in slightly different way in order to achieve optimal efficiency. Water conditions, race distance, paddle length, boat speed, height above the water also change the best way to move the canoe.

Coaching technique is challenging. A Coach should not fix the symptom of poor technique but rather the cause of poor technique. Knowing what the root cause for an athlete’s non-optimal movement is the coaches’ challenge; communicating how to change is a joint responsibility; changing the technique falls to the athlete. Athletes must learn how to feel, how to change and adapt to different situations. Athletes ultimately own their technique, their success and injuries cause the athlete pain - not the coach. Coaches should not cast their perfect technique on their athletes. I find it best to try to get the athlete to tell me what they are feeling, how they are trying to work towards changing technical issues. A coaches’ roll is to enable the athlete to perform optimally. The athlete must learn how to adapt their technique to conditions on race day. One of the most challenging parts of technical development is getting the brain out of the way. Letting the body move in its most efficient way is, most often, the best technique. Learning to do this takes time, but without enabling the body to feel good technique the braining must always be working on controlling the body. This is non optimal during races, long training sessions etc. The technique must be natural.

Winter Workouts for Best Performance

What workouts should athletes perform on and off the water in the winter in order to be best positioned to perform next race season?

The classic winter training plan is to develop base strength over the off-season. Time on the water paddling is very important. But what workouts individual athletes should do really depends on the weaknesses the athlete has identified for themselves.

Workouts on the water might include
· distance paddles at low intensity
· paddles with resistance
· long intervals at higher intensity
· technical sessions

Workouts off the water
· running distance and intervals
· weight workouts for supporting muscle groups
· weight workouts for sport specific muscle groups
· mental training(technical, isometrics and nerve system)
· swimming distance and intervals
· cross country skiing
· the list is long – erg…

One needs to have a plan. One needs to have a WRITTEN plan.

To achieve success one must define for themselves what success means. Then one needs to put a plan in place to achieve it. In order to put a plan in place one should utilize all resources available. In Portland there are many resources to use.

Mental Training for Optimal Performance and Training

Have you experienced a time during practice or competition where you could not focus? Are there times when the chatter in your head is negative? Have you ever heard about athletes doing mental training for their sport and you are not sure how to implement it yourself?

Mental training is a huge component of training and competing. It is a tool that regardless of your sport, when used consistently, can help you stay focused, stop negative self-talk, improve your technique/skills, increase your confidence, prepare you for certain situations in your sport (like winter training), and much more. For example, Jack Nicklaus, one of the greatest golfers, would run his own color movie in his head before hitting a shot, even in practice. His movie was very sharp and in-focus like he had actually performed it. This helped him to become a champion golfer of his time.

February Seminar
In February you will learn some tools that will help you take your paddling to a whole new level by implementing mental training into your life. The benefits may even be beyond paddling and expand to your everyday life.

Nutrition Over the Holidays

Race season is over and we are now in the base-building phase of the paddling year. Use this time to work on your stroke, your fitness level and your goals. Don’t forget the important role nutrition plays in all of these areas. The athlete’s diet can help to improve strength, optimize workouts and increase strength to weight ratio, ultimately improving your paddling performance.

During the next few months, a variety of topics will be touched upon on this site to help keep you on track this winter. Specific questions about Nutrition can be directed to Holly at pdxpaddling@gmail.com. A more detailed discussion of Nutrition will follow at Session #5.

Holiday Eating
Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas………ahhhhh, the holidays are upon us! For many, that means parties and gatherings where food and drink is the center of the occasion. The athlete’s diet does not mean treats and delicacies are forbidden. However, remember that you are still fueling your body for optimal performance. Everyday. Try to maintain your usual whole grain-rich, moderate fat, fruit and vegetable laden meals and use these occasions to enjoy favorite foods and sample new dishes and treats in moderation. Go easy on the alcohol. Listen to your body’s hunger cues to stop when you have had enough. (Remember, if you take a break from training through the holidays your calorie consumption should go down too.) For those of you whom it helps, continue tracking your intake to help you stick to your nutritional goals.

Remember, food brings most people great pleasure and should be enjoyed! But, finishing off the leftover Halloween candy before November 1 may not give you the edge you’re striving for!

Fitness & Off Water Training Homework

This seminar's focus will be about developing the tools to put a training plan together to bring out the best in the athlete over several periods. It will not be a session where you will walk away with a plan handed to you for training. Instead we will be discussing the skills needed to develop a plan on your own or with the help of a coach.

In preparation of the upcoming seminar:
Please document what you have done previously to develop your fitness and sport specific skills or if you have put together a training plan previously review the plan for areas of improvement. Consider the questions below and write the ones that speak directly to your experience in your journal with your comments/answers. The amount of detail that you enter into your journal is up to you, however, the more you document the better the overall picture will be for your plan and its follow through.

For those attending the seminar on November 8 please cut and paste the below portion into and email and send your answers/responses/observations to pdxpaddling so that we are one step ahead in understanding those that are attending.

For the Athlete:
Did workouts support and have specific goals?
Was your time spent productive?
Did you work from a Training plan? What was its outline?
Did you feel that the plan reflected your goals?
Were you able to follow the training schedule?
Did you buy 100% into the training?
Did your training plan include periodization?

As a coach:
Did you outline specific training routines for your athletes?
Did you develop a training plan targeted at the right level for the athlete?
Did you focus the training plan on the most experienced athlete in the group and support the less-experienced?
Did the workouts have goals?
Did periods have goals?
Did the athlete(s) excel? If so why or why not?
Were the expectations put onto the athletes higher/lower than the athletes were willing to commit too?
How did you connect with the athlete to drive optimal performance?

Fitness & Off Water Training

The off-season is a perfect time to work on general fitness. Progress made on general fitness from October through April will pay big dividends during the on-season. This can not be stressed enough. Increasing your strength and overall fitness will increase your performance.

track your progress
There are many categories of fitness. Keeping a fitness journal is a great way to document your growth and measure present fitness level. This will also help you repeat tests to show how your training plan is working over time. Write goals in the front, a plan of attack, difficulties or problem areas, and add in some goal dates to help achieve you program.


categories
There are a several fitness categories athletes are encouraged or should train (commonly called “general fitness”). Good general fitness is needed to have good paddling specific fitness. An athlete must develop in all these categories.
cardiovascular fitness – the ability to feed muscle’s oxygen over a longer time period

anaerobic fitness - the ability to recover after sprints and to repeat the output again and again

mental toughness – developing a “never give up (even for a stroke) attitude”

core strength – developing muscles in the body (versus the arm/legs) so they can work together. A strong core is needed to maintain balance when working.

nerve system and fine motor control development – working to hone the ability for the nerve system to talk to muscles groups. Essential for separating the muscles that are working from those that should be relaxed.
Note: Paddlers need to have good strength to weight ratios. If you carry weight (muscle or fat) that does not participate in pushing the boat forward than this is not optimal.

overall strength – developing sport specific and sport non-specific strength helps with injury prevention.

As an athlete, own your development. Trust in your plan. You and you alone know if you have put everything into a workout. Progress is not made in a linear fashion; you must apply yourself over time and you will see progress. Do not expect immediate results. Continue to follow through even when progress seems halted. Working on these fitness categories is not easy. Working with a coach to develop a plan along with your personal commitment can be crucial to success.

coach as partner
Every athlete should work with a coach to help optimize their development. Coaches must learn how to develop athletes by building a relationship that is centered in trust. Every athlete will need a different training plan, different workouts with different focuses. Managing athlete's training plans is an important task and can be a delicate balance based on individual's abilities. Moreover, in team situations highlighting all the above categories during training is a skill that requires patience and experience. Coaches need to continually learn and advance themselves to be a strong coach partner.

How much training an athlete can tolerate changes over time (measured by years, not months). A well trained athlete can tolerate much more than an untrained athlete. Understand who you are working with and what their goals are. Plan on a year or two or more in order for an athlete to “step to the next level” depending on the starting level of general fitness. This relationship will continue to grow as each of you learn what the athlete is capable of.

most important
Lastly but not of least importance is ** sport specific fitness – training your specific muscles to perform optimally - e.g. paddling muscles**.