Kayaking
Nouria Newman's top 5 fitness tips for perfect kayaking
The French kayaking champion shares her 5 fitness essentials that every kayaking enthusiast should do to improve their paddling prowess.
Beyond appearances, being a good whitewater kayaker requires a lot of hard work and excellent fitness. Here are top whitewater rider Nouria Newman's top five things to work on if you want to be in shape for your paddling adventures.
1. Fundamental endurance
Running, biking, swimming, or any other sport done for a long amount of time helps to build fundamental endurance. Good endurance allows you to train more and recover better. It's also necessary when you need to make it through long river days.
Newman uses running to build her endurance reserves
© Teddy Morellec for Wings for Life World Run
Most of the time, making your way down the river requires more than just paddling down the rapids. You need to hike to the river, scramble over wet rocks to scout rapids, and carry your kayak whenever you can't run a rapid and have to portage around it.
2. Strength
Sometimes the current helps, sometimes it doesn't. To paddle down a river, you can't just float with the flow. You have to constantly pull hard on your paddle to make your lines, and move your kayak towards where you want to go. Some moves, such as the boof stroke, require a lot of power to jump over waves and holes.
Like a phoenix rising from the flames...
© Samo Vidic/Red Bull Content Pool
To be able to pull hard on your paddle at all times, you might want to hit the gym and work on your arms and upper body with different pulling exercises. You want to be stronger so that you can handle more reps and have some explosivity. Make sure you don't just work with heavy weights: change the format of your gym session with different pulling angles, as well as some isometric and isokinetic exercises.
3. Core and abs
If you need your arms to pull hard on your paddle, but you also need a good core to move your kayak. As you pull on your paddle, you have to be able to transfer the forces through your core all the way to your feet, with which you push on your footrest – that's what helps your boat move forward. To move your boat around when you want to turn, but also every time you edge, you need good core muscles. There are hundreds of good core exercises, switch them up to keep it entertaining.
4. Balance
As the water is constantly moving under your boat, whitewater kayaking requires very good balance. Of course, the best way to practice is to go kayaking, but since you might already be going to the gym to work on your strength and core, you might as well spice up your training sessions with some balance and proprioception exercises. Challenge yourself by doing some balance and core exercises on some fitness balls.
Maintain a balanced core
© Marcelo Maragni/Red Bull Content Pool
5. Work those shoulders
Shoulder dislocation is probably the most common injury in whitewater kayaking so it's very important to keep your shoulders healthy by doing injury prevention exercises.
Shoulder strength is key for paddling
© Dean Treml/Red Bull Content Pool
Use some elastic bands to work your small shoulder muscles and put in some extra time for your external rotator cuffs. A lot of kayaking can also generate bad body posture so to correct body posture, you need to work on your small back muscles, mostly the shoulder blade fixators. If possible, work with a physiotherapist, too.
Watch the raw power of Nouria's kayaking in the player below:
1 min
Follow Me – Nouria Newman
Enjoy the incredible kayaking skills of Nouria Newman as she takes on the Devil’s Slide in Italy.
