Marianne Archer is competing in the World Kayak Marathon Championships

That's Marianne out front - of course!

I have been assisting Marianne with her nutrition and conditioning for several years from the time she switched from netball to kayak after a series of frustrating leg injuries.

Despite her being considered "old", Marianne is now the undisputed marathon champion in New Zealand and she finished in the top 20 at the last World Kayak Marathon Championships.  I would be disappointed if she did not make the top 10 this time round.  She has the physical goods and has done the work.

Here is the official website and programme where results will be published.  If I have it right, she is competing on 23rd Sept in the K1 Senior Women.

Messages of support for Marianne can be posted using the "post a comment" tab below this article.

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Do you have a question?  Email Gary: gary@myotec.co.nz. Include any relevant background information to your question.  Please be patient and be aware that I may not be able to answer every inquiry in detail, depending on workloads (My paying clients take precedence!). I will either reply by email or, most likely, by way of an article (Personal identifying details will be removed before publication).

Advice for treating rotator cuff tendon injury from paddling

Hello Gary,
I have been involved in surf ski and marathon paddling for a couple of years, but lately have been experiencing shoulder problems that have kept me out of the boat. I have seen a couple of physios, bio - kinetists, and orthopedic surgeons to try and get to the bottom of the problems, and they all seem to agree that i have muscular imbalances in my shoulder, that are causing impingement of the rotator cuff tendon, but a cant seem to get a decent gym / stretching program out of the guys, as none of them are paddlers.

I have spent some time in the gym, trying to strengthen the rotator cuff muscles, core and shoulders, but lack a bit of direction with the program.

I have also seem a technique expert, who is helping me sort out any any / all of the stroke problems that may be causing the problems.
Do you have an all round gym program, as well as specific rotator cuff exercises, and a stretching program that will hopefully get me back in the boat?

Great site, and thanks for the time. Cheers David
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Gary Moller comments:
The issue you raise is the most common ailment that I deal with on a daily basis. I would add that the resolution never requires medication or surgery and all those affected are able to resume full activity in no longer than a few weeks. Paddlers, cyclists, runners, swimmers and computer operators are generously represented. In most people there is some tenderness of the rotator cuff muscles.

What is most likely going on in your case, David, is most of the muscles of the back and shoulder have become knotted and inflamed as a consequence of years of heavy use from paddling. No manner or amount of strengthening, stretching or balancing - or even rest - will give anything more than short relief. You could rest six months, resume and be back where you were in a matter of weeks.

When muscles are exercised hard over a long period of time there is accumulated damage, including adhesions between muscles, tendons and fascia that would normally slide and glide smoothly past each other. Muscles can become painfully bunched, knotted, stuck and engorged with toxic fluid. Such areas may be visibly swollen and extremely painful to press on. If body PH is tested, the person affected is more than likely acidic and the muscles themselves even more so due to constant anaerobic prodiction of lactate and acidic metabolic wastes. This localised acidity is confirmed by the drop in body PH immediately following a massage of the affected areas.

If you have hard, knotted portions within a muscle, I recommend nothing other than gentle stretching. This is because excessive stretching may cause more problems because it is the softer, healthy muscle that stretches and not the hard gristle. Get rid of the knots and adhesions and then stretch and strengthen. I am sure that, if an experienced massage therapist was to examine your muscles, you will discover they are riddled with painful knots.

There is only one solution and one that is highly effective when done properly and persisted with and that is deep tissue massage of the affected areas. You need to find an experienced massage therapist. You need to spend time. A 20 minute physio appointment is no good - about an hour twice a week for about 4-6 weeks. This kind of massage is painful to begin with but becomes pleasant as the muscles recover to normal health. Positive results can be seen within two sessions in most cases.

Combined with this is a diet that promotes an alkaline constitution and which aids healing. Please read my articles about body acidity. Also ensure that you have generous vitamins especially vitamin C during the healing processes and to mop up the free radicals that flood the body from the toxins released during the massages.

Once you have commenced this regime, you need to listen to your body. It will tell you when to get out on the water again. Sure, you could join a gym; but if you are serious about paddling, then invest in a good kayak coach and do various drills on the water.

Are athletes really getting faster due to legitimate training mehtods?

"Thanks for the comments on an article that I, and my team of athletes and professional strength & conditioning specialists/sport scientists so intelligently put together. Why strength train? simple:
1. prevent chronic injury - all sports, esp those that are repetitive in motion, will cause an imbalance that can lead to injury. Stronger athletes are more resistant to injury
2. prevent burnout - our entire team of experts at Human Motion can talk the talk and we can certainly walk the walk - all athletes at a high level and know the benefits of stimulating the nervous system in the "gym." Aside from balanced power development and refining motor programs and intramuscular coordination and decreased "unnecessary" cortical activty, doing something other than paddling can be a great OTS avoider.
3. Improve power - Simple really - improve strength, improve rate fo force application = improvements in power. We have measured kayakers in the lab after strength training and low and behold - their watts went up

So, athletes in general are getting faster and getting stronger, across the board, in all sports and what is the common denominator - excellent, scientifically prescribed strength programs. The results speak for themselves and you didn't hear this from some geeky scientist that sits in a lab all day, you heard this from those who have tested and proven it on themselves and their athletes." (Here is the article in question)
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Gary Moller responds:
I am not sure whether the letter above is an advertorial or a telling off - probably both.

First of all, canoeing is several sports in one - it could be flat water sprints, slalom, canoe polo, marathon or as part of multisports. Each has differing requirements. The most important being a high skill base and then physical conditioning.

I have a reasonable competitive canoeing background and have presented to kayaking coaches about the Lydiard Method of athlete conditioning. Canoeing is the only sport I have done competitively and never suffered an injury, other than being whacked under the nose by another kayaker's paddle! Ouch! I concentrated on long distance downriver racing and palying the waves so, other than sore shoulders and a numb arse, there are few other injuries because anything worse would probably result in terminal drowning.

While I have no problem with gym conditioning for paddling, I will continue to argue that the best conditioning for most sports is to do the sport. Great athletes are not made in gyms - its time on the water, on the road and so on that produces them. Of course, they need to work to a structured coaching programme. In the case of canoeing, most, if not all of the strength work can be done on the water under the instruction of an experienced paddling coach who can devise sport-specific drills. If an athlete has the time and the energy to do fancy gym work, then he/she is probably not spending enough time on the water.

I can not understand the logic of the argument that working out in the gym reduces injuries. Injuries from kayak training are rare and where they occur, the problem is to do with poor techniques and training programme structure. Paddlers who get injured need a new coach and they might also benefit from a good shoulder massage, a better diet and more rest between training sessions. Who knows? Chucking weights is lower on the list of interventions. This is especially so, since weight training without meticulous practice carries much higher risk of injury than paddling a canoe!

Photo: NZ Kayaker, Ben Fouhy, clean and mean and beaten by an Australian drugs cheat.

Are athletes really getting that much faster and stronger due to legitimate means, or is much of what we witness today the result of outright cheating? In Lorraine's book, "On the Wings of Mercury" she tactfully talks about drugs cheats. In one story, she talks about "Catheter Woman" who creates a toilet queue under the Olympic stadium while she struggles to fit a plastic bladder and catheter with "clean" urine inside her before rushing out into the crowded stadium to make her winning attempt. Yep, Gold and the other atheltes knew what she was up to but could or would not say anything.

An athlete does not accuse another of being a drugs cheat without the risk of having their arses sued to Kingdom-come, and of being totally unwelcome like a deformed leper for the rest of their living days by event promoters, their national sporting bodies and fellow athletes. Say "drug cheat" and your career is history. A drugs cheat gets only 4 years off - not a lifetime of ostracism as can happen to the clean athlete who speaks out.

Photo: Nathan Baggaley - exposed as a low down drugs cheat - go here for the story

We should be under no illusions at all that drugs taking is not rife in sports across the board and we are naiive if we really think that the sports drugs testing agencies are getting on top of the problem.

Clean athletes usually come 5th or less - seldom first.

Question:
The next Olympics are being held in China. China is planning to dominate these games in the medal count. So, my question to you is this: How come we are not seeing Chinese athletes competing on the World stage right now? What are they getting up to behind the security of their national borders?

Core Conditioning for Kayaking - Do you really need it?

"I cannot think of a single successful training innovation proposed by a scientist,"
Peter Snell (2007)

Here is the body of an article from the website: Altdirt about strength training and core conditioning for kayakers. I have cut and pasted this because it is very well written and demonstrates so well why and how New Zealand has lost the plot when it comes to producing champion athletes:

"Strength training is effective and necessary for kayakers who wish to establish the groundwork required for maximizing power output, reducing the risk of injury, and achieving peak sport performance. by Camen Bott and Lonni Farmer. The athlete’s core, as its name suggests, acts as the foundation for movement generation and power production (Kibler, Press, & Sciascia, 2006).

Upon recognizing that power and muscular endurance are essential skills for successful kayaking, it is not difficult to understand why developing core strength through purposeful training is particularly advantageous. With improved core conditioning and stability, an athlete is able to execute body movements more efficiently, allowing for a streamlined translation of force from the fully engaged platform to the upper and lower body regions—where sport-specific skills are executed (Kibler et al., 2006).

Regardless of the amount of strength an athlete possesses in the upper and lower limbs, neglecting to strengthen the core will create a deficit that will ultimately decrease the amount of total power that can be accumulated (Fekete, 1998).

In addition to mitigating power output, a muscular imbalance involving the torso places the athlete at great risk for injury.

CORE STRENGTH TRAINING FOR INJURY PREVENTION Developing and maintaining adequate core strength is believed to be one of the most effective ways of protecting oneself from injury (Bono, 2004; Brukner & Khan, 2007).

Because the core serves as the platform through which actions are initiated, a weakness in this area will increase the demands on other joints and muscles and can lead to pain and injury (Edwards, 1993). The overuse injuries associated with paddling often occur in the back, shoulders and arms (Kameyama, Shibano, Kawakita, Ogawa, & Kumamoto, 1999).

The Back One of the most common problems observed in kayaking is associated with the unique rotational trunk movement that occurs while paddling. This movement, performed in the seated position, creates a sheering effect at the lower spine. Without a strong torso to distribute these forces and support the back, this sheering will find or create a point of weakness along the spine and result in injury. Of all the variations of abdominal exercises practiced by athletes, those that involve rotation of the trunk are believed to be the least often used (Brukner & Khan, 2007).

For a sport as abdominally dynamic as kayaking, it is critical that these exercises are incorporated into a program. The Shoulders The health and performance of the shoulders is extremely reliant on the strength, endurance, and stability of the trunk. Developing a resilient core will foster safe and effective paddling techniques. A weak core will make proper kayaking form difficult to maintain due to the disproportionate recruitment of the shoulders and arms (Kameyama et al., 1999).

Over time, these and other distal structures will undergo premature compensatory fatigue which may result in chronic overuse injury."

Please download and view the video that comes with the Altdirt article. This video is a beautiful demonstration of a single-handed dumbell clean done by a superbly conditioned athlete.

Before I explain my problem with all of this, let me establsih a few paddling credentials:

I competed in the first paddling multisports tri in NZ, the Sulphur City Gut Buster in Rotorua 1978. This involved a paddle across lake Rotorua. I was beaten into 2nd place by less than 60 seconds by a guy named Paul MacDonald who went on to win several Olympic medals as a flat water paddler. I continued to compete through to about 1985, averaging 3rd placing behind Roger Nevatt (Super Chook) who should have gone to the Olympics as a road cyclist if he had not been so distracted by triathlons and Bernard Fletcher who had over 30 NZ kayaking titles to his name. I thrived on down-river racing sections of these races and relished beating the big, muscular boys who were often all power and no skill.

I learned early on from being repeatedly cleaned out in the paddling legs by Bernard Fletcher that kayaking had little to do with strength and more to do with technique, heart and the ability to work with the river and not against it. In those early days, there were no rudders, so we were forced to paddle smoothly, evenly and to use our body position to swing and glide the boat in whatever direction. Like a little Blue Duck, we learned to use the pressure waves and eddies to sling-shot the kayak downstream with little effort. This is a skill not learned in a gym.

Since those early days, I have worked with a number of paddlers, made presentations at training camps and even run a workshop for Ian Ferguson's regional kayak coaches about training using the Lydiard Method, prior to the Athens Olympics. The kayak coach I have the most time for is Mark Watson of Tawa who is very strong on the technical aspects of paddling efficiently.

Kayaking does not cause injuries unless you wipe out and use your head and face as an anchor as you slide downstream. What causes injuries in kayaking is poor technique and poorly structured training programmes. Technique is not learned in a gym. It is learned through time spent on the water doing drills under the watchfull eye of an experienced coach like Mark.

Kayaking done right is fabulous core conditioning. there is no need to spend hours in the gym. If you do not believe me, go hire a coach like Mark Watson to show you some paddling drills. You could also try lifting your rudder and doing zig-zag sprints in and out of the rows of boats moored in a marina. Try paddling in a straight line backwards. Core conditioning should be specific for the sport and nothing is better than doing the sport itself. The problem with weights exercises like the one demonstrated in the video is it has little in relation to kayaking. Sure, its a great exercise for a power lifter; but little relevance for a paddler. If, as a paddler, you have the time and the energy to be doing these fancy exercises, it probably means you are not spending enough time on the water!

Doing exercises like the one demonstrated carry a significant injury risk, especially to the shoulder and back. This should only be attempted under the instruction of an experienced power lifting coach and many months of practice are required to get anywhere near the perfection as demonstrated in the video. Such coaches are few and far between in NZ and average You and Me will be far from perfect when it comes to technique, no matter how careful we are. So much for doing exercises to prevent paddling injuries. Please read this article about the damage one can suffer.

A winning paddler is mean and ugly with muscles in the right places. Why waste precious physiological reserves developing muscles you do not need for powering a kayak? If you are a downriver paddler, you want a light, low centre of gravity. All that bulk upstairs from pumping iron in the gym only serves to cause stability problems as your kayak bounces through those rapids and hits those swirling eddies. So what are you going for - the body beautifull to stand and pose on the river bank; or are you training to win?

Of course there is a place for the gym; but, my advice, if you aspire to paddle really well, and to do so without injury or boating mishap, is to hire an experienced coach who has already delivered the goods with others. As Peter Snell alludes to: Keep the sports scientist who has never achieved sporting greatness themself at arms length. Do these things and you will do well. Most of all, you must get out on the water at every opportunity!

About core strength for endurance athletes

This article is going to get me off-side with the strength and conditioning experts; but here goes.... Much is heard nowadays about "core strength". It appears that just about every sporting injury has the lack of core strength as a root cause and it seems every exercise programme must include a complex series of "core exercises" that are so difficult to do that the ongoing services of a personal trainer are required to do them safely. In the context of endurance sports like running and cycling, I believe the need for core strength is over-promoted to the point where it is detrimental to athletic performance.

Photo: Light weight, wiry strength and no bulk are key determinants of who wins

While an endurance athlete needs strong abs and back muscles, there is definitely no need for a thick "core" of trunk muscles that do nothing to improve forward propulsion and serve only to add excess weight that is an added strain to the heart and the legs.

What makes a middle and long distance runner, swimmer or cyclist faster is time spent doing the actual activity - time spent in the gym lifting weights or teetering on large balls for longer than about 30 minutes three times a week probably does not contribute to athletic performance. If the athlete has the time and the energy to spend longer in the gym then he or she is probably not doing enough of their "core" activity such as running.

My previous business partner (He was a nationally ranked runner with a 4min 01s mile PB) in the gym business and I were constantly bemused by all the hours spent by aspiring athletes doing advanced Swiss Ball exercises. It was a pity there was not an Olympic event for Swiss Balls!

Sure: Strong, mobile joints and muscles about the hips are essential for running and strength is needed about the trunk to maintain posture and to balance and transfer pushing, pulling and torsional forces between the upper and lower limbs. But it comes down to how much strength and bulk is needed and how it is developed and maintained. The best way to develop core strength that is sport-specific is resistance forms of the competition one is training for - so in kayaking, that might involve drills towing a bucket or sack; a runner may do hill bounds; a cyclist might do hill climbs -stomping a big gear and a swimmer might use hand paddles.

I have put together a guide for core exercises to develop core strength and good posture - exercises you do not neeed a university Degree to do safely. These exercises should require no more than about 30 minutes in the gym 3 times a week, including warm-up time. Any longer and you might be doing too much and you should be outside doing some real training!