Practice paddling right. Bring a lot of focus to each run. Each run should be high quality, fast and clean. Paddling well is a habit. If you paddle fast and clean in practice, you will paddle fast and clean in races. You won’t need to do anything different on race day.
So, you should never paddle slowly. It’s a bad habit, just as hitting gates is a bad habit and being off line is a bad habit and using poor technique in practice is a bad habit. So, if you start getting tired during the workout and can’t do it fast and with perfect technique, stop and come back another day.
Your muscles will gradually get more used to these higher speeds from practice and that will be the speed you naturally go in races. It will take some time to re-program the muscles to go fast though. Your muscles will actually undergo changes as they become faster. Might take months to fully convert.
Rest times are important. The idea is to have enough rest between runs so that you are fresh and ready and can do another fast, clean run. If you are so tired that you make a technical error or slow down, it’s time to stop the workout, even if you haven’t done all the runs you planned on taking.
Do not get into bad habits such as slouching, poor forward stroke technique, hitting poles, or going slow. If you practice using bad habits, you will do them in the race. If you are so exhausted that you can't use proper technique or you start to paddle slowly, just stop the workout and come back another day when you are fresh and ready to paddle fast and clean.
Training for long distances in your slalom boat teaches the muscles to go slowly, which is a bad habit. If you use a wildwater or flatwater boat, the muscle speed is faster, so it's not so much of a bad habit, but not really specific to slalom either. Instead, plan on doing shorter segments of race length or shorter, so that you can go race pace or faster, and you don't ingrain the bad habit of paddling slowly.
Comments