Benefits of Surf Training

When you think of surfers, the image that comes to mind is a fit, tanned and healthy individual. This is no surprise, as surfing is a unique, full body workout that burns a lot of calories.

It requires a good level of core strength and fast twitch muscles to react quickly to the changing environment of the ocean. It also improves lung capacity and cardiovascular fitness.

Endurance Training

For surfing, endurance training is critical to surf longer and maintain high performance levels without getting fatigued. Endurance training increases the size of your muscles and improves muscle movement efficiency to allow you to perform for long periods of time and recover quickly. It also helps you stay at your ideal body weight and boosts lung capacity for increased oxygen intake.

Endurance training is best done with whole-body exercises that work a large number of muscle groups at once. Swimming and running are great examples. Running with short bursts of speed is better for this than slow jogging. Uphill sprints are another great exercise to develop leg strength and endurance for surfing, as well as combating hunched shoulders and flexed hips that promote injuries when surfed.

Most surfers are looking to build endurance to last longer without becoming too tired in the water. Strength is useful but if you get overly strong you will become fatigued quicker, as strong muscles need to be trained at lower volumes.

Cardiovascular Exercise

During a surf session you will work your core, legs, arms and shoulders. Paddling and duck diving in and out of the water and balancing on a surfboard will help to strengthen these major muscles.

The lungs also get a workout as you paddle out and duck dive through oncoming waves (that you won’t be riding). This combination of high and low intensity exercise will improve your lung capacity.

Most surf workouts have short bursts of intense activity with recovery periods in between, a method known as interval training. This type of workout will burn more calories and boost your heart health. It will also train your body to have greater stamina as you spend more time out on the water surfing. This will allow you to stay out longer and see more of the incredible scenery that surfing has to offer. This will also help you to enjoy your surfing more. It will make your sessions more fun and prevent you from burning out too quickly, check over here.

Muscle Strengthening

Surfing involves a lot of movement, and requires that muscles work for extended periods of time. Muscle strengthening will help develop the base levels of strength required for surfing as well as protect against injury.

Surfers need to have strong shoulders for paddling, thighs for getting up on the board and stabilizer muscles (chest, arms, abdominals) to stay balanced on the board. The core is also crucial for stability and should be trained with exercises that target the transverse abdominals, rectus abdominis and abdominal internal/external obliques.

One of the best and most effective exercises for surfers is the classic pushup. This exercise not only strengthens the shoulders, upper back and chest (key areas for surfers), it also helps to develop shoulder integrity and prevent shoulder burn after just a few waves. Other great exercises include bent knee circles and standing leg extensions. Both of these exercises are simple to perform and can be done anywhere.

Flexibility

If you want to improve your surfing, or even get started, it takes commitment and regularity. You also need to be able to move well and have good core strength.

The best surf fitness exercises include balance between pull and push muscle groups, and rotational movements to help with body positioning in a wave. Often people focus on either strength or flexibility training but not both, this creates imbalances that have a negative impact on performance and increase the likelihood of injury.

Conclusion:

The most important aspects of surf training are cardiovascular fitness tuned for surf endurance and quick recovery, and upper body and core strength. Flexibility training (using dynamic and static stretching) can help improve movement proficiency, guard against injury and allow you to recover from a session quickly. It is important to use these techniques before and after a surf or workout, and on days off. Using these techniques will also reduce the risk of sore muscles from surfing.