We all know that the quickest path to victory in any given pursuit, is momentum. 15 minutes of effort every day trumps five hours of effort once a week. This is true if you are learning a new skill, improving your strength and fitness or trying to get something done.
Little and often beats much and rarely every single time.
The problem we have then with kite surfing is maintaining momentum, when our sport is reliant on the wind, which is inherently outside of our control.
I will first lay down several techniques to get around this problem and then talk about why a lack of momentum in this case may not be such a bad thing.
Of all the methods we can use to maintain momentum the most powerful is really very simple:
Visualisation.
Scientists have proved that simply by visualising an exercise we gain around 70% of the benefits as actually doing it.
So for example let’s take strength training, if you were to go and physically do biceps curls with a 20 kg weight you would gain 100% of the benefit of doing that exercise (whatever that may be). If you were to sit on the couch and simply visualise doing the same exercise you would gain somewhere between 60 and 80% of the benefit of actually having done the curl with the weight.
Do you see how massive this is?
It means that simply by taking 5 minutes each day we can’t get on the water and visualising the next trick or the next move you’re trying to perfect in kite surfing we can physically improve in that skill the next time we go out. If you actually use your body i.e. stand there and physically make the motions associated with that movement as well, the benefits can go up even higher, as can the strange looks from passers by!
Crossover sports are obviously another great way. However for many, suffer similar problems, that of set up and travel time and relying on conditions. Things such as surfing, stand-up paddling, skateboarding, snowboarding or any sport which requires balance, will really help our kite surfing.
Physical conditioning is obviously of huge importance as well.
Exercises such as Pilates, body balance even just standing on a balance trainer will help us to gain that overall equilibrium which is so important to our kite surfing (and our well being in general).
Conditioning classes such as cross fit can help or workouts that specifically target the major muscle groups used in kitesurfing and just as important allow our body to handle the stresses and strains a days kiting inevitably places on it, without it falling apart at the seams and leaving us sofa bound for weeks.
So earlier I mentioned that this lack of ability to build momentum in kite surfing (because of the wind and its variability) may in fact be a good thing, how can that be so?
Again going back to science, what is being discovered more and more is that the minimum effective dose needed to learn a skill, to gain strength, to build muscle, to build fitness is a lot, lot less than previously thought.
In his book Body by Science, Doug McGuff propounds a method of strength training where people train for only 20 minutes once a week and have seen massive strength increases. Tim Ferriss in his book The Four-Hour Body proposes that the minimum effective dose for a whole host of things is much less than we ever thought possible and participants in his experiments have shown superhuman results as a consequence.
What this leads us to is that the most important part of training is recovery.
Yes we need to train hard but what is more important is that we recover like a Mother Fokker. Most of us spend so much time in the training zone that we never allow our body to recover we are also in our modern society very bad a utilising the principles of recovery.
What do I mean by recovery?
Very very simple.
Sleep, Diet & Mindset.
You need to be getting your full quota of sleep, we are a nation of chronically fatigued individuals. For many of you out there I imagine trying to think of the last time you got a full eight hours great sleep and woke up full of energy raring to go not even thinking about hitting the snooze button is a long distant memory yet this is our natural state as humans in the 21st century.
It is during sleep that the mind pieces together the skills it has learned that day and where performance really improves. Performance will rarely improve during the time you are actually doing it (i.e. when you are on the water) in fact performance often decreases as you get increasingly physically tired.
Deep sleep is required for the brain to piece together the skills and to recover the body to the skill becomes implicit. This is why often a day of intense practice and frustration attempting to nail a skill you come back in the morning and perform it effortlessly first time.
The same can be said of diet if you’re filling your body full of crap at every meal your body is not going have the fuel available to power effective recovery and performance, learning and improvement will suffer greatly.
Mindset is possibly the most important but the most difficult to get your head around (ironically enough). Being in a constantly stressful state releases so many hormones into your system that actively take you out of this state of recovery and prevent you from getting back there any time soon thats it’s probably the most important and most under rated performance booster we have.
So the next time you sat on the beach waiting for wind don’t get frustrated, chill, enjoy the sun…think about how much recovery time you’re giving your body and how you actually improving your performance just by sitting there!