Analysing Performance Sport: Kayaking

GCSE Physical Education (Sport & Coaching)

Jacob Owen

08/05/2007

PE Theory Coursework

Analysing Performance

Sport: Kayaking

Role: Surfing

Important Skills Required For the Sport:

Straight Paddling
Sweep Strokes
Eskimo Roll
Hand Roll
Stern Rudder

Components of Fitness Required

Cardiovascular Endurance
Muscular Endurance ~ Mainly in arms and stomach
Speed ~ In the arms for fast paddling
Strength ~ Mainly in the upper body; arms stomach and back
Flexibility ~ Required in back and stomach to manoeuvre boat

Skill Related Fitness Components Required

Balance ~ To control and manoeuvre the boat
Co-ordination ~ So that things can be preformed at the same time.
Timing ~ So that everything is preformed at the right time to be effective
Speed of Reaction ~ So that things are done at the right moment

Out of these skills and components of fitness, I have some weakness’ and strengths. I will show these and from these I can make up a 3 week training program focusing on these.

My weakness’ are:

Hand Roll
Muscular Endurance
Flexibility
Timing

My strengths are:

Stern Rudder
Eskimo roll
Speed
Balance

From these skills that I am best at and least good at, I will be able to produce a 4 week training program that focus’s on my weakness’, improves the skills that I am no so weak in but still need improvement, and will give the least attention to my best skills, but I will still need to practice these skills to stop myself loosing the ability.

There are many different principles that can be used in developing a training program, each exercise recognise each of these and address each as nessesscery.

Overload Training is to making your body work harder than it is known to easily, this will cause your fitness to improve.
Specificity is that all training must be targeted at skills and components of fitness specific to the activity or sport.
Progression is that all training must steadily progress from simple training to the desired level.
Peaking is that all athletes can only work at their best for a small amount of time so that they time this peak to coincide with an important event or competition.
Reversibility is the fact that if you do not continue to train, you will loose fitness, this usually happens much faster than training.
The FITT principle is a way of training, all successful training program s must contain an element of each of these decided before training starts.

Frequency of training exercise
Intensity of each training exercise
Time for each exercise
Type of exercise

The way of doing each of these exercises and training well with each is called a training method, there are many of these, and some of these are:

Circuit Training can be used to train many different skills at once, this allows this method to be used in many situations. They are easily customised for almost every sport and activity.
Continuous training is training the body’s aerobic respiration, it is training for a long period of time, doing one constant thing.
Fartlek Training is continuous training interspersed with short periods of fast sprints, this helps build up the ability to change speeds, and is commonly used in training for games.
Flexibility training should be used in all sports and activities, it is the stretching of muscles ...

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Circuit Training can be used to train many different skills at once, this allows this method to be used in many situations. They are easily customised for almost every sport and activity.
Continuous training is training the body’s aerobic respiration, it is training for a long period of time, doing one constant thing.
Fartlek Training is continuous training interspersed with short periods of fast sprints, this helps build up the ability to change speeds, and is commonly used in training for games.
Flexibility training should be used in all sports and activities, it is the stretching of muscles and tendons, these stretches can be preformed my yourself (active stretching) or with someone else (passive stretching)
Interval training is short periods of training with rest periods between. Its rest periods and exercise times can be changed over time to help the athlete progress. It is a highly adaptable type of training suiting most runners, swimmers and cyclists
Weight training is training in a gym with weights, this can be customised to suit the sport you are training for and so certain muscle groups can be targeted. There are types of equipment to suit almost all types of sport and exercise.

It is also known that for a exercise to be successful, it must be all of the following:

Specific
Measurable
A
Rate
Timed
E
R

Training to improve my kayaking

I have not been kayaking for the last 2months over the winter and I am now starting again for the year, I wish to get as much fitness and skills back within the first three weeks. Over the winter I have only spent one hour a week practicing my skill in the pool and so I do not have the fitness I need.

I wish to create a routine that will improve my skills and so make me better at kayaking. I have decided that I have 2 hours a day to use for practice. I will use this to improve my kayaking skills as best I can in three weeks.

I need to concentrate on my weakest skills because of this I will make my main exercises focus on these. These are:

Hand Roll
Muscular Endurance
Flexibility

Timing

I also need to use the principles above to help me to choose an effective routine.

To improve my hand roll I will have to do regular practice, I wish to do at least 2 hours in a week. At the moment I can successfully roll about half the times I try, from this I can tell if I have improved. My goal over the three week period is to roll successfully three times out of four.

I also wish to improve my muscular endurance, I will have to do endurance exercises, for increasing lengths of time over my three week periods. I will start with half an hour on a rowing machine. I also wish to use my times that I can kayak to concentrate on long distance endurance kayaking. As I get later in the training program I will increase the length on the rowing machine building up my stamina over the three week training session. I will aim to increase my time on the machine by about 10 minutes a week, because I am going to repeat this practice every day I will aim to increase this time by 5 min halfway through each week. I will also aim to paddle further each time and build up the length and time in which I paddle for. I wish to be able to improve the time I can use the rowing machine and so the time I can kayak for. My goal is to be able to easily use the rowing machine for 50 minutes; I also want to easily be able to paddle further than the 2 miles I can already paddle. Another way to increase my muscular endurance is to do regular sit-ups and press-ups over the next three weeks, because of this I wish to do 1 minute of each of these a day to improve my fitness.

I also wish to build up my flexibility in by back and stomach, to do this I will do regular stretch exercises. I will stretch out before each exercise I do and I wish to spent 3 lots of 1minute each day stretching my muscles. I will need to test and see if my flexibility is improving, I will use the “sit and reach” test to find out how flexible my stomach and back is. Knowing this I can test myself and find out how much I have improved my flexibility.

Timing can only be improved by practicing kayaking, because of this and because it is and effective way of training all of the above. I wish to kayak in all of the spare time I have after doing all of the above training. I will aim to paddle more than 1 hour a week. It is hard to say how good my timing is so it will be hard to notice any improvements, because of this it is not a very good training exercise as I cannot make a goal. I will include it in my regular kayaking and I know that it will improve if I practice it.

Training

I will practice all of this as much as possible in the three weeks I have.

Before I started my training program I will take a test in most of the areas I wish to improve, this will allow me to see how I have improved over the two weeks.

As I said before my hand-roll was only successful half the time and I wanted to significantly improve this.

I have not paddled for two months and found it difficult to paddle the 2miles from pier to pier and back. I would like to be able to improve the time in which I can do this, and by the end I would like to be able to easily paddle from the marina to west pier and back (approximately 4miles)

In my sit and reach tests, I set the distance that I could reach to 0 on the scale. From this I will be able to tell how much I have improved over the next few weeks.

I cannot judge my timing and it is very hard to measure how I have improved. Because of this I cannot make it a goal. Because of this I will or have a target to aim towards and my training will be seriously jeopardised. I will only be able to say that I wish to practice surfing as much as I possibly can. But this depends on how lucky I am with the weather. I will be able to improve my timing over the season, and it is the least week of all my weakest skills. I will aim to paddle for at least and hour a week.

So I have decided to practice over the next few weeks this:

2 hours of hand rolling per week
30 minutes on the rowing machine, increasing by 5min every 3days.
1 minute of press-ups and 1 minute of sit-ups each day.
3 lots of 1minute stretches, and stretching before each other exercise.
1 hour of kayaking a week.

Improvements

After the three weeks of intensive training, I found that all my weakest areas have significantly improved;

I can now go for 50 minutes on the rowing machine, which is a vast improvement on the 30 minutes I could manage before. This is what I aimed for and so I have reached my goal. I also managed to kayak between the pier and the 4 miles I aimed at. It was not as easy as I hoped it would be though so I would still like to try that another time.
I can also now roll successfully most times that I try and it is clear that I have improved. I managed 119 out of the 162 rolls I attempted; this was very close to ¾ of them and a vast improvement on my old record of half of them. I am pleased to now have the confidence to use them.
In the flexibility test, I can now reach 6cm further than I could before the training routine. This shows that my stomach muscles are much fitter allowing me to perform better in a kayak and reduce the risk of injury.
I paddled 1-2 hours every week, this shows that I did the exercises as I should have but it is hard to say if my timing has improved, I feel it has but there are no obvious signs that this is true.

Now that I have finished my routine, I wish to continue these exercises to keep improving my fitness, it will also stop my fitness reversing. I will also add additional exercises in to target other areas that I feel need to be improved.

Week 1

This week I did two sessions of hand-rolling practice, each session was for 1hour in these I did not greatly improve my skills compared to the last, but I did roll more than half of the times, this allows me to say that already I know I am improving.

I spent half an hour each day for the first three days this week, and 35minutes for two more days later in the week on the rowing machine. I can already tell that I felt less tired and out of breath after every time on the rowing machine. I also noticed that at the start of the week I could only just do the thirty minutes but by the end I could easily do thirty-five minutes. I will start next week on forty minutes. On Saturday and Tuesday I did some long distance paddling, I found that because of the practice during the week I found it much easier to paddle on the Saturday compared to the Tuesday.

I have been stretching the muscles in my back and stomach every night and whenever up to three times per day. When I retook the sit-and-reach test, I found that I could reach three centimetres further than I could originally. This shows an improvement.

There has only been one day this week in which the whether conditions were correct for surfing, this meant that I could only do two hours of surfing. The surf was poor and though the practice was good for my overall skills, because the conditions were not excellent, I do not feel I have improved much.

Week 2

This week again I did two sessions of hand-rolling practice; each session was for 1hour in these in this session, I made sure I counted the number of rolls so that I can say how I improved. Out of the 154 rolls I did over the two sessions I completed 89 of them this is more than half and on the way to three-quarters of them. This is a sure sign that I am improving this.

This week I decided to spent 40minutes on the rowing machine for the first 3 sessions and 45 for the rest of the week, I did three sessions at 40 minutes and three at 45 minutes. From these practice sessions I then did some long distance paddling. This week I timed the time it took for me to paddle between the two piers, and found that this improved.