Goi's Fitness Forum

He trains with a canoeing team in some poly.

6km run, gym: bench press, lats pulldown, one arm row, tricep extension, bicep curl, squats, incline chest flies, shoulder press, 3 sets of 12 reps each.Then abs excercise: 6 types of exercise X 50

Thats his 2x land training for canoeing.I know what you guys are going to say about the gym regime.

On top of that, he has 2x water training.

I asked him if he feels "sian" or 'not feel like training' and he said 'sometimes on the day of training'.And he also claims not being able to fall asleep sometimes after training ends at night.

Funny how they throw such a large volume at certain people who have no prior athletic or physical training, i thought this sort of volume needs to be built up over time.

Markers of overtraining:
- Decrease in performance
- Loss of motivation
- General fatigue
- Insomnia
- Higher resting pulse rate
- Weight loss
- Falling sick easily
- Mood swings

alex wrote:...
Funny how they throw such a large volume at certain people who have no prior athletic or physical training...

it's just my opinion, but i would think that it's the beginners that need the most reps.
of course, i woudn't be doing 3x12 everything...

in any case, i have no idea what overtraining is, after reading a few articles. there just seem to be too many different opinions.

...if he wants to be on the team, and this is the shit he has to go through... then... tough.
maybe you should give him something to help him out.

-edit-
again... just another opinion... but i do not believe "having no desire to train" on some days qualifies as an indicator, especially in a team.
practice (especially if the coach sucks) could become work-like... it's not all fun. i would say it's almost natural not wanting to show up at practice on some days.

Well, what to do. Proper SnC is not mainstream in SG.

Well, look on the bright side:

Met-Cond: apart from canoeing practice, he runs 6km twice a week, that's not as bad as it could be; would be a welcome change from the mainly upper body pull/push activity of canoeing (although you'd be surprised how much your legs are used to).

Strength: bench press, lats pulldown, one arm row, tricep extension, bicep curl, squats, incline chest flies, shoulder press. Take away the arm isolation exercises, and you have horizontal push+pull, vertical push+pull, squats. Could be much worse (missing DLs of course, which although IMHO should be included, if he's not trained properly it could be injury prone and hence detrimental). If he did pullups+chins, and dips instead of the arm work (even the flies make sense, if you've ever canoed before and understand the force production is push+pull+diagonally across, but maybe cable work would be better), I daresay it'd be a pretty decent program.

Abs: considering how much core work canoeing entails, I'm not surprised they would prescribe so many different exercises, although 50 reps seems excessive, and yet not that excessive; better would be to vary the rep+intensity range between sort-of ME type work (for when they really need to accelerate or turn on a dime) and RE type work (5x10, 1x50 are vastly different), and understand that core is not just abs, but the full range (pitch/roll/yaw... which seems pretty appropriate for canoeing, if you've ever rolled over before... glug glug)

Caveat: I am not a competitive canoeist, only been stuck in one for a few days before.

The concept of getting the athlete stronger is lost upon endlessly trying to improve the conditioning. Where the former is harder to build, we're still stuck in the diatribes of bodybuilding and endurance athlete like the text books.

oh well, evolution isn't hasten without a catalyst - so let it be.