Paddling strength

Why bother with the gym at all

Gym work does not replace paddling. It does four things paddling cannot do on its own.

It makes you stronger, and 1RM scores correlate well with paddling performance over sprint distances. It makes you faster, because force is mass times acceleration, so an athlete who can move more mass can accelerate a lighter load, which is what the blade is. Targeted strength reduces injury risk, because paddling holds the hips and spine in flexion and overworks the anterior chain, and hip extension, glute work, spinal extension and rotator cuff work push back against that. And it gives you a second place to practise technique, which speeds up the neuromuscular side of stroke change.

I set that out in why use the gym as a training tool and expanded on the performance side in how does gym based training improve your paddling performance.

General strength or paddling specific

The honest answer is a bit of both, weighted toward whatever you are missing. Every paddler is different, and a program should be built around your own strengths and weaknesses rather than a template.

Legs are the clearest example. In the boat the knee travels from slightly flexed to close to full extension, and the hip extends only slightly through the drive. That is a small range, and specific leg strength should reflect it: partial squats, partial step-ups, partial deadlifts, Romanian deadlifts, lunges, and variations that add or resist rotation such as the suitcase deadlift. Full range squats, reverse hyperextensions and glute drives are not specific to that range at all, and they still belong in the program, because they keep the body balanced and the strength they build transfers into the specific work.

The full breakdown, including core, isometrics and wrist conditioning, is in strength training for paddlers: specific vs general exercises.

Three families of exercise, not two

Most arguments about paddling strength collapse because people only recognise two categories general strength and specific strength. There are three, and they do different jobs.

• Traditional strength. Bench press, pull-ups, squats, lunges, Olympic lifts. Mostly sagittal plane, heavily loadable, and that heavy load is the point: it teaches maximal fibre recruitment, core stability under load, and kinetic chain power.
• Multi-planar work. Rotational landmine presses and pulls, cable cross-body rows, pull-to-press movements. This is the middle ground where you learn to produce power through rotation while the core stays stable.
• Movement-specific work. Replicating technique movements in the gym add to technique practise, without the need to get on the water. Connecting your strength to the water.

Absolute statements about which exercises are good or bad rarely survive contact with an individual athlete. I made that argument in strength training vs movement pattern training.

What the research says about pulling

The bench pull is a fixture of sprint kayak programs, and it is worth questioning. Three studies point in an interesting direction: bench press strength correlated better with paddling performance than bench pull strength did (Kristiansen et al., 2023), pulling velocity correlated better than pressing velocity when looking at velocity and power (Romagnoli et al., 2022), and isometric training showed greater potential benefit than standard concentric work (Lum et al., 2021).

Read together, that fits what the stroke actually does. Paddling is closer to a pressing sport than a pulling one, and the pull that does happen wants speed more than raw load. I went through the studies and the alternatives I use instead in is the bench pull really helping you paddle faster.

Starting a program, and how to load it

Strength work usually starts before the paddling-specific block, while there is room to build base strength, correct imbalances and add prehab. Do that first and strength is much easier to hold onto once paddling load climbs.

Resist the urge to open at last season’s best lifts. Start around 80 per cent of your max. If your best 5×5 bench was 100kg, start at 80kg. You get useful volume at a manageable load and room to progress past the old number later. Compound lifts are the foundation, and they build total body strength because they teach you to recruit more muscle to move more weight. The bench press is nominally a chest exercise, and the glutes, calves, shoulders and core are all working during it.

The full set of guidelines, including how gym sessions sit alongside paddling, is in starting your strength program.

The paddling specific gym exercises that made the cut

My top ten runs from pull-ups and inverted rows through press-ups, scapular protraction and retraction work, ring-assisted pistol squats, wrist flexion and extension, core side bends, superman holds, Russian twists and sling kayak rotations. The wrist work is the one everybody skips and the one that keeps elbows healthy.

The exercises that missed are more interesting than the ones that made it. The bench pull is biomechanically ugly, with back hyperextension driving the pulling action, and it tends to reward arm strength over rotational strength. A weighted inverted row does the same job better. Shoulder raises are largely covered by correct pull-ups, inverted rows and press-ups. The reasoning for all twenty calls is in top 10 paddling specific gym exercises.

Rotation, and the gap nothing standard fills

Landmines, twists and cable wood chops are all useful, and none of them really replicates the paddling movement. Bands solve part of it, with one flaw: the load increases as the band stretches, which is the opposite of what the stroke does. A sling on a cable stack does not stretch, so it loads the kayak kinetic chain, legs through hips through shoulders, at a consistent resistance. I use the band version as a warm-up on the erg, the sling for strength, and the sling with speed for power, which is the progression in rotational strength for paddling.

The landmine deserves its own mention because it does a lot in a small footprint. Rotational lunges, paddler rows, floor press, shoulder press and anti-rotation holds cover most of what a paddler needs, and the full session is written out under the video in kayak strength landmine training.

Why the pull-up keeps coming up

Pull-up strength tracks paddling strength, but mostly in the bottom half of the movement, which is where the catch lives. The top half is the part paddlers skip, and it is the part that matters for shoulder health: chest to bar demands scapular retraction and depression, which loads the rhomboids, traps, rear delts and teres major. Those are exactly the muscles that get left behind when training is lat-dominant. Progressions toward a full range pull-up are in the perfect pull up.

Rings, slings and borrowing from gymnastics

Gymnastics training is coordinated, bodyweight based and worked through full range, which tends to produce better power-to-weight than loading a bar. It also carries a lot of prehab for wrists, elbows and shoulders, the three places paddlers break. Loading a barbell on top of an existing mobility limitation can make that limitation worse, so starting with a progressive bodyweight base is often the safer route. That argument is in gymnastics and paddling.

Equipment-wise, rings and slings buy you more range of training than another rack of dumbbells, and they take almost no space. Building false grip strength alone will do more for your pull-up than another month of assisted reps. I covered rings, slings and a few other underused pieces in unlock more strength with less gear.

The imbalance that injures paddlers

Paddlers lean on their lats, so the lats get strong and dominant. The trap is assuming strong lats balance out a flexed, forward-shouldered paddling posture. They do not. Because of its attachment on the upper arm, the latissimus dorsi also internally rotates the shoulder, so a lat-dominant paddler reinforces the exact posture that causes the problem. Overhead shoulder pain, impingement and medial elbow pain usually come from there.

What the body needs instead is hip and spinal extension, external rotation, full shoulder extension and scapular control through the whole range. Unilateral work is useful here because it exposes limitations that bilateral lifting hides. The full explanation, and why struggling with pull-ups and getting injured share a root cause, is in why you’re getting injured as a paddler.

If you only add three things, add the supine lat stretch with glute drive, the prone opposite arm and leg raise, and face pulls. Those are daily-dose exercises, described in 3 exercises to reduce paddling injuries. A banded warm-up routine you can run at home with nothing but a set of bands is in essential exercises for paddlers.

So is any of this functional

An international panel went looking for a definition of functional training and effectively concluded the term is redundant. All training is functional if it moves an individual toward their goal. A more useful frame is a continuum from strength to movement. High force work builds capacity and resilience and costs a lot of recovery. Low load, high complexity work builds coordination and motor learning and costs almost none, so you can repeat it often.

For paddlers that second end is the underused half. It lets you accumulate technical volume without loading the system, which is the argument in functional training, what is it really.

Every exercise on this page appears somewhere in the Strong Paddler gym sessions, already programmed with sets, loading and progressions. That library comes with membership.