Hello and Welcome - Purpose of Site
The purpose of this site is to seek and exchange ideas on all aspects of the theory and practice of dragon boat racing. Sports like rowing, kayaking and canoeing are well researched with lots of information available to help coaches and participants improve performance but Dragon Boat racing is a new sport that is yet to be developed to the same level. So if you have any ideas or thoughts on dragon boat paddling techniques, boat steering methods, racing strategies, coaching and training, please post a comment.
February 12th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
JUST TO GIVE IT START SOMEWHERE
It is true that dragon boating itself is relatively “un-researched”.
Also there are many aspects where one could start a research with.
With this comment I want to focus on our human body and its muscles.
It is well researched how those function and we know about anaerobic and aerobic state which goes in line with the so named Steady State.
Describing it in a very simple, perhaps naive way, our muscles obtain their power from a burning process. Let’s call the stuff they burn simply burn-elements, which are in fact things like phosphor creatine, glycogen and oxygen.
For those burn-elements our muscles have only a very limited storage capacity, which means when suddenly being challenged they burn up the stocks pretty fast and will need some supply to continue functioning.
That a muscle uses up his self stored burn-elements when heavily stressed takes about 60 to 90 seconds before he starts fading to a level equivalent to what he gets via the blood as the delivery media for burn-elements.
Now, before a muscle is stressed, so in a resting state, our vasomotor nervous system pumps supplies equally as needed to all organs of our body. Suddenly stressed muscles will give it a wake up call to step up supplies. However, this takes some time.
With the additional knowledge that a muscle can even work for few seconds without oxygen lets him most likely even work more than the gradually supplies can catch up with.
What now happens is that after 60 to 90 seconds the muscle is in a lack of supplies, he will fade down to level of the then available supply, which is then not at its possible maximum, which will be reached only after two to three minutes. Let’s leave it as explained, there would be much more, and take a look how long a dragon boat race over 250 or 300 m takes. That’s between 1 to 1,5 minutes, isn’t it?
This means at race end, when you would wish to sprint your muscles are fading out to likely the weakest state they can have. It’s exactly the time when your muscles are in urgent need for burn-elements and the supply hasn’t reached it’s maximum.
The question is now how to overcome this situation?
There are answers to it, which are not only on a pure training side.
It touches also strategic thoughts for a team captain.
Let’s have a look what comments you have on this.
July 6th, 2008 at 7:36 am
Thames Dragon Boat Club, UK is partnering with the University of East London’s Sports Science department to undertake some revolutionary research which will deal with fitness, nutrition etc.
We hope to also expand this to include optimum paddling style, technique, training and paddle.
Watch this space!
July 27th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Check out the following site
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02640410802491350