Are 3 days to recover from a surf lesson too many?

Question

I am 37 and in good shape. I do gym, weights lifting. One month ago, I started learning surfing and, unfortunately, I need 3 full days to recover from a surf lesson, especially if the ocean is a bit wilder.

I am wondering if that’s normal in the beginning and if it improves over time. Or, it could be an issue with body tension — I had this issue in the past.

If I take a lesson after only 2 days, my body is still a bit tired, and not very responding/slow. In such conditions, it’s impossible for me to catch the waves.

Answer 1

I'll assume what you do in the gym is pretty much an all-over workout aimed at general strength. This can be very helpful, but may miss some useful muscles. You may benefit a bit from some endurance cardio in gaps between the surfing, but I suspect a couple of things:

• Surfing is still new to you, and only doing it twice a week it will take some time for the unfamiliar movements to become routine. New uses of the same muscles do take some getting used to, resulting in stiffness.

• You might find stretching after a surf session is helpful. This might include finding some new stretches. If you're like me, finishing a gym session or even a run with some stretches is routine, but after getting out of a kayak or off a bike it doesn't seem to happen. Even after an unusually hard swim I should stretch but don't.

• If it's a long session (like a half-day lesson), you could end up really depleted and need a bit of refeeding. In that case you should get some carbs (and protein) in you at the first opportunity. This is especially something to look at if you're used to shorter bouts of exercise, and if you're feeling sluggish all over. In particular if your diet is light on carbs to start with, it could take a couple of days to build back up. A portion of starchy food after a surf session would be an easy thing to try. If your normal diet is very light on carbs (but you're not going keto) your glycogen stores may be low to start with. Modifying the meal or two before the session might help (e.g. more bread at lunch, oats at breakfast), and/or a cereal bar or banana close to the session or in a break on the beach.

• Similarly it's quite easy to end up dehydrated after a day on the water, and again that should be dealt with promptly.

If you make a note of specific areas of your body that suffer the most, you can try training (when not surfing) and/or stretching (after a surf session) those areas

Answer 2

I’d say three days is at the extreme end of recovery time, but as others have said, you might be using new, untrained muscles.

My opinion, and speaking as a climber who has never surfed: you shouldn’t expect gym exercises (weights - high intensity, low volume) to improve your performance when surfing. I expect - much like climbing - it is mostly down to stamina. Sure, I need to be able to pull up on my arms sometimes, and training with weights, press ups and pull ups helps there, but the majority of it is just being able to sustain 20m of climbing non-stop without getting pumped or running out of breath. So in short: cardio, cardio, cardio. Running, cycling, maybe things like HIIT or body-pump - these are the ways of a Jedi. Weight training is the best way to having a beautiful, toned and sculpted body, but nothing else. As they said on an alpine climbing course I attended once: “don’t be that guy”.

Other answers have suggested ensuring you eat some protein and carbs, but you should also look at the number of calories you’re consuming as you could be under-fuelling your body. Use an app like MyFitnessPal to keep track of how many calories you need versus how many you consume.

Answer 3

Gym workouts are perfect for show off - they concentrate on the most spectacular muscles, but are neglecting the stabilization muscles, that are crucial for outdoor activities - like running on mountain trails, climbing or surfing.

Taking into account that you're now targeting muscles that you've likely neglected in your life, 3 days regeneration time is excellent.

Answer 4

The best thing you can do in order to learn to surf without actually surfing, is to swim.

Front crawl helps a lot for surfing. You could work on your technique first, then on endurance, and then on speed.

You'll be more relaxed while preparing for a wave, you'll have more power when catching it, and you won't be completely exhausted afterwards.

That being said, surfing is hard. I tried pretty much every existing boardsport, and surfing is by far the hardest and most exhausting of all. It's great fun, but it's dangerous too: you always want to have some stamina left in order to come back safely to shore.

If you need 3 days to recover, so be it. Working on your front crawl will probably help.

Answer 5

It's probably normal. I teach surf preparation cardio workouts (paddling on a lake) and beginners are usually wrecked at the end of the lesson and it doesn't matter at all whether they do strengh training.

Before your next trip, do some surf-paddling first. That's the best preparation for surfing. Front crawl (as mentioned in the other answer) works if you happen to be good at it or want to train swimming anyway, but paddling training is much more focused on surfing and provides additional benefits over swimming.

Just take your surf board into a lake or river and do a cardio paddle workout on it with some high intensity intervals.

Basics: Press legs together, keeps legs over center of board, lift up shoulders, lift up feet if possible (and lift knees too if possible). Nose of board right at the water line. Neither the board nor your body wobbles or turns side to side while paddling.

Good exercises which I use in my training, ordered from basic to more advanced:

• sit up on board, don't press your knees against it, you just loosely sit on it
• while sitting up on the board, lift your hands to shoulder height and turn from side to side while keeping your arms in front of you
• while sitting up, board flat, turn with just your feet as fast as possible
• while sitting up, nose of board around 45 degrees up, turn with just your hand. One hand grips the side of the board, the other pushes water away from the board in a circle. Most beginners splash the water back - but you are neither supposed to splash, nor to go back. Your hand moves in as large of a circle as possible and not so explosively that you splash, that would be useless
• while sitting up, nose up, do turns with hand and feet
• paddle, single narrow push-up on knees, paddle
• paddle, sit up, lay down, paddle
• sit up, then start sprinting, quickly laying down in the right position on the board
• get off the board, lay arms over the board and grab your feet on the other side of the board. Very relaxing between hard exercises
• alternate for 10-20 strokes each: 1) good position, shoulders up as far as possible, move to the front of the board a bit so its nose is just at the water line. Really work your shoulders here. 2) bad position, shoulders down, you need to move back a bit so the board's nose doesn't dive below the water line. Yes, using intentionally bad form in the recovery phase is good here.
• paddle, 360 turn, paddle
• sprint, 180 turn, sprint
• alternate paddling techniques for 20 strokes each: front crawl style with elbows high and surf style with extended arms swinging forwards. Front crawl style is more suited to sprints, the other for distance.
• focus on grabbing a packet of water at the front and then pushing it as far back as possible with each stroke. Don't splash.
• sprint interval with focus on left/right hand movement, if you feel your hand slipping through the water too much with not enough resistance, do an S with each hand during the pull.
• pair up with someone else. Partner A closes eyes and paddles, partner B helps them to stay on a straight course by giving left/right instructions. Then switch. You can extend that with more possible instructions like left/right commands not aimed at going straight or blind 180 turns.
• turtle rolls, i.e. roll sideways into the water, turning your board on top of you. Stay down for a couple of seconds. Then roll up again.
• duck dives, i.e. sprint, make the board dive into the water and then follow the board. Only possible with boards that are likely too small for beginners. Best to watch some videos.
• sprint, then duck dive or turtle roll, sprint. Repeat with some active recovery in between
• many combinations of sprint, duck dive, turtle roll, 180 turn, 360 turn.
• paddle with both hands synchronously for 10-20 strokes
• do zigs and zags while lying down, i.e. change your direction abruptly by 30 to 45 degrees.
• sit up on the board and put your legs in front of you on the board. More difficult: Cross legged, or without using hands to keep balance.
• find a comfortable position on the board where you aren't straining your shoulders too much. Start paddling and every 5 to 10 strokes move forward 1-2 cm. Repeat until you fall of the board. This will make you lift your shoulders high to stay on the board as long as possible.

(this list kind of went on and on and still doesn't include every exercise I like to do. I didn't realize before that I use this many different exercises)

And of course don't forget normal interval/endurance training.

If you do this a couple of times per week for a couple of months before your surf trip, you will be able to surf all day, every day.

Answer 6

My experience was that muscle soreness feels quite debilitating early in the day, but is relieved by repeating the exercise and you forget about it after a half hour. Go ahead and take another lesson the next day. You will need to start a bit slow in the morning, but will pick up quickly. If it is a multiday lesson (as opposed to a new one day lesson with a different instructor) the instructor should be in tune with this. My instructors would go around the group and ask how people were feeling first thing in the morning, then tailor the class a bit based on the responses. The third day of a three day class I would often be feeling "a bit worn".

Answer 7

Different muscles

How much work do you do in the gym to focus on twisting? When you're working with weights, your movements are almost always linear. I've only played with surfboards, but I know you're looking at serious amounts of twisting movement in your core and hips. This is almost impossible to do with a regular weights workout.

Instead of your gym and weights, look up bodyweight exercises based around gymnastics and yoga. You'll discover muscles you never knew you had! And in a more controlled way than overdoing it in one intense session past your limits, which tends to result in injury.

Flexibility

Can you do a full butt-to-heels squat? If not, you're going to have problems right from the start, before you get onto anything else. As a sport requiring a lot of dynamic movement, you're going to need to be very flexible. If you're 37 and you've mostly focused on general fitness and maybe a bit of strength, you've probably skimped on stretching. This is going to bite you now. The good news is that stretching isn't magic and you can always get more flexible, but you do need to work at it.

Answer 8

It is absolutely normal to take that long to recover at first! Don't lose hope :) It gets much better. After a few months you'll be able to go back to back days surfing and just feel tired without too much soreness.

It is a pretty good workout though - even on a surf trip where you are surfing multiple times a day for days in a row, its not unusual for a hardened surfer to need a "lay|rest day"