Fitness on the beach with Wavehunters: Join our fitness team for the last beach sessions this year
Beach workouts are the perfect complement to building on your surfing performance! Benefiting many areas of your life, from body wellness to your surfing skills. Surf fitness is aided by yoga and strength building, as more dynamic muscle and endurance building is done on the sand to be used and translated into the water.
Many of your favourite professional surfers have a workout routine alongside their surfing, as one supports the other.
Building Strength for Winter Surfing
Winter brings stronger swells from storms in the Atlantic; Cornwall gets the full impact of these deep ocean swells. For this, you need added strength and endurance, allowing your body to push limits further in the sometimes-challenging conditions, to hold at bay tiredness and lack of energy and to maintain endurance in a session. Fitness is your best friend.
Fitness means increased time in the cold (with the right equipment). It can increase abilities that can benefit your session time out there and translate into your skills and ocean knowledge, being able to read the waves from more time out there, for wave selection.
Cross Training for Stronger Surfing
As you may have heard, paddle fitness is also incredibly important this time of year, in colder water conditions. To paddle through breaking waves, duck diving and increasing lung capacity through fitness and breathing exercises for a more comfortable time during wipeouts. You often need to complement winter surfing with additional strength training and workouts for fitness and endurance to match the sea conditions.
Training on shifting sand also challenges balance, coordination and stabilising muscles, adding a different dimension to strength and mobility work.
Autumn Beach Workouts
Autumn beach workouts are perfect to support surf mobility and maximise strength for flexibility in your turns, which need power from your core in order to achieve and improve on. Surfing is a highly physical and mental sport/hobby and needs out-of-the-water training to help with learning and development in the water, if you want to see improvements in your sessions and up your level.
Our Autumn beach workouts are perfect to try as part of an outdoor workout routine, which can benefit your mental resilience and stress recovery, body tone, strengthening and endurance profile.
The natural resistance of training or doing yoga barefoot on unstable sand builds extra strength in your feet, ankles and core. Your muscles have to micro-adjust when in strength-holding or raising positions and in balancing postures in yoga. Your body then needs to work harder with the micro-adjustments, which in turn uses other muscle groups otherwise not accessed in traditional workouts. Building strength in these areas can lead to increased fitness and strength endurance overall, with the right guidance from a professional coach.
This type of fitness complements a gym routine by mixing up your workout environment and engaging different muscles, building power from each. Combined with surfing to build endurance, your body benefits from additional winter conditioning after the long summer surfing days are gone.
Breathing In the Crisp Autumn Air
Added mental benefits can come from getting good quality air with increased negative ions and coastal ocean air can contain more naturally occurring negative ions per cubic centimetre than standard indoor air in areas of good air quality. The combination of ocean air and coastal scenery can help boost restorative feelings during a workout. These magic ions and natural visual landscapes can help with mental calm and alertness. When working out, your heart rate and breathing rate increase, and more oxygenated blood is distributed throughout your body, which, in turn, is distributed through your body’s muscles and organs. This makes a beach workout or surf complementary to your workout regime.
In terms of strength-building benefits, cooler outdoor air temperatures allow you to work out harder whilst being more refreshed and comfortable, with the right clothing.
Integrating Mindfulness
Peacefulness and stress release also come from a colder-season beach workout.
Empty shores after the summer crowds leave allow you to enjoy and take in the outdoor unspoilt beauty before the cold winter takes hold. Allowing peaceful focus on your routine, hearing and feeling your body and the environment itself with less distractions. Adding to this mix are the natural sounds of the surroundings, which can help with stress management and serotonin and dopamine levels, and lower stress hormones such as cortisol. Reduced brain activity post-workout in the stress and threat detection centres can allow restoration of overused attention networks in the brain.
Just viewing natural scenery and surroundings helps lower the heart rate, ease muscle tension and calm brain activity, calming the sympathetic nervous system. All of these alertness levels we have are built in for human survival. The lowering of these threat responses has numerous proven health benefits for overall long-term wellbeing.
How Wavehunters Can Support Your Workout Routine
Wavehunters helps you keep your fitness routine up in the colder months with surf classes and beach workouts. For an even more relaxing experience, we also have the ultimate wellness treat! An ocean-view sauna on the beach at Watergate Bay for the post-workout sea dip and sauna heat session. This can be the finishing touch to your fitness and surf sessions, with many other health benefits, highlighted in our sauna journal.
Fitness classes run from May to the end of October every year. You can also book our instructors for private groups any time.
Get started today! Book a surf lesson with us to build and improve your skills, a beach fitness session to support your training, or a sauna and ocean dip experience for recovery and wellness at Wavehunters.
