Apprenez-en un peu plus sur nos entraînements et du coup sur notre coach par cet article fort intéressant sur l’alliance crossfit et bateau dragon. L’article a été écrit par notre entraîneure Julie Beaumont et ce en anglais. Découvrez  l’athlète en vous! Crossfit for Dragon Boaters : Discrovering the athlete in you

Trends in fitness are what drive the fitness industry, sell their products (as ridiculous as some may be) and grab people’s attention (quick fix anyone?).  Some of those trends stick, and others fade away. One of the latest crazes to hit the industry – whether you are an advocate or a critic – is Crossfit.  What is Crossfit?  Once reserved for police academies, firefighters, the military, martial artists, and elite and professional athletes has now mainstreamed its way into the lives of ordinary every day people.  Crossfit is designed to optimize physical competence in each of ten recognized fitness domains. They are Cardiovascular and Respiratory endurance, Stamina, Strength, Flexibility, Power, Speed, Coordination, Agility, Balance, and Accuracy.  Relying mainly on functional exercises (don’t expect to be doing bicep curls) crossfit combines weight lifting and throwing, gymnastics and metabolic conditioning in an effort to enhance an individual’s competency in physical tasks. If you’d like to read a more detailed description of crossfit and the research behind it, visit this link: http://library.crossfit.com/free/pdf/Foundations.pdf

I accidentally discovered Crossfit last year while I watched some guy training as hard if not harder than me – As narcissistic as this may sound, most women and men don’t train in the same capacity that I do, so I was interested in his workouts.  He told me a little about these workouts and next thing you know we started doing some of them together.  At the time we were finding the workouts on youtube, but my curiosity led me to the crossfit website and eventually to a crossfit gym where I fell in love with the challenge, intensity and craziness of the workouts.  At the time I was still training competitively for paddling and in a very short time I started noticing how beneficial these workouts were to paddling.  I have done many circuit trainings before, and they were no doubt hard; but paddling sprint involves very little isolation of specific muscles at specific times, and my desire to curl a dumbbell in isolation for one minute quickly became a thing of the past.  The crossfit workouts were explosive, short, intense, and used compound movements which globally mimicked dragon boating and its energy pathways, much closer than a bicep curl ever would. Keep in mind that this is a totally subjective opinion and I have nothing against how others choose to train, this was simply more of a revelation for me, as a paddler and as a trainer.

What I love about crossfit and how dragon boaters can benefit is that ALL dragon boaters can do it and yield results. Over 90% of the dragon boat community is derived of recreational paddlers – teamwork, camaraderie, social events and achieving personal goals are what motivate these people to continue dragon boating for so many years. While some move on to more elite levels, many choose to remain recreational, active, and hope to improve on their fitness to some degree.  As many crossfit exercises can be done with body weight alone, it’s easy to bring a group together, develop a crossfit style workout or even an actual crossfit workout, teach them how to push themselves to new levels, improve their metabolic conditioning and all the while keeping that recreational and social atmosphere and setting new personal goals.  The more elite dragon boater can easily follow most of the workouts directly from the website or even hit a crossfit gym.  If you don’t believe me, try it.  I grouped together between 15 and 20 people of all fitness abilities over the last 4 weeks for outdoor crossfit training.  Regardless of their fitness level, every single one of them completed every single workout (with great pride), discovered that they could push themselves beyond what they thought they could – all the while achieving personal goals, safely and efficiently.  They fell in love with Crossfit workouts – ok so maybe they loved it once the workouts were over, but there has to be a reason they keep coming back!  Although I am not a Crossfit purist, I believe in its benefits and how they can contribute positively to a dragon boater’s fitness and a performance during races.