Waterman 2.0: Optimized Movement For Lifelong, Pain-Free Paddling And Surfing

Waterman 2.0: Optimized Movement for Lifelong, Pain-free Paddling & Surfing Dr. Kelly Starrett with Phil White

Copyright © 2018 Dr. Kelly Starrett and Phil White

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part (beyond the copying permitted by US Copyright Law, Section 107, fair use in teaching or research, Section 108, certain library copying, or in published media by reviewers in limited excerpts), without written permission from the author.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-0692070659

EBook ISBN: 978-0-692-14952-2

Softcover: 978-0-692-17103-5

Images © their respective owner

Generic water images throughout © Shutterstock

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This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment and education only. While best efforts have been used, the author and publisher are not offering legal, accounting, medical or any other professional services advice and make no representations or warranties of any kind and assume no liabilities of any kind with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents and specifically disclaim any implied warranties or merchantability or fitness of use for a particular purpose, nor shall they be held liable or responsible to any person or entity with respect to any loss or incidental or consequential damages caused, or alleged to have caused, directly or indirectly, by the information or programs contained herein.

The discomfort described in this book relates to the normal range of stress reactions. If you believe for any reason that you have physical or mental symptoms that require medical attention, get proper help immediately.

CONTENTS

Foreword by Laird Hamilton: The Way of the Waterman

Introduction

Kelly’s Story: Confessions of a River Rat

Chapter 1: Becoming a Lifetime Waterman

Chapter 2: Mobility 101

Chapter 3: Meet the Standards

Chapter 4: The Spine and Hips

Standard #1: Can you achieve and maintain a stable spine?

Standard #2: Can you hinge from the hips without sacrificing trunk stiffness?

Standard #3: Can you maintain trunk stability while squatting?

Chapter 5: The Shoulders

Standard #4: Do you have full overhead capacity?

Standard #5: Can you achieve and maintain a stable shoulder and spine in the press archetype?

Standard #6: Can you achieve optimal shoulder positioning in the hang archetype?

Chapter 6: The Feet and Ankles

Standard #7: Are you standing, walking, running, stepping and jumping with neutral feet?

Standard #8: Can you perform a lunge and master Warrior Pose II?

Chapter 7: The Hands, Wrists, Elbows and Arms

Standard #9: Do you have full wrist flexion?

Standard #10: Can you fully articulate your hands when your elbows are extended?

Chapter 8: Preparation and Recovery

Standard #11: Do you have an appropriate hydration and fueling strategy?

Standard #12: Are you physically prepared to get on the water?

Standard #13: Are you recovering effectively?

Conclusion

Mobilizations Appendix

Waterman Wisdom: Tips from the Pros

Resources

THE WAY OF THE WATERMAN

To me, the term waterman is rich with meaning. From a physical standpoint, it means being a well-rounded individual who has the skills to perform multiple disciplines with a variety of boards, boats and your own body. Mentally, a waterman needs a deep understanding of the ocean that allows him to read the conditions so that he can excel in any situation. Then there’s the relational aspect. My wife Gabby has said that the ocean is the only woman she will share me with and that shows how meaningful my relationship with the water is. There are also the friendships that are forged with others who have the same love of the water. These are built through all the highs and lows that being out on the water presents—having fun, being scared and sometimes risking our lives. We have a mutual reverence for the ocean and the activities we partake in.

Waterman culture also has a spiritual component. I’m a better person after I’ve been out surfing or paddling than when I left the house. When you’re in harmony with the water you develop a sensitivity to it that goes beyond the physical. We can become so self-important in life and I welcome the honesty of the water and how being out in the most dynamic setting nature has to offer reminds me of my true insignificance. The magnitude of the ocean gives me a sense of perspective, which is amplified when it unleashes a little of its power. If it’s possible to learn spirituality, then the majesty of the sea is the ultimate teacher. People sometimes ask me how I conquered a certain wave and I find that peculiar. When you surf a wave there’s no conquest involved—if you behave well and with respect, then you make it through.

To experience the full benefits that being a waterman offers, you don’t just need that kind of knowledge. Your body also needs to be up to the challenge. Kelly’s work represents an opportunity to better understand yourself and how you move, so that you can fix errors and become more efficient and resilient. This book will not only help you improve your performance, but also make you more durable by offering a counterbalance to the repetitive motions that can wear you down otherwise. If I had known Kelly earlier, I believe that I would’ve avoided a lot of the injuries that came from being in compromised positions and not knowing how to fix myself. When issues arise, I can go to Kelly in full confidence, trusting that he can help solve the problem and get me back to enjoying the ocean.

As you’ll discover when you read his story, Kelly’s vocation comes from the purest intentions. He needed a better way to heal himself and once he’d done so, became determined to use what he had learned to help as many people as possible. Then you add in his first-hand experience on the water and continual pursuit of knowledge and you have something really special. He’s determined to make a positive difference and you can only benefit from that. I’ve incorporated Kelly’s techniques into my daily life to help me move better on and off the water, improve my recovery and reduce the chance of getting hurt in the future. In the following pages, you’ll find tips and tools that are highly applicable to your life and are effective in the real world. Kelly has helped me to become a more sustainable waterman—I know this book will do the same for you.

Laird Hamilton

KAUAI

INTRODUCTION

You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.

—Bruce Lee

Do you remember the way you felt the first time you caught a wave, stood up on your SUP or peeled out of an eddy? Stoke doesn’t even come close, right? The glide across the water, the spray on your face, the sense that this was it, the thing you’d been searching for, and that you’d do forever. From that moment on, you lived for getting back out on the water, knowing that sensation was accessible again and again.

So where did it all go wrong? Maybe it was the day you woke up with a lower back so sore you felt like you couldn’t get out of bed. Or perhaps it was that horrible burn in your shoulders that wouldn’t go away, no matter how many ibuprofens you swallowed. It might’ve been when your hand suddenly cramped up when you were driving back from the beach. Something had changed, and the lifetime you were once certain you’d spend on the water was now in question.

That’s why we wrote this book. We believe that you can indeed spend the rest of your life enjoying the water sports you love without the pain, movement restrictions and tacked down tissues that have become the norm. That you can access free power, strength and endurance that will take you to the next level. And that you can do it all without special equipment, thousands of dollars in medical bills or the painkillers that one veteran paddler told us had become her second religion.

If you’ve spent any time with Kelly, watched his MobilityWOD videos or listened to him at a mobility seminar or on a podcast, you’ll know that his main reason for being a teacher is to help and empower as many people as possible. He possesses a contagious zeal for educating men, women and children of all ages and abilities about how to move, perform and live better.

Kelly believes that each of us is engineered to move well for 110 years. As much as he enjoys trail running, Olympic lifting and many other land lubber sports, he is a waterman at heart. Through his years of competing at the highest level in whitewater slalom and rafting, he found out first hand that although surfing and paddle sports have reached astonishing new heights in performance during recent years, they remain primitive when it comes to developing movement, mobility and strength and conditioning practices and remedying soft tissue and joint issues.

From bum knees to torn rotator cuffs to herniated discs, even the best paddlers, rowers and surfers are finding that just because they’re not pounding the pavement doesn’t mean they’re participating in a non-impact sport. As Laird shared in the foreword, the repetitive motion of millions of strokes taken in bad positions can mess you up. The trouble is that very few paddlers or surfers know how their body works, what correct positioning looks like or how to perform even basic maintenance to prevent and treat injuries and restore soft tissue health. Multiply this lack of knowledge across the millions of people who take to the water each year, and you have a massive, systemic problem. And a tremendous opportunity for change.

Before we start exploring how you can help yourself perform better, stay in the water longer and enjoy water sports for life, let’s quickly take the pulse of the industry. Surfing is the logical place to start, as the most culturally, socially and economically significant water sport of the past 100 years. According to the latest research, it’s a $7.4 billion business, with 1.7 million Americans hitting the waves at least once a year.¹

When you look at surfing as a truly global phenomenon the numbers skyrocket, with an estimated 23 million surfers worldwide. And while surfing hit a revenue road bump a few years ago, it’s on the rise again, thanks to a growing middle class in developing nations and the availability of cheaper boards. Not to mention the development of wave pools by the likes of Kelly Slater. Plus, the sport will get a global boost with its inclusion in the 2020 Olympics.²

Though it still trails its paddle-less cousin in participation stats and the revenue rankings, SUP is catching up fast. In the past 10 years there have been a lot of new fleeting fitness trends, but 2 sports have continued their strong growth and become part of mainstream culture: CrossFit and standup paddling. Outside magazine’s most recent Best Places to Live issue mentioned SUP access just as much as running, and if you browse almost any outdoor or lifestyle magazine you’ll likely see several ads of smiling families on SUP boards (even if, annoyingly, their paddle blades are often the wrong way round!). No longer just a fixture in surf shops, SUP boards are now available everywhere from REI to big box stores like Costco and Sam’s Club. Hollywood is even getting in on the act, with everyone from Will Smith to Rihanna to Matthew McConaughey being snapped on their boards.

The Hawaiians of old were the first to grab a board in one hand and a paddle in the other. Later, legendary surfer Duke Kahanamoku and his peers took on Tongg’s and other hallowed breaks with a paddle in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. But it wasn’t until Laird Hamilton started looking for something different to do on the water when Peahi wasn’t breaking big that the sport was reborn in the 2000s. When Hamilton, Dave Kalama and company started getting the word out about the versatility of SUP between 2008 and 2010, it was quickly introduced to California by the likes of Rick Thomas and boom! The standup revolution began.

Almost overnight it seemed like SUP boards were everywhere. Sure, novices dropping in on longboards with 7 foot spears irked a lot of surfers, who couldn’t stand the recklessness of these newbies that had no concept of pecking order or lineup etiquette. Some even tried to ban standup from their beaches. But despite this clash of old and new schools—which led to Hamilton launching a line of Blame Laird apparel—it quickly became apparent that SUP wasn’t going anywhere. By 2011, participation had ballooned to 1.2 million people. According to the Outdoor Industry Association, 60 percent of these—almost 3 quarters of a million—were trying it for the first time. In the years since, SUP participation has grown to over 2 million.

One of the reasons for standup’s popularity is the versatility of the craft. Surfing’s growth in the US was limited once it reached saturation on the coasts, but you can use a SUP board on any reasonably sized body of water, from the ocean to rivers to lakes. This versatility opened up the chance to glide to millions of landlocked Americans, many of whom had never so much as tried to pop up on a surfboard.

A few short years ago people in any of America’s landlocked states would look at a person with a longboard on their car like they were nuts. But now that the non-coastal states have gone SUP crazy and recreational paddlers are taking to lakes and rivers in droves, SUP is no longer a fringe activity. And it’s not just one-off newbie paddlers who have become pervasive away from the coasts, but also systematized SUP-focused fitness programs like Brody Welte’s PaddleFit. At the site of the Pacific Paddle Games, Doheny State Beach, The Paddle Academy has created a formalized practice for the first SUP generation that is already producing elite athletes like Shae Foudy. So too has Performance Paddling. Clearly, SUP is here to stay.

Standup manufacturing is booming in unlikely destinations such as Austin, Texas, and one of the nation’s largest retailers, Paddleboard Specialists, has built a thriving business in Waunakee, Wisconsin. And as SUP continues to increase in popularity on both coasts, standup boards, paddles and equipment are revitalizing surf shops in traditional hot spots.

The SUP racing and performance scene has become just as diverse as the industry that supplies it. From the first SUP surfing event at Pipeline to The Pacific Paddle Games in California to canal races in Europe to gnarly whitewater courses at the GoPro Mountain Games—yep, that’s the Vail Mountain Games to us old timers—SUP competitions are stretching the limits of organizers’ imaginations and participants’ skill sets.

Meanwhile, endurance fiends like Shane Perrin are completing ultramarathon river races previously limited to canoes and kayaks, such as the Texas Water Safari and MR340, not to mention tackling long distance expeditions through the Belize jungle and Amazon rainforest. And iconoclasts like Ken Hoeve and Kelly’s longtime friend Dan Gavere are scaring the pants off of everyone with daredevil rides down rapids and on river waves.

Standup paddling has arguably also increased participation in OC1, surfski, prone paddleboarding and other water sports that have been foundering for the past few years. Indeed, a report sponsored by the Outdoor Foundation found that 19 million Americans participate in water sports. Of these, 3.7 million went rafting, 9.8 million canoeing and 10.3 million kayaking. When we’re looking at 202 million outings on the water, it seems that rumors of paddling’s death have been greatly exaggerated!³

It has certainly helped canoeing and kayaking that inter-disciplinary competitions like The Ultimate Waterman see SUP world champions Zane Schweitzer, Danny Ching, Kai Lenny and Connor Baxter test their versatility in these other sports. Meanwhile, increased media focus on banner SUP events like the grueling Molokai 2 Oahu (M2O) channel crossing has encouraged greater participation in the other disciplines at these races. As we were starting to write this book, Kelly subjected himself to the horrors of long sessions on the water and the Concept2 Ski Erg to prepare for the OC1 event at Molokai.

Gear outfitters have taken note of standup’s rise and the resurgence of other aquatic activities and upped their game accordingly. Finally, equipment has begun catching up to ergonomics and the unique needs of different paddling demographics, with mad scientists like Jim Terrell and Dave Chun creating specialized paddles for women and kids, adding double dihedrals and creating new shaft shapes that encourage efficiency.

Likewise, board manufacturers have finally realized that not everyone is 5’ 9’’ and 150 pounds, and master shapers like Joe Bark are creating high performing boards tailored to everyone from groms to heavy hitters like Kelly (who is 6’ 1’’ and 230 pounds). These quantum leaps in design have also made their way into other water sports, with crazy light OC1s, bulletproof slalom canoes and feather-like paddles now the norm.

All these advances have made SUP, surfing and paddle sports more accessible than ever before, from elite pros to recreational paddlers to the special needs/adaptive community, and more. And really, that’s the prevailing mindset for most of us who love to be on the water, isn’t it? We just want to get out there and lose ourselves in the glide, flow, stoke, gnar or whatever cliché you’ll hopefully forgive us using.

The trouble is that no matter how experienced we are on the water, many of us aren’t adequately prepared to be in the kind of flow state Steven Kotler describes in his seminal book The Rise of Superman. That’s all well and good if we’ve been taught and have reinforced proper technique in a formal movement practice, and default to this while moving unconsciously across the water (most people aren’t thinking about those knees collapsing inward while crouching in a wave barrel, but sure feel it the next day).

Unfortunately, practice makes permanent and if we’re merely ingraining faulty motor patterns on land and over thousands of hours and millions of strokes on the water, we’re going to get messed up eventually. How much stoke is there when you’re lying on a physical therapist’s table? As someone who’s been in the role of both wrecked patient-athlete and orthopedic medicine practitioner, Kelly knows the answer is not a lot.

This has been confirmed by the dozens of paddlers, surfers and rowers we’ve asked about their injuries, aches and pains. Across all the different water sports disciplines, a familiar story emerges—chronically sore lower back and hips, sore shoulders, tight wrists. But the more disturbing thing is not the injuries and pain themselves, but what athletes are doing about it.

Or not. The most advanced response we got about a movement and mobility practice was, I use a foam roller. Most of the other watermen and women we talked to just take it easy when they feel that angry back flare up, perform the same ineffective static stretches every day or take a bunch of painkillers and hope for the best. And these aren’t amateurs, but some of the biggest names in the water sports world. Clearly, something has to change.

The purpose of this book is not to dilute the purity of your on-the-water experiences, or to discourage you from participating if you’re not moving correctly. If anything, we would like you to spend more time on the water. Yet we don’t want you to wait until your lumbar spine detonates, your shoulders seize up or you can’t feel your hands before you start to make change.

To advance our thinking, we need to examine the impact of simply getting out of the car, grabbing our gear and charging headlong toward the river, ocean or lake. To take a long hard look about what we’re doing once we get into or onto the water. And to evaluate why drying off and going back to sit at the office, at home or at a bar for a few hours afterwards is not exactly ideal recovery. Oh, and before we forget, to address the fact that many of us are chronically dehydrated, make poor nutritional decisions and walk around in a zombie-like, sleep-deprived state.

Once you’ve read Kelly’s river rat story, we’re going to (pun alert!) dive right in to how you can transform yourself as a waterman or woman. Though each water sport obviously has its own technical nuances, there are more commonalities than differences. For starters, all require us to achieve and maintain a stable spine and trunk, to generate torque from the hips and shoulders and to apply this through the water or off of a fixed object (hands, paddle, oar, etc.). Most water sports also ask us to perform work in an overhead position.

Fortunately, the hips are the hips, the shoulders are the shoulders and the spine is the spine for every person and in and on every water craft. This means that if we can learn how to adopt correct positioning in one discipline and reinforce it on land we can apply the same principles to any and every water sport. The results? Less injuries, higher performance and the fullest expression of your human potential on the water.

Whether you’re a pro, a seasoned recreational athlete or a beginner, our goal is to help you enjoy paddle sports, rowing and surfing for life without the range of motion restrictions and pain many of us have come to take for granted. Over the coming pages, we’ll break down basic movement patterns and positions that apply to all water sports, address common mechanical and lifestyle errors and give you a blueprint for healthy and sustainable movement and mobility practices.

We will also walk you through 13 standards that you can work toward to improve your performance and durability and help you overcome your limitations. Plus, you’ll discover tips and tricks from some of the world’s best surfers, paddlers and rowers. It took a career-altering injury for Kelly to stop hiding behind his weaknesses and start fixing himself. Don’t wait that long to upgrade yourself to Waterman 2.0!

1 Allan Edwards, Keith Gilbert, James Skinner, Some Like it Hot: The Beach as a Cultural Dimension, 20.

2 Nic Couchman, Why the £10bn Surfing Industry Deserves its Introduction as an Olympic Sport in 2020, City A.M., available online at http://www.cityam.com/​247308/​why-​10bn-​surfing-​industry-​deserves-​its-​introduction-​olympic.

3 Outdoor Participation Report, The Outdoor Foundation, 2017, available online at https://outdoorindustry.org/​wp-​content/​uploads/​2017/​05/​2017-​Outdoor-​Recreation-​Participation-​Report_​FINAL.pdf.

KELLY’S STORY:

CONFESSIONS OF A RIVER RAT

If it’s true that we become what we behold, then I had little choice in becoming a river rat. When I was six years old, my Mom and I moved from Seattle, Washington to Garmisch in southern Germany, where she was to be a psychology professor for the University of Maryland’s satellite campus and a teacher at the local international school. An idyllic, heavily wooded mountain town located in the shadow of the country’s tallest peak, Zugspitze, Garmisch is just a stone’s throw from the Austrian border. To a kid who loved the outdoors, it was paradise.

The best way to describe my newly adopted hometown is as a German mash-up of Durango, Telluride and Aspen. Garmisch hosted the Winter Olympics in 1936, which was the first Olympiad to feature alpine skiing, and the World Alpine Ski Championships in 1978 and 2011. It’s also famous throughout Europe for the New Year’s Day ski jumping competition.

But it’d be wrong to limit Garmisch by calling it a ski town. The Partnach Gorge is one of the most renowned