The Challenge

Canoe Slalom is an amazing sport, yet participation numbers are declining year on year in the UK. There have been many discussions as to why this is the case on various forums, and I don't aim to reproduce those insightful debates here. 

Last year I had a young girl join my training group at Manchester Canoe Club for an evening. She had been paddling with the club for a few weeks and was giving slalom a go. At the end of the session she said she wouldn't be doing slalom again as it was boring. This made me reflect a lot. Previously I had always thought that the challenge of trying to get through gates on moving water was its own excitement and nothing else is needed. This may be true for those kids that are highly motivated, but how many kids are we losing along the wayside? There are some who would argue that this doesn't matter, if we lose the kids who aren't driven to succeed it's no great loss. But I would argue that these are the kids that would prop up the lower divisions with their presence, would make slalom events busier, more social, more fun for all those involved. So I decided to look into change. I didn't want to lose anybody else from my groups because slalom was boring.

I had just discovered Stuart Armstrong's excellent Talent Equation podcast, and though most of what he talked about was team games, I started thinking about how to apply the things I was hearing about to slalom training. Phrases like "Constraints Led Approach", "Ecological Dynamics", "Repetition Without Repetition","War on Drills", "Games-Based Approach" went round and round my head and a lot of the time I have no idea what they meant (and I'm still not sure and if I use them incorrectly anywhere on the site please correct me!

This website is designed to be a place where I share what I am doing and trying, and what is working for me. Hopefully other canoe slalom coaches can share ideas which I can post (and credit!) and we can build up a bank of training ideas in order to keep everything we do fresh, varied and interesting.