Fitness for Poling a Skiff: Workouts That Build a Guide's Engine

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 610 - Physical Friday: Fitness for Poling a Skiff.

The Question: Training to Pole a Skiff

Tom Rowland: What's up, everybody? It is Physical Friday, and that is where we talk about things physical — ways that we can be better at the things we love to do outdoors, prolong our careers, or just get stronger so we can do more. Today we're going to take a question from the audience, and that's awesome. I love it when you guys ask questions, and this one came through Instagram, which is definitely not the best way to get me, but it is possible at Tom_Rowland — that is my personal Instagram account, and that's where this question came from. It is better if you text the number (305) 930-7346. That's where you'll get the quickest response.

So Kyle — Kyle Medusia, or Medusia, I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing your name — sent this through Instagram, and it's been sitting there for a little bit, so I'm sorry it took a little while, but I do like this question, and it's perfect for Physical Friday. He says, "Hey, Tom, I've got a workout question. If you had to pick some workouts that could simulate poling a skiff, what would they be?"

Okay, so this is a really good question, and I do this quite a bit, because this is exactly what we're trying to do — we're trying to be better at the things that we do outside. For a very long period of my life, poling a boat was the only way that I made any money, and so I wanted to be better at it. I wanted to do my job better. If you do a little training off the water, not only can you be better at it, you'll be stronger and you can pole a boat faster, of course, and without getting fatigued. But also you can avoid overuse injuries by training off the water.

So the way we're going to do this is, at the end of this, I'm going to tell you how I would incorporate these exercises into a couple of workouts. But first, let's talk about poling a boat. Poling a boat is physical. It can be kind of easy sometimes, and it can be extremely physical at other times. Fishing guides that make a living fishing do not really cancel because it's a little bit windy — in fact, they don't cancel because it's a lot windy. So poling a boat for a living means that you're going to have to pole a boat in all different conditions: high tide conditions where you've got a tremendous amount of tide flow, running like a river; lots of wind, very common to pole into the wind, across the wind, upwind, downwind, into the current, down current, across the current; all of these different things in deep water, in shallow water, pushing the boat across water that's too shallow for the boat to go, all the way down to pushing the boat in water where your push pole can barely touch the bottom.

And all of those are fatiguing, and it takes a lot of practice. When you get good at poling a boat, it's a very effective way to move the boat through the Florida Keys waters, because the fish that we're fishing for are spooky, and it's a quiet way to push the boat. I think you could probably push a boat with a push pole better than you could with oars. The push pole is fantastic because, with the advent of all of the evolutions that have happened in the Florida Keys for poling a boat — like the poling tower — the push pole allows the guide to be at elevation so that you can see better into the water and have total control over the boat. It's a very, very effective way to do it.

So if I'm going to try to get better at poling, or if I'm going to try to prolong my career, these are the kind of exercises that I am going to incorporate. Now, when you're talking about poling, I've heard one guide — a very famous person, actually — call poling "a controlled drift." That could not be further from the truth, and every time I think about it, it just makes me upset, because that is just not at all what poling a boat in the Florida Keys is. Like I said, you have to go into the tide, into the wind, down tide, down wind, all different directions. It's everything but a controlled drift. You're not controlled drifting — you are absolutely taking that boat exactly where you want to go despite the conditions around you. So that is not what we're training for. We're training so that you are going to be able to move that boat any which way you want to.

Key Exercises for Poling Strength

The most important thing on poling — and to be able to pole, not just for fifteen minutes, but for ten hours a day, two hundred days in a row — is probably to have good enough grip strength to be able to hold on to that pole all day long and push. Whether you're pushing very athletically or you're just sneaking up on fish, any way you slice it, your grip strength is incredibly important. When you shake hands with your fishing guide that's out there 310 days a year poling a skiff, you'll know it, because he's going to have really strong hands. I've never met a fishing guide that doesn't have strong hands, and if I did, I'd be wary, because being a fishing guide is very grip intensive, very hand intensive. Especially if you are an inshore guide who poles a boat for a living, you're going to have strong forearms, you're going to have strong hands. That is important.

So I want to think about exercises that are going to improve my grip strength — not only for overall sheer strength, but also for endurance through the hands, so that you are able to hold on to that push pole for ten hours a day, two hundred days in a row. The things that I would do for that would be to simulate the push pole with something round, like a rope. A Manila rope, one and a half inch Manila rope, is easy to find — lots of workout facilities, places like Rogue Fitness, sell these in all different lengths. If you have two ropes hanging off a pull-up bar, you can grab hold of the ropes and hang there. You can do pull-ups on the ropes where you are holding on to something that's roughly the size of the push pole. You're going to be using your grip to support your body weight, and that is an absolutely excellent way to improve your hand strength, your finger strength, your grip strength, your forearm strength — all the things that it requires to pole a boat.

Another exercise we do often: I will push a sled with a fifty-foot Manila rope attached to it. I'll push it fifty feet away, and then I will walk back and pull that hand over hand, which is very similar to poling a boat. Push it out, pull it back. That is exercising your grip, your fingers, your hands, your forearms, and your shoulders. Of course, poling is a pulling exercise — you are pulling down with the push pole, pulling down and walking down that pole, getting some bend in the pole, propelling the boat forward. So other great exercises would be pull-ups and chin-ups, both ways, where the hands face one way on the bar or the other way on the bar — that is the difference between a chin-up and a pull-up. Both are excellent exercises to enhance your strength in poling and also to make your shoulders nice and strong. Rope climbs are really good exercises for poling too, because when you're climbing a rope, you are doing almost the exact same movement that you're doing when you are poling a boat.

As you're pushing on the boat and getting that final pull, you're using a full-body curl to push down on that push pole, so having a core movement in your training is also really good — that could be sit-ups, band pull-downs, flutter kicks, or any sort of flexion in the trunk under tension. Poling also takes balance. Your feet should be together when you're poling, and the boat is often rocking and moving, so if you were to train on a Bosu ball, a couple of Bosu balls, or an indo board, and practice increasing your balance, that would be fantastic. Just being out on the boat every single day also increases your balance and trains the small muscles in your feet and legs that are important for balance. But if we're talking about completely off-water training, utilizing some sort of balance training is also very good.

Squats matter too — you're standing up all day long, so if your legs are stronger, you're going to be able to do that better. There is a small half-squat in the poling technique where you're getting down and pushing that last push out, so if you are squatting, both with weight and just air squats, that is fantastic. There are certain machines you can use as well — the SkiErg, made by Concept2, is something that simulates cross-country skiing, and it's also similar to poling, where you're pulling down with your shoulders, doing a body curl, and pushing the handles back, kind of like the push pole. You're doing it with two arms, but it has some good cardio elements to it. Those are all the exercises that I think are the most important.

Shoulder Health and Two Sample Workouts

Now, when you are training for poling, if that's your primary thing, you're going to be doing a lot of pulling exercises, a lot of pull-ups, a lot of grip work, a lot of core exercises, and maybe some squats like we talked about. It's also important to think about training the opposite way — if you're only training one way, that is a pretty good recipe for overuse injuries. So I think it is incredibly important to try to preserve your shoulder health, and your training off the water should help you do a better job on the water and last longer as a guide. A lot of guides have shoulder issues from poling, and I think a lot of people, myself included, have gotten over them through stretching and other movements.

So if all you're doing is pulling, one thing you might incorporate into your training is pushing. If you're doing a lot of pull-ups, it would also be good to incorporate a shoulder press with weight, a dumbbell press with weight, handstand push-ups with body weight, single-arm dumbbell push presses straight up off the shoulder, or a jerk — so that you're not only training down, but you're also training up. That will do a lot. There are two other things I recommend for your shoulders that have been instrumental in helping me overcome the shoulder issues I had from too much poling. The first is a tool called Crossover Symmetry. It's used a lot in baseball, swimming, gymnastics, CrossFit, and a lot of sports that are incredibly shoulder intensive, and yes, poling a boat is very shoulder intensive. Crossover Symmetry uses light elastic bands that you can hook on a door frame, a squat rack, a chain link fence, or all kinds of things, to do a series of simple exercises that train both the big muscles and the smaller muscles in the shoulder in lots of different ways. Many, many people have overcome shoulder issues with Crossover Symmetry. I strongly recommend looking into that product. If you're a fishing guide who does no training off the water currently and you're having shoulder issues, if you had a Crossover Symmetry setup somewhere in your tackle room and spent five to ten minutes on it in the morning, I think it would go a long way toward improving your shoulder health.

The other thing I suggest for the shoulders is the program by my friend Joe Hippensteel. We've had Joe on the podcast a number of times, and we'll link those episodes in the show notes so you can go back and listen. Joe was an undersized decathlete who trained way too hard and had all kinds of problems throughout his body. He overcame those problems through a stretching program he created himself, called Ultimate Human Performance, and it's fantastic. He has lower body stretches as well as shoulder stretches, and there are three or four or five different shoulder stretches that have helped me greatly. If you have issues with your shoulders, or want to prevent them, both Crossover Symmetry and Joe's program are very highly suggested.

So those are the exercises that I like: something for your grip, something for pulling, some sort of squat, some sort of sit-up. Now, how would I incorporate those into a workout? I'll give you two different formats. Both incorporate four exercises across different time domains and reps.

The first is an AMRAP — as many rounds as possible — for twenty minutes. Let's take the exercises we talked about for poling specifically: five rope-hang pull-ups, where you hold on to a Manila rope hanging off your pull-up bar just like you'd hold the push pole, and pull up until you complete a pull-up. Then ten body curls with a band — you get on your knees, hold a band coming off the pull-up bar at about your forehead, and curl down to the ground. Then fifteen squats. You do that circuit as many times as you possibly can for twenty minutes. That's a great, poling-specific workout. If you like it, you can come back to it and try to do more rounds, or you can swap the exercises — instead of rope pull-ups, do regular pull-ups; instead of body curls, do sit-ups; instead of squats, push a sled.

The second format is an EMOM — every minute on the minute — for forty minutes, written as EMOM 40. That means you set a clock for forty minutes, and every minute you start something new. Let's say you have four exercises: first, a sled push fifty feet with a long rope attached, and say that takes you thirty seconds — you have thirty seconds to rest before the next minute starts. On minute two, you go hand over hand and pull that sled back to you; say that takes another thirty seconds, leaving thirty seconds to rest. On minute three, twenty calories on the SkiErg machine, say that takes forty seconds, leaving twenty seconds to rest. On minute four, five pull-ups, which might take only fifteen seconds, leaving forty-five seconds to rest and get back to the sled. You repeat this cycle for forty minutes. It's also fine to use only three exercises and let one of those minutes be a rest minute. The point is that you can create different workouts like these that will improve your conditioning for the activity you're trying to get better at — poling.

So: grip strength, pulling, rope climbs, core, balance, and taking care of those shoulders — all of that is super important. One other exercise I forgot to mention: a lot of what we're doing is forward movement, a lot of pulling, so we might also want to train the opposite direction. There's a machine called a glute-ham developer, or if you have no equipment at all, you can do what's called a Superman — you lay flat on your face with your legs and arms extended, then arch your back and legs so your legs, arms, and head come off the ground, with only your hips staying down, then lower back to the ground and repeat. If you have a glute-ham developer or a back-extension machine, you can do a similar reverse sit-up, arching up to parallel with the ground and back down. Those are good exercises for the lower back, since we're doing so much forward movement — it's good to train the body in the other direction too. That's how I'd use these exercises to build a workout for poling.

Great question — it really is a great question. If you have questions like that, I'd love to hear them, and if you come up with a workout of your own using these exercises, or others that you think simulate poling very well, text it to me at (305) 930-7346, and we will see you guys all next week. I hope everybody has an awesome weekend. Get out there and get in so much of what we like to do in the outdoors, whatever that is — hunting, fishing, hiking, backpacking, mountain climbing, or owning a boat. I hope you get to do it this weekend. Alright, we'll see you next week.