Dr. Cliff Kapono and Matt Rode Discuss the Cardiac Effects of Big Wave Surfing
Introduction
Two topics that really interest me in surfing are health and science—and more often than not, they intersect! Surfing’s best-known scientist Dr. Cliff Kapono has been exploring a variety of topics in a recent Instagram post series, and I was pretty excited to see that he had covered a peer-reviewed study on the effect of big wave surfing on athlete’s hearts. To get a better idea of what Dr. Kapono was talking about, I called up Hawaiian South Shore’s resident big wave expert Matt Rode, who broke down his own experience and compared it with the findings in the study reviewed by Dr. Kapono.
Dr. Cliff Kapono’s Scientific Exploration of Surfing
I was pretty stoked to see that Cliff had found a peer-reviewed study about big wave surfing’s effect on heart rate, as this is something I think about a lot. In addition to surfing, I do a lot of other sports that require excellent cardio health, including rock climbing, backcountry snowboarding/splitboarding, trail running, and mountain biking—and I used to race triathlon. All of these sports require and involve not only extensive cardio training, but also awareness and ongoing monitoring of one’s cardiac output. If you “burn too many matches” early in a bike race or climbing route by maxing your heart rate out, you will suffer performance deficits later in the event, which is why so many professional athletes not only practice a variety of forms of breathing and cardiac effort regulation, but also rely on heart rate monitors, watt meters, and other tools to help them be aware of their physical output.
Connecting Cardio Health Across Sports
Surfers have historically had a reputation for partying more than training—and even in recent years, as the sport has become more professional and more and more athletes have started cross-training, there is still a relative lack of focus on cardio training and monitoring. This is ironic, since we are one of the only sports where athletes are forced into a hypoxic state by being held underwater—often during high stress moments after exerting tremendous amounts of energy to catch large waves. It would stand to reason that better cardio fitness would make us more likely to survive and thrive during big wave sessions, yet very little research has been done on the actual cardiac output of big wave surfers.
The Paradox of Surfer Fitness and Hypoxia
The study that Cliff reviews in his post was interesting in that it focused on surfers at Maverick’s, which is potentially the heaviest big wave spot in the world, size for size. Nazare may break bigger and Jaws may have a bigger barrel, but Mavs has the gnarliest drop and arguably the heaviest beatings. Both Cliff and I have surfed Mavs quite a bit, and we would both agree that it’s an experience that gets the heart racing!
Understanding the Study at Maverick’s
The team from UC Santa Cruz and Texas A&M University, led by Terry Williams, set out to quantify this experience in a study called “The Healthy Heart: Lessons From Nature’s Elite Athletes,” which was published in The Journal of Physiology in 2015. They set a number of elite Mavs surfers up with biometric sensors to test heart rate during sessions at the famed outer reef in Half Moon Bay, in waves ranging from 3 to 10 meters in height. What they found was super interesting and indicated that big wave surfers are definitely dependent on our cardio fitness—even though many of us don’t bother developing it with training!
Key Findings: Cardiac Output During Surfing
The study found that big wave surfers regularly reached more than 90 percent of their maximum heart rate during rides (for many athletes, that means somewhere between 170 and 200 beats per minute), which isn’t that surprising, considering the combination of extreme physical exertion (spring paddling) and psychological stress (catching bombs is scary!) involved in riding big waves. What was surprising was that these athletes’ heart rates remained elevated for hours during the session—much longer than in other extreme athletes, such as F1 and motocross racers. In fact, the date collected from the big wave surfers marked some of the longest sustained periods of near-max heart rates of any athletes ever studied!
Elevated Heart Rates and Athlete Comparisons
This data in and of itself should be motivation for every big wave surfer out there to start adding cardio sessions such as biking, running, or swimming to their training regimens, and explains why we are often exhausted after big wave sessions, even though we might only catch three or four waves in six hours. But there was another level to the study that made things even more interesting—and it involved a completely different species of wave rider.
The Dolphin Comparison: What Can We Learn?
The research team found that, unlike humans, whose heart rates increased surfing, dolphins actually reduced their heart rates while riding waves! This enables them to save energy and oxygen—the exact thing we surfers should theoretically be doing if we want to perform at our best while surfing and survive hold downs after wipeouts! While more research is needed, the scientists behind the study posit that the thrill-seeking nature of surfing causes humans to override their natural metabolic safeguards, while marine mammals do the opposite in an attempt to regulate cardiac output and optimize their performance in the waves.
The Adrenaline Debate: Excitement vs. Efficiency
The question this raises is whether it’s better to be excited by the waves we ride and jacked into the adrenaline high that they provide us (and that is, for many of us, the very reason we surf) or more relaxed and efficient in our surfing. More importantly, is there a scenario where it’s possible for us to learn to do both at the same time—remain relaxed, both psychologically and physiologically, while at the same time enjoying the stimulating effects of wave riding. It would be interesting to do a follow up study on the most successful big wave surfers out there (compared to the rest of us, who are often simply trying to survive!) and see if there’s any difference in the ability of the world’s best to regulate their cortisol, respiratory, and heart rate levels while under self-imposed “good stress.”
Regardless, it is clear that big wave surfing raises our collective pulse—and that’s probably the point for most of us. Now we just need to take that knowledge to heart and start training specifically for cardio performance, like the athletes in so many other sports do.