Bad results are usually the accumulation of losses throughout a race; a kind of bleeding that happens as the race develops.

One minute you think you’re in a good position, the next minute you find yourself at the back of the fleet.

In this article, I’ll talk about the areas on the race course where most sailors lose places without even realising it. Then I’ll give you some practical tips on how to avoid them.

1. Top Mark

Mark roundings and the approaches to mark roundings cost sailors 100s of places over the course of a regatta.

With all the boats converging in a small area, one mistake can cost you a lot of places. This is particularly true at the top mark. Dirty wind, and port/starboard considerations make this one of the most crucial moments of a race.

Coming into the top mark, there’s two things you can do to keep your spot:

1. Focus on sailing fast - getting distracted by tactics and other boats at the top mark will cost you a surprising number of places. By continuing to focus on speed, you’ll be surprised how many extra crosses you can get.

2. Avoid the ‘cone of silence’ - at every top mark there’s a triangle immediately below the top mark where the dirty air is deadly. You need to get to the laylines before the cone to stay in clear air.

   

2. Downwind Gate Marks

Similar to the top mark, the gate is a part of the race course where boats are converging and it’s easy to lose a lot of places. There’s boats still coming downwind, boats going upwind giving you dirty air; it’s a tricky area of the course to navigate.

Here’s a few simple rules you can use to get out of the gate in good shape.

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How you fuel during a race day can be the difference between pushing hard until the last upwind, and struggling just to get through the whole day.

Beyond your physical endurance and energy, your nutrition also has a big impact on your mental performance and how well you can focus throughout the day.

In this article, I’ll break down the science-backed principles that go into a good race-day menu, and give you some suggestions for how you can use them.

Principle #1: Eat Food You Enjoy

One of the biggest mistakes sailors make when it comes to fueling is eating things they don’t like.

Instead of rigidly eating a specific energy gel or meal, you should aim to fit the foods and drinks you’ll actually consume into the requirements you need at different parts of your racing day.

If you don’t like the food you’ve prepared for a race day, you won’t feel good and you probably won’t perform at your best.

Principle #2: Carbs are King

Carbs have gained a bad reputation in the fitness/nutrition world, but the simple fact is that carbs are one of the easiest ways to fuel for endurance sports like sailing.

There are some athletes who have gone off carbs, but the majority still rely on them.

Eat them generously throughout a race day.

Principle #3: Favour Real Food

There is a huge industry which has been built around making you believe that protein shakes, sports gels and hydration drinks are the only way you can fuel yourself properly.

That’s simply not true.

You can get nearly all of the nutrients you need from real foods, they will usually be cheaper and with the added benefit of consuming additional minerals and nutrients which you wouldn’t get from supplements.

I’m not saying supplements are bad, they have their place. Just don’t over-rely on them.

Principle #4: Protein for Recovery

Protein is the most important nutrient when it comes to recovering from racing. Prioritise getting protein in ASAP after racing each day.

Throughout a racing day, you should aim to consume somewhere between 1.4g and 1.8g of protein per kg of bodyweight. As an example, an 80kg sailor should aim for 112g to 144g of protein per day.

Now that I’ve laid out the principles which should guide your meals throughout a race day, here’s some specific suggestions about how you can plan out your race day.

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There are a number of reasons why this rule is useful upwind. I’ll try and list them out here:

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In addition to the original article, paid members will get access to new hiking bench routines, plus some tips on how often you should use the hiking bench.

Enjoy!

“Boat speed makes you look like a tactical genius”

A common saying around boat parks, this holds true for all levels of Laser sailing. Even at the pinnacles of Olympic sailing, the top contenders are consistently at the front because they’re that much faster than everyone else.

But how are they so much faster? One of the keys is being able to hike incredibly hard. In a normal Laser race, the upwind legs are going to account for at least 60% of the time spent racing. Assuming you’re the right weight for the rig, you will be full hiking in any wind above ~8 knots. That’s the vast majority of conditions you’ll race in. Add in reaching legs, and a huge amount of your racing time is going to be spent hiking.

This makes it the single most important thing you should be training, and the area which is going to have the biggest impact on your results. Many sailors neglect hiking training because it sucks. They think that spending time on the water will make up for not using a hiking bench.

It won’t.

This guide isn’t going to give you a magic bullet which will suddenly make hiking bench training a breeze. It’s going to be hard, it’s going to require discipline, but if you want to quickly rise to the top of your fleet, this is one of the best ways to do it.

Why Can’t I just Hike on the Water?

In a sentence, it’s easy to cheat, and it’s not controllable.

Because of the nature of sailing the boat, you will often take ‘mini breaks’ at random times - lulls, tacking, waves etc. Additionally, the requirements of sailing also introduce a cardiovascular component to hiking. This often makes the hiking seem harder than your hiking muscles are actually working.

By using a hiking bench, you are able to accurately target the hiking muscles, and do so with a measurable load. One of the most important factors in improving anything is progressive overload. This is the concept of increasing the load your body faces over time, with the aim of consistently challenging it in order for your body to make the adaptations necessary to become stronger. This is how we become fitter over time.

When hiking on the water, it’s extremely difficult to measure exactly how hard you were hiking, and how long for.

Building a Hiking Bench

There are multiple ways you can tackle this, but I went down the route of building my own. There are a number of designs you can use on the internet like the Improper Course Hiking Bench or the Deadrock Laser Hiking Bench, but I basically just measured the Laser cockpit, and tried to recreate that using timber I bought from the hardware store.

If you’re looking for a video on to help you build your own hiking bench - I would recommend this one here.

You can also buy a hiking bench like this Windesign Hiking Bench one, which I’ve used in the past when travelling.

Your hiking bench doesn’t need to be anything fancy, it just needs to roughly match the dimensions of a Laser cockpit, have a hiking strap which can ideally be set to a length you would use on your boat, and be convenient enough to use often.

Training on the Hiking Bench

So you’ve got your hiking bench, and now you’re wondering how to actually use it. Whenever I would train on the hiking bench, I always used hiking pads and boots, that way you can accurately simulate sailing on the water. This will also allow you to hike longer without your performance being hindered by non-muscular pain.

The other crucial thing is to make sure you’re always hiking with good form.

That means shoulders back, glutes squeezed, core tight, your knees pushing down in to the hiking bench, and your toes pointed. This is probably the most important point I can make. If you’re not using good technique, you might as well not be on the hiking bench at all.

Hiking Bench Routines

Improving your hiking ability can be broadly separated in to two goals.

1. Increasing the maximum amount of force you can put in to the boat. Consider this to be synonymous with your hiking ‘strength’.

2. Lengthening the amount of time you can hold a fully extended hiking position. This essentially equates to endurance.

A well balanced program will contain exercises to target both aspects, but in general, I would suggest leaning towards targeting strength in the off and pre-season, and shifting towards endurance as you get closer to your peak event.

This is to do with the concept of specificity. As you get closer to your ‘peak’, your training wants to be more closely tied to the demands of your target event. In general, the endurance exercises will be performed unweighted, and you are aiming to build up the strength exercises to be able to perform them with good form, whilst holding additional weight.

Endurance Exercises:

• 5-4-3-2-1 that’s 5 minutes, 4 minutes, 3 minutes, 2 minutes, and 1 minute of hiking with 1 minute rest in between. You’re trying to do these in your best possible technique you can hold for the entire interval.

• 10 x 2 minutes with 1 minute rest. This will be around 80% of your maximum

Strength Exercises:

• 10 x 1 minute with 1 minute rest. This will be performed at roughly 90% of your best hiking ability

• Weighted hiking extensions. This is where you hiking in a fully extended position, and raise additional weight above and behind your head - reaching ‘overhead’. Weight should be added to this exercise very, very gradually as it will strain your lower abs like no other, and if your abs are too weak, your lower back will be on the line. Start with a small water bottle. 10 slow reps for 3 sets will be a killer.

If you want even more hiking bench routines, keep reading.

Consistency

"What we fear doing the most is usually what we most need to do"

Tim Ferriss

Finally, the most important thing when that I found when it comes to improving your hiking is consistency. It’s very easy to do a windy week of sailing, and think that you don’t need to use the hiking bench. This is going to kill your progress, and make it easy for you to give up on using it. Not only will consistency help improve your hiking, it will also decrease your chance of injury, as I talked about in my article on Ankle Pain for Laser Sailors. Without consistency, you won’t be able to achieve the progressive overload we discussed earlier.

The Fast Track to the Top

If I had the opportunity to go back in time and talk to 15 year old me about how to get better in the Laser, this is the article I would give him. Improving your hiking fitness is one of the most straightforward ways to sail faster upwind, and get better results. A hiking bench is one of the most cost and time effective training techniques there is. Use it consistently, and you’ll be amazed at how much easier sailing on the water feels.

Hiking Bench Workout Library

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Given the importance of cardiovascular fitness, this is where you’ll spend the majority of your off-water training hours, so it’s critical to get it right and make sure you train the right parts.

In this article, I’ll do a quick recap of the fundamentals behind cardio fitness, how you should include it in your training, and specific sessions you can do which target each component of it.

To quickly recap, the cardio system is broken up into two broad types of energy systems: aerobic and anaerobic. Within anaerobic, there are an additional two energy types: glycolytic and phosphagen.

When talking about cardio fitness and training, the easiest way to think about intensity is to break it down into 5 different zones. We will use these zones to help guide and structure our training.

How we integrate each of the zones into our training program is the key question to solve for.

How To Structure Your Training Week - Preseason

Preseason training is all about building up your base. The main way we will do this is using Z2 training, and a concept called a pyramidal training program.

Using a pyramidal program, your training will be broken down like this:

Z1 & Z3: 70-80%

Z3 & Z4 15-20%

Z5a & Z5b: 5-10%

This will allow you to train each of the zones, and while you’re not on the water as much during the preseason, it’s important to include some Z3 & Z4 in your off-water training (more on that later).

During the phases with a pyramidal program, your training will typically look like this:

How to Structure Your Training Week - In Season

Once we hit the racing season, our time training off the water will decrease, and we need to make sure we get the most bang for our buck.

Because our focus is our performance on the water, we also need to make sure we don’t create too much fatigue with our off-water training.

One of the ways we can do this is using a polarised training program for our cardio training.

A polarised training program is where you spend 80% of your time training in Zone 1 & 2, and 20% of your time training Zone 5a and 5b.

This program skips Zone 3 and Zone 4 because Zones 3 & 4 typically produce a lot of fatigue without providing much benefit. Training like this allows you to grow your aerobic base (Zone 1 & 2) while still improving your top end performance.

Your cardio training session during the season will usually look something like this (depending on how often you sail):

In the next section of the article, paid members will get access to a library of training sessions you can fill in the training schedules above.

If you’re not yet a paid member, use your free trial to gain access.

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The monthly Q&A is an opporunity for all paid members to ask any questions which will help them take their sailing to the next level.

If you’ve got a question which has been bugging you for the last month, click below to ask it in the comment section.

Leave a comment

Over the last few weeks I’ve been doing a heap of coaching on the water, and have a heap of new content for you guys.

I’ve only got a couple of spots left in my private coaching group for the ILCA 6 Worlds.

If you or someone you know is looking for a coach, share this post with them.

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What is it that the sailors at the top are doing differently?

The answer is of…

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As you get closer to race season, your training should become more specific to the conditions and situations you’ll face during your regattas.

Most people do this by increasing the amount of practice races they do.

That wor…

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Especially when the wind gets lighter, minimising the amount you use the rudder is critical to keeping the boat moving, surfing waves and making the most of every gust.

There are a number of ways you can use your bodyweight in the boat, and each one has a different impact.

In this article, I’m going to break down how the best sailors use their bodyweight downwind and go into a couple of real world examples from the recent Sailing Energy Series.

Fore-Aft

Moving fore and aft in the boat is the most important way to help your boat start and continue surfing waves.

• Popping onto waves - there are many times where your boat will be on the precipice of a wave but you don’t quite have the power to overtake the peak and begin surfing. This is the perfect opportunity to aggressively move your weight forward in the boat to ‘force it’ down the face of the wave. You’ll even see some sailors get their weight over their centreboard to try and get onto the wave.

• Surfing the face - once you begin surfing the wave, this is where you need to quickly get your weight back in the boat. How far you move back will depend on the size of the wave. The bigger the wave, the further you need to move back. This has two effects:

1. Lifts the bow out of the water to prevent it from digging into the wave in front of you

2. Helps you plane which will give you the speed to stay on the current wave

Windward - Leeward

Using your bodyweight on the windward and leeward sides of the boat is a crucial skill to develop and has many applications.

If you watch elite sailors, every single turn they make downwind will be initiated with their body weight.

That’s not to say they don’t use their rudder.

One of the most important ideas to understand for fast downwind sailing is the dog wags the tail and the tail doesn’t wag the dog.

That probably doesn’t make any sense, but it’s a metaphor to say that any turning of the boat should start with your bodyweight, and then your rudder naturally follows. Not the other way around.

I wrote about a number of drills you can use to train this concept here:

Changing Angle

The most important reason to use your body weight to windward and leeward of your boat is to change directions.

In general, you should turn to harder angles (either by the lee or broad reaching) to gain speed and begin surfing. Once you’re surfing, you can use your body weight to steer the boat back towards the mark and help you stay on the wave. In light-medium winds, you will usually be trying to ‘milk the wave’ because the waves are rarely big enough to surf properly.

This will mean small changes in direction once surfing to find the balance between staying powered and staying with the wave, and sailing an angle which is not aligned with the wave.

By the lee press

The “by the lee press” is a way to power up when sailing by the lee when the waves aren’t big enough to surf.

If you sail by the lee with slightly more sheet out than usual, the boat will start heeling to windward.

Use your body weight to lean over the leeward gunwhale and push against it.

This will have the effect of getting your boat to sail more downwind while utilising the power you’ve created by the lee.

See the video example below.

Light Wind Windward Heel

In extremely light wind, you can use windward heel to help keep the boom out and reduce drag.

If you let the boom out all the way, you’ll be able to lock your leg under the hiking strap and heel the boat towards you. Use a combination of the mainsheet and pressing against the leeward side to make use of any changes in pressure.

Examples

The recent Sailing Energy Series in Mallorca featured light-medium conditions and some of the best sailors in the world.

I’ve made a 10 minute video breaking down the techniques they used. Check out the video below.

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The monthly Q&A is an opporunity for all paid members to ask any questions which will help them take their sailing to the next level.

If you’ve got a question which has been bugging you for the last month, click below to ask it in the commen…

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Throughout all levels of sailing, you often see the sailors with the most experience coming out on top. If you want to get to the top without spending years and a heap of money accumulating experience, you need to maximise your learning from every regatta you race.

I’ve dived deep into the science of learning to understand what we can do to learn more from our limited time on the water, and make the most of every regatta.

Here’s what I discovered.

Deliberate Practice

The biggest mistake most sailors make is going into every regatta with the aim of winning. While winning is a noble goal, it often means that you don’t practice anything new and revert back to old habits and techniques.

A better plan is to go into non-important regattas with 1 or 2 new techniques which you specifically want to practice during racing.

This lets you practice new techniques in a racing environment where the stakes are low. If you can succeed with implementing new techniques in a low stakes regatta, it will be easier to carry these into a ‘key’ event where the stakes are higher.

But it’s not enough just to go into a regatta with the plan of working on a certain technique. You should go into the regatta with specific goals for the technique you’re working on.

Ideally, these will follow the SMART framework (I talked about this in-depth in this article)

For example, say you want to work on starting at the race committee end of the start line. You might have the following goal:

Start within 3 boats of the RC end more than 50% of the time when the RC end is the most popular end of the line. Do this using the reverse out-shoot back up technique to build my gap.

Gathering Data

To learn effectively in sailing, you need to gather data on your performance, specifically for the area of your sailing you want to improve.

Data is critical because it bridges the gap between what we feel, how we think we’re sailing and what’s actually happening and how we perform.

During a regatta, we can get results as one form of data, but that’s a very crude measure.

If possible, you should try to collect some of the following forms of feedback:

• GPS/Tracking Data

• Recordings of mark rounding positions

• Video footage (ideally onboard if your class allows it)

• Coaching/external feedback.

Practicing Consciously

When training a particular aspect of sailing, it’s crucial to consciously think about what you’re trying to achieve and how you’re doing it.

Having a clear plan or train of thought behind your sailing allows you to revisit it afterwards and analyse whether it was the approach or the execution which did/didn’t work.

On the water, you need a way to record your thought process and the thinking behind the thing you’re working on. Some ways to do this are:

• Telling a coach or training partner how you’ll tackle it

• Saying out aloud what you’re doing as you sail (especially if you’re filming yourself)

• Writing it down before/after every race.

In between races, try to revisit your approach or thought process from the race before and determine what did/didn’t work. Identify something you can change in the following race and see if that improves the outcome.

Throughout my career I’ve used a simple between race debrief framework which helps me remain focussed and process-oriented. I’ll include the framework at the end of the article.

Reviewing

Every productive racing day ends with an additional off-water debrief. This is an opportunity to revisit the days’ events in an objective, low-pressure environment.

The single most important part of any debrief is objectivity. The debrief is the opportunity where you can bridge the gap between what you felt was happening on the water, and what actually happened on the water.

This is where the data you gathered during racing is invaluable.

Focussing on your one or two ‘goals for the regatta’, you should start off recapping how that technique felt on the water, review the data to compare the sensations to how you actually performed, analyse what could be improved, and (ideally) look at footage of a good example.

If you want a full framework for structuring your debriefs, I’m including the framework I use below in the section for paid members.

Internalising

The final step to maximise your learning from a regatta is to internalise the learnings. There are a number ways I recommend doing this:

• Consciously practicing your new techniques in a range of environments

• Recapping what you learnt in your own words through writing or talking about it

• Teaching the lessons to someone else

The last two are particularly powerful. When you think about a concept in your own lingo you retain the learnings much better than trying to recall what a coach or training partner tells you.

When internalising any lesson or concept you learn from a regatta, it’s also crucial to think about the sensations you felt on the water. If you can recall how it feels to perform the new technique, you’ll be able to recreate it a lot easier.

If you want to get access to the frameworks I use for on-water and off-water debriefs, click below to become a paid member + get access to all my other coaching.

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I’ve spent quite a lot…

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1. Sail your boat at maximum ability for multiple races a day

2. Compete at maximum effort for multiple days in a row.

3. Produce enough righting moment to sail your boat effectively in the upper wind range.

4. Be light enough to sail your boat well in the lower wind range.

On top of the requirements that apply across all classes, each class and role will have specific fitness requirements.

These are what typical physical requirements look like across roles:

Alongside the specific fitness requirements for your class, any well-rounded program will also include exercises to help balance the extra load that certain muscles get through sailing and training for sailing.

This will help prevent overuse injuries.

Want help with your improving your fitness? Become a paid member to get my help building a program.

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The monthly Q&A is an opporunity for all paid members to ask any questions which will help them take their sailing to the next level.

If you’ve got a question which has been bugging you for the last month, click below to ask it in the comment section.

Leave a comment

I’ve also announced my in-person coaching dates for 2026. I’ll be coaching a small group of sailors at the ILCA 4 and ILCA 6 Youth World Championships in Aarhus, Denmark.

If you or someone you know are attending those events and would like to get coached by me, you can find more information here.

Thanks for the support, and see you on the water 🤙

You finish the first lap and it’s time to sail upwind again. What’s your plan for the next upwind? Follow the boat in front of you?

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If you don’t have the physical capabilities required to sail the boat well, you won’t have boat speed, you won’t make good decisions on the water, and you won’t be able to back up your performance day after day.

Throughout my career, I obsessed over fitness. Probably too much. Fitness is a very objective aspect of sailing, and I assumed that the fitter I was, the better I’d be.

Turns out that isn’t entirely true. But it’s mostly true.

In many physical classes (like the ILCA), the sailors who consistently win are usually the ones with the most physical ability. Matt Wearn and Marit Bouwmeester are by far the most physically capable sailors in their fleet, but it’s not the only reason they win.

In this series of articles, I’m going to give you a full background on the principles you need to understand to become fitter on the water. On top of that, I’ll teach you the lessons I’ve learnt from years of trial and error, plus give you specific programs that I would use if I were starting from scratch.

Let’s start with the basics.

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This was one of the closest medal races there’s ever been, and if you want to read the five lessons I took away from the race, check this article out:

The monthly Q&A is an opporunity for all paid members to ask any questions which will help them take their sailing to the next level.

If you’ve got a question which has been bugging you for the last month, click below to ask it in the com…

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I went through this race second by second, and found 5 tips which everyone can use (regardless of your level).

I also made a video breaking down the entire race, but Youtube won’t let me post it. Do you wa…

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