Canoe polo research gets attention at undergraduate PE conference

Across Canada a little known sport is finally making big waves - and sparking new research.

Canoe polo, popular in Europe, is drawing enthusiasts to the fast watersport here in Canada. However, relatively little is known about the athletes in the sport, their physiology, what type of training they need to focus on, or what coaches should look for when selecting athletes.

Enter PhD student Scott Forbes, a member of the Canadian national canoe polo team, and his doctoral studies mentor Dr. Gordon Bell, one of Canada's leading exercise physiologists, who began a study looking at the sport, primarily because of Forbes' interest.

And it's this research, and Forbes and Bell's preliminary findings, which eventually took Sheldon Tibbo, a fourth year kinesiology student doing his practicum in the exercise physiology lab with Bell, to the University of Toronto's annual physical education conference recently to make a presentation on the subject.

In getting to that point though, there was plenty to do, especially as they were looking at a sport about which there is no known research.

There are many unknowns in researching a sport that hasn't been studied before, explains Bell, noting that a time motion analysis (TMA) is the first crucial step. "You want to look at the physical demands of the sport. We do that by video-taping the sport and analysing all of the different movement patterns in the sport and how long athletes do the different movement patterns.

"For example, if it's a sprint movement we want to know how long do they actually sprint in the kayak? (Canoe polo is actually played in kayaks). Once we know the time spent doing these different movement patterns, it gives us knowledge about what energy system is used. Then we know how to assess canoe polo players because we can design or select fitness tests that will assess those components of the sport.

"That helps the athletes who are able to be tested for their sport to see what they need to work on to achieve the kind of fitness they need for the sport."

Besides conducting a TMA, two classic ways of looking at the demands of a sport that hasn't been researched is to monitor athletes' heart rates or to take a fingertip blood sample from athletes during and after the game. With vigorous athletes in kayaks on the water, it wasn't feasible to take blood samples, so their heart rates were monitored prior to and during the game.

As it happened, the canoe polo world championships were hosted in Edmonton last year, affording this research team the perfect opportunity to monitor prime athletes during a world-class competition.

Bell and Forbes were surprised to see just how intensely the sport is played. Heart rates for some of the athletes were quite elevated before the game even began, showing a high anticipatory or stress response. Says Bell, "The heart rate responses during the game were quite high and very close to the peak heart rates they would have been able to achieve." And they remained so for 70 percent of the game.

Besides learning more about the physiology of the athletes in the sport, Bell says the TMA gives researchers important information about the way the game is played. "You get information about how long a team is in the offensive zone vs. the defensive zone; how many shots there are in the games, how many passes, and so on. This is really important information for coaches. For example, if you know a team is known for its offensive ability, you can use the analysis to find ways to play the game differently to counteract them."

Bell and Forbes helped Tibbo to do the data reduction and to prepare a presentation of the preliminary findings to share at the U of T undergraduate conference.

For Tibbo, who graduates this year, it was it was a rare experience for an undergrad. "This definitely opened my eyes to possibilities in research," he says. "In the near future, after a break from my studies, I hope to do a master's degree at U of A or U of T to explore the field of kinesiology further."

As an athlete, Forbes says the research findings will definitely help the sport. "At present there are no standardised test protocols when we're selecting the national team," he says. "Now that we have a more objective measure of what the demands of the sport are, we can devise better testing and select the best athletes for the sport. It will help for selection and training. We know now that we have to train at very high intensity to be able to last almost 20 minutes at very high heart rates."

With preliminary data looked at, Bell and Forbes will continue with the next stage of their research, delving deeper into a sport that could just become summer's answer to hockey!


Canoe polo is played in kayaks with five on a side. Games consist of two fast and furious ten-minute halves. More information at Canada Canoe Polo at http://www.canoekayak.ca/canoepolo/Home.html

This study is funded by the Sport Science Association of Alberta. http://www.ssaa.ca/

Dr. Bell is a lead researcher in the Exercise Physiology Laboratory. Read more about the lab online here: http://www.physedandrec.ualberta.ca/exphys_lab.cfm