If you are a sailor and have been on the internet for the past fortnight it will have been hard to miss the launch of Jon Emmett’s new sailing book, Be Your Own Sailing Coach. We say that because every sailing website we go to seems to be featuring it (well done to Jon for a sterling marketing effort on this one!).

Not to mention his Facebook page which has twice as many fans as ours

But Facebook rivalry aside, we have managed to twist Jon’s arm to give you a free chapter of his book, so here is the link:

Be Your Own Sailing Coach by Jon Emmett - Body Weight Chapter 16

We chose the chapter on Body Weight for two reasons:

1. It is not something that many other sailing books touch on, so it should give you a new perspective on this important part of the sport.
2. It is something we ourselves have been working hard on the last 2 months, so we will be able to follow up with a few posts on our experiences of gaining and losing weight for sailing.

Here are some of our thoughts on the topic of the Chapter:

We think that Body Weight is often used as an excuse for poor performances in certain conditions - e.g. “we’re too heavy for that 5 knot stuff, we always do badly”. There are two things to point out for this - 1) your weight is one factor which you are in control of, so you have no excuses, and Jon has some very good points to expand on that idea. And 2) yes, weight is important, but it is not the be-all and end-all. Light-wind regattas are still won by heavier crews.

At the other end of the scale, especially in highly competitive fleets, you can become so obsessed with getting to the perfect weight that you end up focusing on it too much. 1 kilogram here or there makes an inconsequential difference to boat speed, particularly with the likely wind ranges over the course of a regatta (some days that extra kilogram will help, another day it will slightly hinder, but importantly it averages out to no difference at all). In Jon’s chapter, Joe Glanfield makes a very good point - just get to the average ideal weight for the class you sail, then forget about it.

In the next couple of weeks we will post do a couple of follow-up posts on this, because my experience in particular has been a challenging one (i.e. at Uni I weighed 90kg, but now I have to maintain my weight at 72kg as a 470 crew!).

Jon’s book is available from Wiley Publishing or any good chandlery.

A quick update - Palma Regatta starts on Sunday so we are winding down the training camp and beginning to get into competition-mode for next week. Bring it on!