ADEMIR DA SILVA, MASTERS/A-FRAME, BRIAN BIELMANN/RED BULL CONTENT POOL
the couch, getting to 45 seconds or a minute was a struggle for me. So how did you address it? It was October 2010, I believe. I was flying, and the in-flight magazine had an article about this freediver and his wife [Kirk Krack and Mandy-Rae Cruickshank], who trained all these people: like Tiger Woods, and David Blaine for his magic stunts. I was reading about their technique and how they build up levels of lung capacity and teach breathing patterns, and I started thinking. At the time, Red Bull had just implemented their high-performance programme, so I took a load of screenshots of the article and emailed it to Andy Walshe, who was heading up the programme, and asked him, “Do you think we’d ever be able to get this guy to do a course with me, or figure out where he is?” And a few months later he ended up at my house on Maui. We had a full five days to figure it out. What did he have you doing? The first day Kirk flew in and went to dinner with my family, and at dinner he says, “OK, lie down and try this.” And I lay down and held my breath for 45 seconds or a minute. And then he says, “Now try this breathing technique,” which was basically slowing your heart rate down and letting out more carbon dioxide than you’re letting in oxygen, and unbalancing it so you have more room to fill up with oxygen. The first hold I did was three minutes, right there. After that, it was the winter we started paddling in at Jaws, and on a decent-sized day I got held under for a really long time. I remember coming up and having less than two seconds before another huge wave hit me, and I fully went into everything I had learned on the course. I went right into a diaphragmatic breath and sort of took a second to control my heart rate and then went straight back under, and I was way more comfortable than I had ever been up to that point. I came in that day and emailed Andy and Kirk right away just saying, “I can’t thank you guys enough.” What’s your training like today? I have a pretty good programme that I do for six weeks before winter. I’ll do a window of breath training for four or five days, where that’s all you do for those days is go through the pool motions and some static apnea [facedown underwater breath-holding] stuff, and then some freedives. Basically getting used to holding your breath almost to the point of torture. Then the THE RED BULLETIN
“ I used to just surf all winter long, but I was going so hard I‘d just run myself into the ground”
rest of my programme is that I’ll wake up early and go and surf every morning for a few hours, then come in, eat a second breakfast, and I’ll go to the gym for two to three hours and do a whole load of different stuff. Not a lot of weightlifting, a lot of it’s done with my own weight, like pull-ups, and just a ton of circuit training. And then I’ll eat again and usually go for a long bike ride, 55 to 65km or so. Some days I’ll go to Pilates or yoga as kind of an end-of-theday reset. Unless the waves are good, then I’m surfing again. And that’s just the first part of your training? Yeah. After week one, once I get everything firing, I’ll start to do breathholds within the circuit training at the gym. I’ll do a breathe-up similar to if I’m about to go underwater, and because my heart rate is higher, that feels a lot more like surfing than it does to just lie in a pool face down holding your breath. That’s where I feel like I start to push myself a lot. Sounds like off-season boot camp. Right, except there is no off-season in surfing. That’s what’s hard. You have to
make time. And I still want to be able to surf, so I might be in the middle of training, but if there’s a late-season swell in Indonesia that looks huge I’m going to dip out and go and surf it. Because in the end it’s still about surfing. Even just last year I felt like I overtrained, and it took away from some of my time in the water. I feel a lot of athletes do that. They might get so adamant about having a routine in the gym when they should be spending more time at their sport, and the gym should just be a tune-up. Where does the motivation come from to train this way? A lot of guys just surf, and that’s it. I’ve noticed the benefit for a few years now. I used to just surf all winter long and then move right into the Southern Hemisphere winter and surf all summer long down there. Usually by August or September, I’m going so hard that I just run myself into the ground. A few years ago I stopped doing that. I would finish my travels and go home and actually focus on a window to get myself ready for winter, and in doing that I noticed how much better I felt for the duration of the season. Are any other sports part of your training programme? I got really into mountain biking and road biking after my knee surgery last year. Now I love to do that. And then if the waves are flat I’ll do downwind paddleboard racing. And snowboarding, as much fun as it is, is definitely a workout, hiking around at altitude trying to find powder. I did a lot of boxing for a few years, full hand-eye and a lot of speed, hitting mitts or sparring. It was good cardio and it was fun as well. It’s a good life skill, too. It’s absolutely a good life skill. Have you noticed a change in surfers’ attitudes towards training in general? It seems there’s been a shift in the way people accept it. Oh, definitely. Tenfold, in every aspect of the sport. All the way down to the juniors, there’s a much more professional approach than there was 15 years ago. Now the top 10 surfers in the world, they’re all training year round and they have coaches. You look at the top juniors and it’s the same thing. And a big part of that is seeing the longevity of some of the guys’ careers who have taken care of themselves. You can get a lot more waves under your belt if you can stay in the water and stay healthy. 55