Shark Trainings Philosophy, part 1
June 15th, 2006 by Jorg
In the last two weeks our ideas and trainings methods were confirmed by some excellent performances by Sanne. This shows that we definitely took the right road and I’m fully convinced of what the future may hold for Sanne and some possible new Shark blood.
First of all, before we disclose anything about the training techniques, it’s important to know that we had a clear definition of what a competition freediver should be like. Too many times we see freedivers who are waiting for their lucky day, hoping that everything fits correctly and really depending on so many factors before they ‘believe’ that they can do what they want to do. Another factor which clearly gives troubles to some are the immense long trainings and long warm-ups needed before they can pull of a good performance.
So the whole idea is to create an all-round freediver who can compete in all disciplines and can ALWAYS come close to his best performances with a minimum amount of preparation time.
To give an example; if you look at Sanne at a competition he’s relaxing and waiting for his official top, just chatting with some other people, enjoying the surroundings. 15-20 minutes before his time he puts on his freediving gear and slowly walks to the performance zone. He arrives 3 minutes before official top at the place to be and presents himself to the judges and sits down on the side of the pool. 2 minutes before he starts his breathing pattern and around 30 seconds before his start he drops into the water, waits a little, last breath and there he goes.
The beauty of it all is that what he does in competition he can do every week, without warming up. The competition results are already done many times in training, so we know for a fact what his body is capable of and he just does what he does every week. Put him in any pool and he’ll always be capable of going to at least 80-90% of his maximum performance with no warming up. Due to hard work he can trust his body and that gives confidence!
We disclose some more details in part 2 of our training methods.
August 3rd, 2006 at 09:34
[...] As you may recall from part 1, the main goals of our training is that you can always do a near maximum performance without warming up, not depending on long times of warming ups or doing tables in the pool. In the last years many freedivers have turned to so many different ways of training for freediving. Reading all kind of medical and scientific reports and studies, but also looking into the eastern ways, like yoga or meditation. Some others use NLP or other western ways of mental training. They believe that their mental power will give them a better performance. Everybody is just jumping around with so many ideas! [...]
May 22nd, 2008 at 12:22
Hi guys,
Love the approach taken, it’s re-freshing to hear guys passionate about “hard training” … I get tired reading these long scientific reports and a lot of “beating around the bush chit-chat” leaving a person dumb struck, with no answers but more questions … I’m an apnea enthusiast … no doctor or scientist.
Keep up the hard training dude!
Fernando Ferreira
Centurion Freedivers South Africa