As I’m back into training again, working my way to a few personal bests, I’ll be scheduling and reporting about my training and progress towards personal goals.

Personal Bests
The personal bests I’m training to improve are my DYN: 125m, DNF: 109m, STA in competition: 5m 33s. To achieve these goals I make use of different training exercises and techniques, which consist of:

• Dry-walks
• Dry-statics
• Statics
• Crawl without breath
• DNF/Breaststroke technique
• MAX-attempts in all 3

Exceeding PB’s
I want to exceed my personal bests within the next 4 months, this time I will not be focussing on a set distances or time. I will have my focus on doing maximum attempts again and thus improving my personal bests.

“Why this change in approach?” you might ask. Well; In the past few months I’ve been looking back at why I cease to do maximum attempts. I believe one of my restraints is my mind not allowing me to perform to my limits. When looking back on the past year; I’ve seen myself  perform in competitions and everytime I’m in a competition it looks like I’m backing out on my own beliefs and set out paths.

Jorg, Marieke and I have been trying to pinpoint the reason why I’m backing out of it. Where I have to conclude that it includes a certain fear for blacking out and performing badly in front of a crowd. Although I’m only training for personal bests, my mind is always aware of the fact that a bad performance is witnessed and going over the top is a thing I’m not willing to experience.

So how to find a balance in all of this is my main question I’ll be struggling with this next period. Because my body might be ready for a good performance, but how will I convince myself to actually do that max performance?

Reporting
I will write about my progress and for the short updates right after training or the morning after I’ll be using Twitter to communicate the results of the training. I added the twitter feature to the site in the Mini-Blog on the right in the main section, this is where the latest training news appears.

Schedule / Upcoming events
I will be scheduling and planning my training sessions through Google Calendar which is also available on this site, view this public calendar or you can subscribe to the shark-bait calendar with your own Google-account by adding it with the button on the bottom-right.

Here’s a preview from the upcoming days in training:

Stay up to date through the rss-feeds or by reading this site.

As announced this weekend William Trubridge visited the Netherlands for a Constant No Fins (CNF) clinic at Apnea Academy Amsterdam’s pool in Beverwijk. Check out pictures, videos and Glenn’s forum topic with pictures.

First day
It started with a introduction of technique used during the CNF, which he’d broke down into the arm- and legstroke. It’s good to see him explaining all this theory out of his own experience, like where he applies certain corrections and i.e. accidentally finding out why certain stuff is working by looking back through videos.

A lot of other theory explained about lung capacity, certain different thesis’ and practical experience led William to finding a kind of formula to calculate how many air to use for a dive. Although it’s unproven by science it did make sense when he explained it.

After the theory he taught some of his stretching exercises, through which he could stretch his overall body in preparation of CNF or CW dives. In combination with breathing exercises with purpose to stretch the lungs and the rib-cage a preparation for depth training seems to make sense. In some of the stretching exercises or maybe most, I found out that my body wasn’t really all that capable of bending. I do believe that with a little dedication to these stretching exercises, it will be increasing flexibility and thus a better preparation for going into the blue.

With the body stretched up and ready to go we were dropped in the pool to show our technique to the careful eye of the world champ. With pin-pointed accuracy he spotted technique imperfections and showed a way to get rid of these imperfections. For myself my scissor-like movement with my right leg still is one the major imperfections, but by hanging on the side of the pool and slowly making the movement I could get rid of the imperfection. As for the other participants they could also benefit of the observations and comments by William.

Second day
This day started of with theory again, more specific to total lung capacity versus residual volume. He explained an other theory which he worked out for himself and he combined with exhale statics. This approach seems to make sens when you are training for depth, as you’re in this kind of static whilst your falling down by negative buoyancy.

Glenn setup his heart rate monitor through which William was able to show a heart rate drop from 60 to 38 within a minute, which proves his way of using certain pranayama locks. Later that day all participants would be  hooked up and check if they were able to pull of these locks…as for my own heart rate… sigh… I don’t know why but my heart rate starts of at about 100 rest state after 4 minutes of slow breathing and after performing a lock…it would only drop to let’s say 83, but all in a time of 2 minutes for which this is a normal drop in heart rate for me. so for me it’s unproven, but the others were able to get the sensations William was talking about.

After the heart rate monitoring everybody made a maximum attempt in the pool without any preparation, for most of the freedivers this was a first and they all performed really well by down no warm up.

To round up the day we were to execute one of the tables explained earlier in the theory. A certain amount  of 25m laps and decreasing rest times made a perfect training for 30 minutes. Quite tiring and an interesting way of training, although I do see resemblance with my own training schedule’s which Jorg puts me through.

Concluding
Overall a succesful weekend and lot’s of new things learned also about an amazing athlete doing 3 days of trianing and one day of rest in a really awesome blue hole in the Bahamas. Thanks William Trubridge and Glenn Venghaus and Peter Wurschy from Apnea Academy Amsterdam for setting up this oppertunity.

This weekend Apnea Academy Amsterdam are organizing a Constant Weight Without Fins (CNF) training weekend with world record freediver William Trubridge.

The announced schedule for this weekend (roughly):

Saturday
16:00 arrive in pool Beverwijk
16:30 - 17:00   Introductions
17:00 - 18:30  Theory (technique & dive strategy)
18:30 - 19:30  Stretching (body & lungs)
19:30 - 21:30  Pool (technique & drills)
21:30 - End (estimated)

Sunday
12:00 arrival pool beverwijk
12:30 - 15:00   Theory (training program, diet, psychology)
15:00 - 16:00   Stretching (body & lungs)
16:00 - 18:30   Pool (max attempt, pyramid training table)
18:30 - 19:30   Videos, diploma, question time
20:00 -  End (estimated)

Just to let you know what William Trubridge is all about, check out this great performance:

Other information about William Trubridge is posted on Vertical Blue.