Team Sharkbait News

New job and some family stuff prohibited me to write anything serious for some time over here. Still very busy with a lot of things, so I decided to put some Shark.nu tasks in the closet and concentrate on the urgent and good stuff first.

With regards to Sharkbait the most important task for me is to be in the water myself and have fun! And this is going perfectly the last few months, so from now on I try to up the level a little bit and sometimes even hold my breath for an extreme period of 3 contractions instead of coming up after the first contraction I receive.

Coaching Sanne is still a lot of fun because we have some clear goals defined and we’re entering new territory every trainings session. The main goal we’re still working on is the mental part I wrote about earlier. As we ended the second phase project 13 end of December, I took all the data from the preceding 13 weeks and lay them out and found some interesting stuff to work on. Breaking mental barriers isn’t easy but we’re getting there!

This weekend it’s time for the 7th Coupe des Dauphin in Geneve, Switzerland, and we will drive over there with our crew to have some fun. That means Sanne is tapering down on the fitness and intense freediving specific exercises and focusing more on technique. Tomorrow is dynamic without fins training sessions again and at the same time the last pool training before the competition, so we take it easy. The body is ready, the mind is better then ever, so I’m pretty confident that Sanne will reach his set goals.

On Saturday evening he must do at least a dynamic without fins with a distance of 95 meters, which should be no problem. The fun part is that we decided that Sanne will never come closer then 5 meters from the end of the pool in training and competition. This to break the turning-mental-breakpoint. So if he decides to go further then 95 meters, he has to do at least 105! Hehe, funny me…

Next day is time for static, and as it’s been a long time since he has done serious static work, I don’t know what to expect. Furthermore we’re going to do an experiment during that official attempt, so I’m very curious what will happen. As you have to set goals, we set his static to 5:34 minutes. More about the experiment later.
After that it’s time for dynamic with fins and after last Friday’s training we decided to put the goal distance at 110 meters. Last Friday we went to the pool to find out that our training pool was being used as a warm up pool for the swimming competition that was going on in the Olympic pool. So the pool crew decided that all the people who came for their recreational swim could use only 1 lane instead of the normal 4. That was not exactly what we had planned for! So while everybody was preparing to jump in the water, Sanne grabbed his fins, jumped in the pool and started preparing.

While taking his last breaths, standing at the end of the pool, around 5 people jumped from the start block over him into the water. So with a total of 1 minute preparation during a very busy jump in, he started his dynamic with an end goal of reaching 105 meters (remember: he could not stop less then 5 meters from the end). Confident start and swim made a very easy 107 meter dynamic with fins which he recovered from within 2 breaths. Clearly there is much more in there, but let just put the goal for next week at 110 and be satisfied with a clear and conscience decision to do a certain distance that is in reach. Mental training, remember!

I guess the other freedivers, who were still preparing on the side of the pool, didn’t even notice that Sanne did this dive… fun stuff as usual!

All in all I look forward into going to Geneva and have some fun and see Sanne do what he does two times a week in our own pool.

As a new year has come along, Team Sharkbait’s best wishes go out to all our readers. Also a big thanks for the people who keep visiting back here!

Here’s a small statistics update since our new site started february 2007: 41 posts, 20 comments and about 6500 visitors from 91 different countries.

Thank you all for tracking my freediving blog!

Upcoming Events 2008
The new events have also been chosen for the first 4 months of 2008.

26th and 27th of January
7ème Coupe de Dauphins, Geneva, Switzerland

Status:
National Open with AIDA Ranking Recognition WR with doping-test
Disciplines:
Static (STA), Dynamic with fins (DYN) and Dynamic without fins (DNF)

William Winram asked us to drop by in this competition when we were at Wiesbaden last year, so I’m looking forward to this!

12th – 18th of April
Bizzy Blue Hole – Dahab, Egypt

Status:
National with guest with AIDA Ranking
Disciplines:
Constant Weight No fins (CNF), Constant weight (CWT) and Free Immersion (FIM)

We talked to one of the organizers in the Tongelreep Eindhoven during one of our training sessions, she would be thrilled for us to compete and report from the event.

19th – 26th of April
Shark-Bait Xplores Sharm El Sheikh

Status:
Personal freediving Xperience and lot’s of freediving fun
Disciplines:
Xploring depth’s whilst totally relaxing and enjoying the coral reefs

A well deserved holiday with my girlfriend at the nice coral’s of Sharm el Sheikh! Nicely closing the first 4 month’s of 2008. After that it’s back to the drawing board and hit the waters of the Tongelreep in Eindhoven again

What I’ve been noticing throughout the training weeks is that my mind stays totally in focus during a high intensity training. There will be no thoughts distracting me and my mind is only busy with doing its best to execute the exercises as they should be done. This is a totally different world than during the day-life, this is where I get enough time to think about a lot of things.

I’ve asked myself the question, why do I think of all those things? Why should I seek the edge of the sane-explainable and still think some more. Well I think I’ll have to accept that my mind is made for thinking, but on the other hand…there seems to be a way to focus and think of nothing but my mission.

Last Friday Jorg, Kostas and I were training in the pool again and it was dynamic with fins time. The 1st time I just used my swimming goggles to see where I can go, without my nostrils filling up with water too far. At 75m my mind suddenly decides to come up, where this time I wasn’t able to predict this action.

With my next attempt I was looking out for any sign of bailing, knowing my own weak point at  the 50m’s turn. Jorg and I decided a long time ago, that it would never be acceptable to do a 50m during training. So as my 2nd run was progressing towards the 50m I felt my minds urge to come up at 50m. But this time I beat it by looking into the reflecting pools edge and actually just waited a few seconds and looked at myself…telling myself: 50m is NOT ACCEPTABLE. Whilst thinking that I could hear Jorg making noises through the water, knowing he was seeing what I was about to do.

Surprisingly he saw that I turned around and headed back towards the 100m mark. At that point I just managed to clear out any thoughts and made the turn-point and made my return lap to complete 100m’s of dynamic.

It’s not the distance that tricks me, but mind control seems to get more important. All we have to figure out is how I can implement this “focus through training”-concept into my freediving performances. Time to clear out the mind

After Sanne’s original post about his new training we got quite some response. For sure the method we use is different than what freedivers are used to do. But that makes it interesting as well! Everybody is always in search of the holy grail on how to achieve best performances in sport and in the Sharkbait philosophy we have chosen to use a work-ethic approach with a get-in get-out mission mentality that is working very well.I’ve written already many articles about our way of training so it’s no use to repeat the general idea behind the whole philosophy. In this article I will focus only on the packed 30’s approach we’re currently using.

So in short, to recap Sanne’s post, packed 30’s is nothing else then a near-maximum physical and maximum mental training schedule which lasts for 30 minutes, if you can finish the schedule. Let’s just start with answering the questions Sanne put in his post.

Why would you want to train that kind of mental endurance?

After the first project 13 I learned a lot about Sanne his physics, but this was more a confirmation on what I already knew for some time. What was completely new during that project is the mental picture I got from him. For the the first time it really came out how big of a mind game this whole freediving thing was for Sanne. It was perfectly clear that his body was ready for some big performances, like I already told you in earlier articles, but the actual performances during competition were not even near his maximum performance he could do every week in training.

So of course we started discussing and talking about how we could solve this. And if you start talking about mental barriers and overcoming them you start to poke in some deep personal stuff very fast! Every top athlete is not only a master with his body, but even more with his mind!

The natural thing of course happened after some failed performances. Outsiders said Sanne did too much work and hard training and now his body was over trained. Well, that’s of course the easiest thing to say. But if you know what you’re talking about and have all the data, you know that that wasn’t true. Far from it! His training results were improving week after week. Even after the project 13 and with some big resting time in between.

Where the first project 13 was the ultimate program to train every cell in Sanne his body how to cope with low o2 and high co2 grades, the second project 13 would be completed molded around Sanne his brain and to slowly elevate stress level and tension to get him used to freediving competition stress, but even more to grow mental power in general.

As both Sanne and I have pretty busy personal and work lifes, our few sport hours we can spend each week have to be filled with efficiency. The only way to do this is to know what to do in a set time. We don’t have time to hang around the pool for 3 hours at a time. Talk with everybody and then do some laps underwater. 19:00 we start the show and 19:30 we stop the show. Which doesn’t mean we get out of the water immediately after that. We buddy some new freedivers who are also there, and help them with training. But in those 30 minutes… If there was a fire, we would still continue (we are in a pool anyway!

Those 30 minutes are filled with a grueling schedule that will give your body a kick so that the physique is triggered to respond and improve itself. But besides that I set up the schedule in such a pace that every lap or exercise Sanne does makes it more difficult to relax and to keep at ease. Bringing a sensation were he knows he can make it with his body, but were his mind is just so tired that his body wants to quit. To simplify, every end of an exercise will feel mentally as if he has to turn at 125 meters. Questions in his head for example; why should I continue, what am I doing, if I go up everything will be easy and painfree again. If I quit here it’s enough for today. Stuff like that. If you’re a freediver you probably recognize some of the questions.
By bringing him sensations like that during training and by bringing him the sensation of living up to a training from which he knows it will be heavy again, he learns how to deal with this kind of stuff. And from what I already saw, it’s working big time!

Is there a relationship between O2- & CO2-schedules in combination to these packed 30’s ?

Good question. Not really if you compare it to the regular o2 and co2 cycles we know from Apnea Academy. Of course we repeat and keep a certain resting period between each set. But it’s not like the normal stuff were you say; we’re going to do 8 laps of 50 meter underwater and between each set we make the resting period shorter each time (co2). Or we keep the resting period the same but increase the distance (o2).

With the normal schedules for freediving the whole thing is geared into reaching a certain time or distance, where as our schedules are optimized to reach mental exhaustion and still keeping technique okay.

In the last year we’ve developed around 15 exercises we use cross wise to keep each training interesting. So maybe 2 sets of exercise number 8, then 4 laps of exercise number 3, etc. Keep in mind that we in general never do any of the known freediving disciplines in the pool. Only special developed surface work that can be easily done alone, or for some serious schedules with the help of a buddy.

Can you use this approach over an existing training, which results in a packed 30-variant of the exercise?

No! This kind of training only works if you use the complete philosophy we use. This is not for wussies! This asks for complete dedication and faith in yourself that you can reach the end of a schedule. It’s just hard work! It has nothing to do with meditation, relaxation, etc. It only has to do in training your body and mind with these high levels of stress. And that’s why we don’t train in the water for more then 1 hour a week.Is this approach usable for any freediver?For sure not! We tried with other people this approach and for them it just didn’t work out. You just have to find people who are willing to train, suffer, and enjoy a hard time in the pool. You can’t improve without some pain at a certain moment. Ever seen those housewives using the stairmaster year in year out without sweating and puffing, just reading a book and still being fat? Well, no pain no gain!

As Sanne also reported earlier, we found some other people willing to do what it takes. If you see what kind of progression they are making with our beginner schedule it’s just amazing! We never tried a maximum in one of the known freediving disciplines yet, but it’s very clear that they can do triple digit dynamics already.

Want to join us?

If you’re interested in our methods and want to join us we are going to offer two options to you. Only to the really dedicated! We talk about that next week and we’re going to start with this program January 1st!

Our global training-philosophy includes that our training is not wide stretched in time, but it has more resemblance of a “Packed 30″-approach. What does this mean in terms of training? Well 30 minutes of high intensity training, wearing down your mental endurance to a point you’ll have to yield. This kind of training is only done with a safety in the water.

I’ve been doing this kind of training for a few weeks now, but in general we’ve always had significantly shorter training sessions then other approaches. On a level of focusing for training, my focus can be very dedicated. I prepare myself during the day, knowing what I should do during the Packed 30’s later that evening. Preparing in a way that it is something I think about during the day. No surprises, increased focus, set exercises and it will break me down mentally.

The yield point is a way of testing my endurance, it varies per day of training, but should on average be on a constant increasing rate. The yield-point can be a constant value, but the effort to reach the point should be increasing.

I think this approach may raise a few questions like:

• Why would you want to train that kind of mental endurance?
• Is there a relationship between O2- & CO2-schedules in combination to these packed 30’s ?
• Can you use this approach over an existing training, which results in a packed 30-variant of the exercise?
• Is this for approach usable for any freediver?

Jorg will try and answer this in his view on Packed 30’s later this week.