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“Surfing is not easy,” says pro surfer Stephanie Gilmore. “It takes patience and resilience, we all get frustrated and we all fall off a million times over!” Yep, for this six-time world champion, what happens in the water applies on shore, too. “People say, ‘What do you take out of surfing into your everyday life?’ and I’m like, ‘Everything – be patient, if you’re getting smashed and held under a wave, you just have to go with it. You can’t overpower it. Wait for things to run their course.’”
Gilmore takes this same ‘go with the flow’ attitude to her fitness. “Because I travel so much it’s hard to keep one set routine – I am the least self-disciplined athlete you’ve ever met!” she confesses. “But I like to mix it up, it’s good for the body and it’s good for the mind.”
In LA, her class of choice is kickboxing. “I just love having that release. I’m not an aggressive person but there’s something about having that high-cardio, high-intensity work that I really like,” she says. “I’ll mix that in with stretching at home, the foam rollers are the best thing ever invented. I travel with a cricket ball and roll on it, it’s so painful!”
Gilmore also smashes out weights… in the pool. “You get dumbbells and you crawl underwater with the weights. You’ll go down with the weights to the bottom, squat and then come back up and then get a breath before you sink back down again. It’s really good on your joints because it’s not as intense as if you’re in the gym.”
Back home in Australia, Gilmore goes for a more unconventional approach with her fitness. “I work with Nam Baldwin, he mixes in martial arts with circuit work, then he does spatial awareness and balance training.” Turns out, Baldwin’s equipment of choice is a broomstick! “He’ll run it back and forth around you and you have to duck and move around it, so you’re dancing around this stick. The whole time your legs are burning. He’ll come straight at you and you have to move your body, matrix style! He’ll also get you balancing on a Bosu and he’ll throw tennis balls at you and you have to duck and miss the tennis balls.”
So how does she prep for the wipe outs? Baldwin has a solution for that, too. “We do breath enhancement training in the pool,” she explains. “It’s all about showing your body that you’ve actually got oxygen running through it everywhere, you don’t have to rely purely on your breath all the time. For big wave surfing, this is really handy! You’ll think, ‘Wow I’m going to drown,’ and then be like ‘Actually, nah, I’m okay, I’ve still got about another 30 seconds.’”
Unsurprisingly, Gilmore doesn’t stick to a regimented diet to fuel this training. “I’ve never been the most strict. The thing people don’t do is just listen to their body, take a moment to be like, ‘How did I feel after I ate that?’ It’s something simple like that, which helps you really learn about what feels good for you. I love fresh seafood, salads and vegies. And coffee and cake! It’s about balance.”
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