When extreme endurance athlete Dan Martin was sat in our reception area yesterday waiting for his session, I had a chat with him about his current training regime. He’s about to swim a North Sea crossing as a prelude to next year’s global marathon, so he’s spending a LOT of time in the water; up to 120 miles a week…

I figured you guys would find some of it pretty interesting, so I asked him to tell us a bit more. …being the seasoned professional that he is, he emailed me an entire blog entry…

Training, Over-Training and then Training Some More

A 120mile week.

120miles is a long way. It’s nearly five marathons. It’s almost six times the distance of the English Channel. It takes me 60hours to swim this far, almost three days of constant swimming and I do it in a week.

I vary the distance each week from anything from 40miles to 120miles and swim the majority of it in the sea or rivers near me. I do a few pool sessions a week to keep me sharp but cold water is key to my training. It all seems a bit excessive but when compared to the trip I training for, swimming the Atlantic, then it all comes into perspective.

In the Atlantic I’ll be swimming 8hours a day, 7days a week and only taking breaks when significant storms blow through. I hope to be holding 2mph for most of the trip depending on the weather conditions. On top of this the route that I’ve got planned should maximise the benefit I get from the Gulf Current. The Gulf Current is up to 5mph near the eastern sea board of the United States and slows down to about 1mph in the middle of the Atlantic. With this in mind I’m hoping to cover 25-30miles each day in the 8hours that I’m in the water and then GPS mark the point I get out at and get back in there the next day-if this all goes to plan then the crossing should take around 100days.

The main problem with this is the real world never holds true to the theory. The Gulf Current has countless spurs and turns which will at best make my route longer and at worst mean I’m swimming into a head current. On top of this you’ve got to consider culmative fatigue and likelihood of repetitive strain injuries; before you even think about the water being between 6-18Celcius, the effect of being in salt water for long periods of time and all the creatures of the deep that are in there! To this end I have to prepare myself to be out there for twice as long-maybe longer. The good thing is that there’s an end, there’s a fixed finish line and it should always be getting closer no matter how slowly.

Doing 120miles a week isn’t too physically demanding – you get used to the movement, you get used to the exertion – it’s a mental task. Staying alert/sane while spending three strokes out of four with my head gazing down at the big blue nothing for 2.2million strokes is what the training is all about and it won’t be until I get out into the middle-miles from everyone and anything that I’ll see if the training has worked.

The start date for the trip is now May 2011 and we’re still looking for a headline sponsor. If you think you can help or know anyone who might be able to help on the sponsorship side of this project then please get in touch via dan@danmartinextreme.com. You can find out more information on the project at my site.

Last night, members of Comberton Tennis Club’s ladies 1st team booked a session with us in order to learn more about dynamic warm up and injury prevention for tennis…

Comberton is a [relatively] new town just outside of Cambridge, and so Comberton Tennis Club is a [relatively] new club; when one of their first team got in touch to book a session with us, we were delighted.

They asked us to talk about warming up and about injury prevention – both topics that are high on our hot list – so we put together a session that encompassed a whistle-stop tour of dynamic warm up, core stability, injury prevention, movement patterns and agility… …plus a wrap-up of how those concepts all come together to impact upon the players career longevity and performance levels.

“We thoroughly enjoyed this session, it was very very useful,” said Tamryn, who organised the session for the ladies, “We hadn’t been aware of how our movement patterns will affect us on court and how they transfer into tennis. To be honest, just from a general body awareness perspective it was valuable – we can improve our well being considerably by doing more of this type of stuff; If we had better core stability etc. then our limbs would’nt be hurting us.”

“We’re a relatively new team looking to step it up and compete at a higher level – so we’ll be up against a higher level of competitor. This is going to be a great start to get us thinking about what we can and should be doing to stay keep ourselves injury free and performing well.”

For this week’s staff training, we de-camped into the labs to learn more about EMG (electromyography) – a way of recording and displaying the electrical activity in muscles. Our guide along the journey was Dan Gordon, a Paralympic World Record holding athlete who has also been a consultant physiologist for the UK Athletics Paralympic Squad (amongst others).

[warning - photos contain a disturbing depiction of male physicality :( ]

If you’ve been reading the blog for a short while, you’ll have seen that each week we ’shut up shop’ to get together for staff training – and that we regularly have guest speakers to deliver on areas of their expertise.

This week our guest speaker was Dan Gordon, world record holding Paralympic athlete and exercise physiologist.

Dan has competed as a GB athlete in three sports (swimming, track & field and cycling) and still holds a world record in track cycling. He has worked as a consultant physiologist to athletes from a diverse range of disciplines including GB Paralympic endurance runners, GB Lightweight rowers, GB cyclists, ECB/MCC academy cricketers, ultra-marathon runners and ultra-rowers. He has also been a team manager for GB VI track & field at a European level and his latest book “Coaching Science. (Active learning in sport)” was released in March 2009.

Our staff training session saw us decamp into Dan’s labs to learn about ‘EMG’ (electromyography) in more detail. If you’re not familiar with what EMG is, then it’s basically this – by carefully placing electrodes on the skin around a muscle, and by using a boat-load of computer-powered signal analysis, you can display various characteristics about the electrical activity of the muscle you’re observing.

This is all very exciting, because you can record the activity synchronised with video and categorically prove which muscles are (and aren’t) working at any given point in time during a movement.

If you were eating your food at the same time as you opened the photo of Andy flexing his enormous gun then I apologise – but what’s interesting about that photo is that during the session we wired up both of Andy’s biceps and you could visibly see on the computer screen traces that his right arm was fatigued (compared to the left) from all the showboating. Clever stuff eh?!

We’ve got some interesting plans to use this technology in some groundbreaking ways so watch this space!

PS: CAPTION COMPETITION – If you’ve got any humerous suggestions as to what you think Dan’s thinking in the last photo, then I’d be delighted to hear them (best submission wins a core cambridge t-shirt :)

A dancer from the international ‘Mamma Mia!’ stageshow tour has started work with us to fix a knee injury he picked up on stage. When you see the photo of the type of work the show involves, you’ll understand why that might be possible..!

Steve, a full-time dancer who has also appeared in productions of ‘West Side Story’ and ‘Cats’, has come to our injury clinic to help treat and rehabilitate his knee injury. The tour has already taken him to Germany and Switzerland, and he needs to be back in action ASAP to continue the tour into Belgrade, Cork, Sweden, Norway and then back to the UK in Cardiff.

The show involves some pretty physical routines (as you’ll see from the example photo), so full rehabilitation into movement patterns will be critical. Steve’s no stranger to this type of work though – previous shows has seen him performing on Olympic rings suspended from a crane above the audience.

The show would like Steve back on stage in a couple of weeks so the race to full function is on!

The Irish national Rowing squad (‘Rowing Ireland’) held a training camp at the National Rowing Centre in Cork this weekend. The camp’s purpose was to see how the athletes had progressed on their weights programmes over the past few months, to observe their technique and to carry out some strength testing….

The camp was the first time we’d seen the U23/senior squads all together in one place at the same time, so it was a great opportunity to develop technique and coach through the squad. Over the last 6-8 months, the athletes have been working on their lifting technique and strength, so the idea was wanted to check form, look at progress and do some strength testing.

The camp was held at the National Rowing Centre in Cork, with the specialist focus of lifting and strength testing. It was also the first opportunity to get a look at the athletes after their performances at the 2010 Rowing world cup series at lake bled, Slovenia.

You’ll see the facilities aren’t exactly luxury at the moment (the lifting is taking place in a cleared out rowing bay :), but that’s because the centre is in the process of being remodelled. Once the works are completed, there’ll be brand new athlete’s quarters, an erg room and a lifting room.

“The technical ability of the athletes has dramatically improved, which’ll serve as a platform for future strength development to carry over into the boat,” said Ed Hallam (our Director of Performance), “We got through some great lifts – and then had a bench press competition at the end for some fun.” “Overall, the guys have developed really well and made some great progress.”

When asked if this means there was likely to be any emerging cross-over from the athletes into powerlifting, Ed’s reply was “I would expect at least as many athletes that cross-over from powerlifting into an elite-level 2K erg sprint.” :)

I’ll put up some more photos of the lifts when we get the videos back and annotated, and of the new facility when it’s complete. The next camp is in September.

This week, our ’staff training’ guest speaker was national “Young Coach of the Year” and regional “Coach of the Year”, Sam Buck.

Sam, a successful Diving coach and ex- international Gymnast, talked to our staff about a variety of technical aspects of the sport of Diving and the conditioning approaches adopted by coaches to train athletes for these requirements….

Every week, our staff take part in our ’staff training’ programme, which is designed to ensure that we’re all currently learning from the latest research and coaching & therapy methods (as well as each other). I’ve posted photos of a few of the sessions here before, Bob Challis’s Long Term Athlete Development and Greg Reid’s Football Injuries.

This week, Sam Buck, presented to us on the technical requirements of his sport (Diving) and the conditioning methods used by coaches.

Sam was a gymnast for 15 years, becoming U18 British Champion and competing on the Junior European circuit and a variety of Senior International tournaments. A few years back, Sam became a Diving Coach (there’s a great deal of carry over from Gymnastics to Diving) and has been extremely successful – becoming Lead Coach for London/East last year and having 5 of his Divers accepted onto the England Talent programme. He was awarded last year the prestigious Sports Coach UK “Young Coach of the Year” and regional “Coach of the Year” titles.

Sam’s talk covered a variety of topics related to Diving, including the technical aspects of take-off, and the corresponding requirements from an S&C perspective, as well as bodyweight conditioning methods and the progressions that coaches would make. It’s worth noting that, because Diving is a sport for very young athletes (as young as 3!), the coaching methodology has to be adapted to make it fun just as much as it develops their physicality.

It may surprise a few of you to find out that Divers tend to be trained in a very “Gymnast-like” – that is to say that they don’t tend to do free weights coaching per se. That said, only recently, a few of the sport’s top performance people have concluded that modified Olympic lifts should be part of an elite Diver’s training regime, and that this should be rolled out forthwith.

It makes sense to us, after all – the higher they can jump, the longer they have in the air and so the more time they have to do all that ‘pretty falling’ that they do competitively.

“It was an absolute pleasure to present to your guys,” said Sam, “There’s no question that the work that you guys do to instil movement patterns and really carry that form over into their sport gives your athletes and clients excellent benefits.” “I’m looking forward to putting your recommendations into place with our squad over the next few weeks and hopefully a few of these bodyweight drills will be useful for your clients too!”

Exciting news everyone – we’ve gone all “dot com web one point oh” and have set up a newsletter full of useful stuff that you can subscribe to!

We’ll be using this list to send out lots of free and useful articles, coaching resources, discount vouchers, job opportunities, class timetables and more.

– For example, we may send out a voucher for discounted physiotherapy, or ask who would be interested in joining in with a “Squat masterclass”, an “introduction to free weights for runners” group or a “core stability for sport” class.

You can subscribe by entering your email address on this page.
More details below…

We’ve set up three lists, and you can subscribe to one or all of them (and you can change your preferences at any time).

The first is “newsletter” – this is the main newsletter list, which we will use to send the latest articles, coaching resources, special offers, discount vouchers, news, notification of forthcoming group sessions and classes etc. etc.

The second is “jobs” – this list will give you notification of jobs, placements, shadowing opportunities etc. as soon as they are available.

The third is “courses” – this is a subset of the newsletter list, and purely keep you informed of forthcoming training courses, seminars, masterclasses, open evenings that you might be interested in.

Rest assured that we hate spam probably even more than you do, so you’ll hear from us only when we’ve got something we think you’ll find genuinely interesting, and we’ll never (EVER) pass your details on to any other person or organisation.

To subscribe, enter your email address on this page.

A few weeks ago I was contacted by a member of Cambridge Triathlon Club to see whether we could do some triathlon-specific strength & conditioning with a group of their athletes.

Given that the answer was obviously “Yes!” – this week they started a training with us…

Cambridge Triathlon Club is a pretty big deal, having over 200 members (including 60 junior members) and an excellent training programme which helps both novice and experienced athletes alike.

Nicole, our coach who is running the sessions, used both her triathlon coaching qualification and experience of setting up a number of running clubs at home and at Loughborough (where she went to university) to design a triathlon-specific 10-week training plan that will work to improve the athletes’ performance as well as reducing their chances of injury.

We’re really quite pleased to have this opportunity, because the realities of training for three separate events as well as having a day job (and perhaps children as well) makes it a really tough sport to train for. Quite understandably, strength training is usually the first thing to be dropped from a busy training schedule.

“We contacted Core Cambridge about these sessions because we wanted some expert advice on how, what and when to gym train.” said Dan Monks of CTC, “we’re really looking forward to these sessions, because a few of our members have trained here before and really felt that they got a lot out of it. Finding out that they’ve now got a triathlon qualified coach on their team is obviously a bonus!”

Good luck Cambridge Tri Club!

The young lady you see in these pictures is an U17 athlete who competes regularly at national level in a whole host of athletics events. She’s started work with us to help prepare for the English Schools AA Track & Field Finals in July.

Amongst other acheivements, Stephanie… (deep breath)

• finished last season as 12th in the country for 800m, 11th in the country for pentathlon and as 3rd in the country for 300m hurdles.
• took part in three English schools AA qualification events (cross country, 800m and Combined events).
• is Cambridgshire champion for 800m flat and 300m hurdles.
• is South Lincs Schools Champion for high jump (new pb 1.58m), 80m Hurdles and 300m flat.
• is Anglian school Champion over 800m and Lincolnshire School champion for the pentathlon.

Phew! *finally breathes in again* — I believe that the colloquial expression we’re looking for here is “you go girl” =)

Steph qualified for the English Schools Final with a time of 46.8s in the 300m hurdles, and we’re hoping that the sessions with us over the forthcoming weeks will help to keep her injury free during all of her training and will give her the strength that she will need to succeed.

Good luck Stephanie!

We’d like to take this opportunity to say a massive ‘congratulations!’ to the winners of the 2010 Xchanging Oxford vs Cambridge Boat Race – Cambridge!

(If you’re – quite rightly! – wondering what took us so long to post this, the 2009-10 “wash up” meeting was held today, which is the first time that everyone’s back in the same place after the race, and the first opportunity for us to grab photos! =)

We’ve been involved in the Strength & Conditioning for Cambridge University Boat Club for three seasons now, but this last year was the first time we have had the opportunity to design and implement a complete year-round programme…

In actual fact the day was a double victory for Cambridge Boat Club as Goldie (which is kinda sort of a ‘2nd boat’) won their race too versus Oxford’s “Isis” boat.

What made the Blue boat’s victory extra special for us was the fact that it was a win from middlesex station – which means that the crew has to be strong enough to hold on for the middle 2/3rds of the race on the outside of Surrey bend before launching the attack to win.

We believe another key factor was that there were some of the guys in both crews who we have worked on our S&C programme over three years – which means that their physicality is a result of the structure that’s been put in place to graduate them to that point. (Despite popular myths to the contrary, athleticism doesn’t happen overnight!)

Chris Nilsson, Chief Coach, Cambridge University Boat Club, said “Supplementing Core Cambridge’s S&C coaching into CUBC’s on-water training was a key part of the 2010 Boat Race wins. By integrating our on-water coaching with their land-based S&C training we produced stronger, fitter, injury free athletes who went on to win the races.”

“Many thanks for your support and hard work to help us achieve all of the above. All of our guys appreciate it and know they were all the better for your programme.”

Here’s to 2011!

All of the above photos are copyright Getty Images.