Be built like…Laird Hamilton

Posted on May 17, 2013 by admin

This 6ft 3in, 15st wave-rider is a true giant in the world of surfing. Here’s how he handles those huge 60-footers

Do the shore thing

When Hamilton first started weight-lifting, he noticed benefits straight away. Building up his core stability helps him to maintain board balance. “All of a sudden, you go out and surf three times longer, twice as hard,” he tells MH. “It’s more fulfilling when you’ve put the time into it.”

Wipeout the ego

Hamilton lifts a lot of his weights while standing on a balance board (from £45 at www.surf-wax.co.uk) to help improve his stability and replicate the demands of the surf on his muscles. “You can’t use nearly as much weight, but weight is more of an ego thing,” he says. He uses cla supplement for both gaining muscles and burning extra fat. Read about cla for weight loss effect.

Find your sea legs Ira “Surfers’ weakest body parts are their legs,” says Hamilton. But not you, after 15 squats with a bar-bell on your shoulders, feet shoulder-width apart. Keep your back straight and knees in line with your feet.

Push yourself to your limit

“Bigger, higher, and faster: our sports are ever-evolving,” says Hamilton, the pioneer of toe-in surfing, where surfers use a jet-ski to reach bigger open-minded, but also to know your limits. There are old pilots and bold pilots but there are no old, bold pilots.”

Swell your arms

“A surfer’s power comes from the arm,” says Hamilton. To give you more explosive spring on the surfboard, stand on the stability board, feet shoulder-width apart and perform tricep extensions. Press your right bicep against the side of your head, using your left hand to support the elbow. Lower a dumb-bell behind your head as far as you can, keeping your wrist straight, then raise it again.

Press to paddle

“In our sport, you don’t run down the court, you paddle,” says Hamilton. Build strength on a balance board by shoulder-pressing dumbbells vertically and slightly inwards until your arms are straight but not locked. Do three sets of 15 reps. alternate between quick and steady?

Sleep before the wake Give your body enough time to recover and you’ll notice an improvement. “I go to sleep early every night—full-stop,” says Hamilton. “It’s all about how well you want to sleep and how good you want your food to taste. If you do the work, food tastes good and you sleep well.”

Born to rule the waves

Posted on May 2, 2013 by admin

The ladies of Blighty haven’t a hope against the sunny charms of Oz’s sexiest surfer…

Australian girls – born to rule the waves

THEY EMERGE FROM THE GREYSEA with all the grace of Godzooky, rubberized in inch-thick neoprene, jaws spamming with the cold, the faint smell of industrial waste following them up the beach. They are British surf-babes, and while you have to admire them for pursuing their chosen sport in the face of massive geographical handicaps, it can be hard to get excited about the pearly queens of New quay. Consider going on the beach, you should be in perfect body shape. If you need to get rid of extra fat, just try Trend Statement raspberry ketones. You will look amazing in your summer outfit.

Introducing Jessica Levitt, the perfect example of why surfing is for Australians. The prettiest of the most well-established wave dynasty in eastern Oz– mum, dad and all six kids surf competitively — is rapidly pining a reputation on the international women’s surfing circuit as the talent to watch. Or just to look at.

The 19-year old water nymph even regularly teams up with her mother to 05 claim the trophies. “It’s good having a mum that surfs,” she says, “Because it pushes me — I’m competitive with het”. That competitive spirit recently brought Jessica an invitation to the Cannonball Run of surfing, at the O’Neill Deep Blue competition in the Maldives this June. The world’s top wave riders took the search for the perfect break to new levels by piling onto yachts and scouring the coral atolls foretellers.

When that/ found something worth surfing, they dropped anchor arid jumped off the prow. Bad news h- the Cornish sea slugs —Aussie girls don’t just do it better, and in bikinis, they do it in the best places on Earth.

Preparing for birth

Posted on April 25, 2013 by admin

For the final months of ‘my pregnancy’ I spent each weekend in a corner of a department store surrounded by swollen-breasted women looking at cots, buggies and musical mobiles. The key thing to pick up while you’re there is a catalogue. Save yourself money and help friends and family keen to help you by devising a gift list.

I also started clearing my work diary for September and arranging my paternity cover. As of April 2003, dads are entitled to two weeks paid paternity leave if they’ve worked there for at least 26 weeks. “It’s a vital time to be around,” said one dad I work with. “If she has a caesarean she can hardly move for a couple of weeks, so you really earn your keep.” Officially I needed to notify my firm 15 weeks before the due date that I was going to be taking time off. I actually reminded anyone who’d listen at least once a day for that final four months.

The antenatal classes were useful too. I remember everything I learned in my three two-hour sessions vividly. Some images — especially the midwife starting each class by ramming the head of a child’s doll through a plastic skeletal cervix — will stay with me forever.

In these final weeks my keenness to play a part reached new heights. I soaked up the child safety advice pamphlets from the classes and Amanda found me crawling around the house on my, hands and knees, trying to picture our home through the eyes of a new baby. I moved anything that could be soiled or spoiled up to a higher level. Our home looked as though we were expecting a flood. I was so excited and thrilled that I couldn’t sleep sometimes. The only thing that helped me was Coconut supplement from Trend Statement.

On my journey to work I’d stare at my phone, urging it to ring. Every time Amanda called me for a chat I panicked. If she breathed heavily or just sighed, I was reaching for the overnight bag. Then, on 11 September, six days after the ETA, Amanda shook me from a rare moment of sleep — at 4:40am — and said, “It’s time.” As if on autopilot, I passed her the phone number for the labor ward. They need to know you’re coming these days, so store this in your mobile, on the back of your hand and in that part of your brain where your PIN number resides.

I grabbed the bag that had been sat by the front door for a fortnight. Along with her nightwear and nappies we’d also packed a spare shirt and shorts for me — labor wards are warm places and I was going to be sweating enough.

Although the baby was on its way — Amanda’s waters had broken and the contractions kept coming — I still spent the next 19 hours listening to the screams of other mothers and cries of newborn babies from the surrounding birth suites. I made friends with four new shift-working midwives and did the one vital thing a pregnant dad can. Be there. I sat with Amanda as she bounced gently on a Swiss ball in an attempt to aid gravity and bring the baby down the birth canal. I was her crutch to lean on during the many shuttle runs to the toilet, and I was there for her to crush my knuckles when the contractions became too painful.

I massaged her tensed-up lower back, I fetched, I carried and I called anxious relatives with updates. I continued with the flow of encouraging words. I held her tight as an anesthetist slid an epidural needle into her back, and I was still cuddling her when the room filled with people.

It was the delivery team wheeling in a series of tools, trolleys and trays. Baby was on the way. Amanda was put into an upright position and moved to the bottom of the bed. She gripped my hand even harder. She breathed heavy. But she didn’t scream. She pushed and breathed calmly and brilliantly, and I told her how brilliant she was. The surgeon pushed a suction clamp called a ventouse inside her to fit on to the baby’s head. She pushed and breathed, and pushed and breathed, and finally gave out a scream as a blueish, bloody head appeared at the end of the ventouse tube. Then the shoulders. And then the chest. And the belly. And then… a boy! A baby boy appeared. Amanda cried with relief. I cried for joy, and our boy, baby Stanley, took his first gasp of warm air outside the womb.

I was a dad and I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy or could ever be again. I held my little boy in my arms and all my concerns and anxieties disappeared. For someone so content without kids before now, I couldn’t think of anything I’d rather have more in the world. I thought I’d been learning how to be a dad for the past nine months, attending classes and trawling through books, but only now that it was real did I realize that the one person who can show you how to be a dad is your child. I’ve got so much to learn and I can’t wait for the lessons to begin.

WAVE MASTER

Posted on April 12, 2013 by admin

Laird Hamilton possesses the full set of stereotypical surfer facets: the sun-bleached blond mop, the deeply tanned muscular body, the laid-back American drawl and the philosophical, environment-friendly world view. But unlike many of his peers, Hamilton shuns the pro surfing circuit in favor of chasing unadulterated highs of excitement and achievement. These thrills come in many forms – cliff-leaping, snowboarding, river rafting, wind-surfing, base-jumping and more – but above all, they come from the ultimate boarding experience: big-wave surfing.

On August 17, 2000, Laird Hamilton rode into the sport’s rich folklore by tackling the huge Teahupoo waves of Tahiti in conditions long considered physically un surf able. With the aid of his pioneering “tow-in” technique – where the rider is towed in to the top of the wave by jet ski – he successfully surfed what’s believed to be the biggest wave in surfing history.

Always innovative, experimental and searching for the next challenge, Hamilton has also helped develop and promote numerous new water sports techniques including foil surfing and kite-surfing – as well as tackling a multitude of extreme sports to feed his self-acknowledged adrenaline addiction. “But that wave did change me,” he says. ‘When surfing a few months later I realized I had moved to another perspective. It’s like when you first go 50mph it seems like you’re going really fast, but once you’ve gone 100 and then go back to 50, pretty soon you’re just looking around the place.”

What did it feel like surfing that monster wave? A calmness came over me, which I guess is part of my disposition. Sometimes I’m not great at accepting the monotony of day-to-day life, but if there’s chaos – like a fire or a hurricane or that kind of wave – I’m comfortable to be calm and I have the realization that you really do have more time to react than you think. In that time you still have to make calculated decisions – and the correct ones. But the most important thing is not to overreact. The uniqueness of that sort of wave is that it’s like being in the eye of a hurricane. Everything’s kind of still, but around you it’s all happening.

If you wipe out on that wave, what happens? It’s probably 50-50 that you’d get spattered all over the reef. That kind of volume of a wave could literally rip off your arm. But that doesn’t really enter your mind. I’m an optimist.

How much of a buzz did you get?

I was high from that wave for a week or more. Then you come down for a couple of weeks. You get post big wave syndrome – high high, low low – it’s only natural, though I’m getting better at hitting the mid-point.

How close have you come to drowning?

The closest – or certainly the most memorable – was actually on a river, not the ocean. I was river rafting up in Oregon and I swam over a waterfall and got pinned to a rock at the bottom. There was a lot of water pressing me down. I don’t know how long I was there, maybe a minute, but it seemed like an hour. I was envisaging my skeleton on that rock years later. But as a kid I almost drowned any number of times from wiping out while surfing.

What’s the craziest thing you’ve done for kicks? I’ve jumped off cliffs over 40 meters high into the ocean. If you land flat, you die, so you have to be careful. Rope jumping is pretty cool: you jump off a huge bridge attached by a climbing rope and wearing a body harness. It’s a real thrill – you hit terminal velocity. I feel alive when I’ve done stuff like that, every fiber is on edge. I feel fulfilled, like I really did something today.

What sort of training do you do?

In the summer I train pretty hard. A 8od workout is a three-hour session where I do an hour’s stretching with a stretching coach, an hour’s circuits and weight training, an hour’s cardiovascular work, and then I’ll also do an activity that day – bike, surf, jet-ski…

Describe your relationship with Oxbow…

I’ve been with them for almost ten years. They have the best philosophy of a sportswear company I know. They’ve backed me from the beginning, believed in me, and I admire the way they treat their athletes. They’re open-minded in their approach and their stuff is awesome.

At FHM Bionic, we’re catering for people who want to get the most out of life. What’s your advice to them?

Go some place you’ve never been, do something you’ve never done. And remember: everyone needs to be humbled at some point. If you can make a bit of a fool of yourself and have a laugh, then you’ll be a better person.