EXCERPT from SURFING MAGAZINE.COM             Read the full article by clicking here

Since his nearly career ending injury in 2005, Mick Fanning has spent massive amounts of time with 24-year C.H.E.K. (Corrective Holistic Exercise Kinisiology) training veteran Jan Carton, building himself into the ultimate surfing machine. SURFING caught up with Mrs. Carton in Queensland just before the Quiksilver Pro to find out more about the program.

SURFING MAGAZINE: HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT DEVELOPING SURF-SPECIFIC EXERCISES?

JAN CARTON: The way we do that is to break down what’s called the primal patterns for the sport. So, the primal patterns of surfing would be the lunge pattern, the twist pattern, a pull pattern for paddling and things like that – we’ll break down those primal patterns for the sport. And then basically we’ll work on exercises that mimic the movement patterns that they have to do out on the water. With someone like Mick going through rehab, he did a lot of postural alignment work, a lot of stability work, then on to a heavy strength phase and movement-specifics. So when we say we work on movement patterns, they actually have to build all those other steps first – but always keeping in mind, with the surfers, their primal patterns for surfing.

SO, YOU SORT OF BUILD ONE LEVEL UPON THE NEXT, WHILE MAINTAINING THE PREVIOUS LEVEL?

Yeah, it’s sort of like building a building. You actually need to build those steps to get to the level of high-performance at the end of it. So a lot of people will see a lot of fancy exercises and things – they might even see Mick doing those things in photos – but it takes a lot of building the body to get to that level.

HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO GET TO THAT LEVEL OF PERFORMANCE?

You’re looking at years to build that sort of stuff. Mick goes to another level each year. If you’re trying build the body to that level, you must have good nutrition and good health to support the nervous and muscular systems while you’re building that.

WHAT’S A TYPICAL VISITATION LIKE?

We’ll cover all aspects. We might sit down and see how he’s feeling, check the physiological load of the body and then he’ll always do a stretch warm-up. Whatever his conditioning set is will depend on what time of the year. So, from here on it’s all maintenance work for Mick, so he’ll have a maintenance program that will be very specific to each event he goes to. So, his training now for Snapper will be quite different than when he’s at Bells, and his preparation changes again slightly when he goes to Teahupo’o.

HOW WOULD TRAINING DIFFER BETWEEN SNAPPER AND TEAHUPO’O?

For Snapper, we’ll do a lot of reactive work. A lot of speed and highly rotational work, and really quick sort of work. And then when he goes to, say, Teahupo’o, and he’s getting the big barrels, he’ll revert back to a bit more strength, strength with some amplitude work against the massive bulk of waves that can hit them – they’ve got to be able to stabilize that massive load. And because his body is so well-conditioned now, it’s quite easy to diversify his training just a little bit, just to be specific for whatever venue he’s competing at.

DO YOU ALSO WORK WITH THE MENTAL ASPECTS OF COMPETING?

Definitely, because they can do all the exercises in the world, but if they mentally have issues or they haven’t learned to deal with themselves, and the life of competing, and the stresses that go with it and whatever – then they’ll never put it together. So we very much work heavily on that with any of the surfers that we work with.

SINCE MICK’S PROGRAM HAS BEEN SO PUBLICLY SUCCESSFUL, HAVE YOU HAD A LOT MORE PRO SURFERS COME TO YOU?

Yeah, very heavily inundated with surfers now. [Laughs]

Read more and visit the Surfing Magazine.com website by clicking here