Introduction
Wanting to improve your surfing performance, health and general wellbeing?The SSF are stoked to have teamed up with Ash Boddy of Boddy Language an Edinburgh based CHEK practitioner who has compiled the ‘Weekend Surf Warrior’ programme www.weekendsurfwarrior.com.Check the Weekend Surf Warriors Blog packed with professional advice on all aspects of surfer wellbeing from general health, diet, through to detailed ways of tackling common surf injuries and specialist surf conditioning exercises to maximise water potential.Below are links to a few of the blog posts and specialists programmes as well as an Interview with the programme creator Ash Boddy himself.
What do you want to achieve?
WSW Blog: Important Fitness Questions
WSW Blog: Demise of gym chain
WSW Blog: Muscles & Reps
WSW Blog: Horsestance Exercise
WSW Blog: The Bleeding Obvious
WSW Blog Interview: Surf Pro Seb Smart
Tackling Common Surf Injuries
WSW Blog: Disc Injury Part One
WSW Blog: Disc Injury Part 2
WSW Blog: Tight Hamstrings
WSW Blog: Pelvic Pain
You are what you eat!
WSW Blog: Food stress
WSW Blog: Top 10 Paleo Resources
WSW Blog: Benefits of Coconuts
Improving Surf Performance
Revive your duck dive
Surf Conditioning Programmes
WSW Free Download Programme
Weekend Warrior Beginners
Weekend Warrior Intermediate
Weekend Surf Warrior - The Complete Package
Bikini Body Package
Surf Shoulders Made Simple
WSW Sticky Hips
ASH BODDY INTERVIEW
Tell us a bit about yourself. Why Scotland?
I am an aussie surfer, living in Edinburgh. I met my wife Rachel (Scottish) in my last job, which was working for a humanitarian mine clearance charity, The HALO Trust.
Prior to that I was an aussie Infantry Officer, retired as a Captain having served as the youngest Sector Commander in United Nations history, during the Military Observer mission in now South Sudan. My time in Sudan gave me a chance to network my butt off with other agencies, and gaining a taste for adventure (and a fear of endless paperwork) I left Australia to keep my hands dirty. I was a competitive aussie swimmer, and have been in and out of the water since I was a grommie. I grew up in the bush though, and only learned to stand up surf when I was 15. I only really took to surfing in my early twenties when I took a posting to Brisbane, so was dead centre between the Sunny and the Gold Coasts. Once I started though, I would regularly drive half a day to get to a beach with waves on it!
Lots of international work meant that I couldn’t surf (not much swell on the Nile, or safe freedom of movement in the mined areas of Angola or Cambodia), but now that I am in Scotland I am picking it back up again.
I have always been training. Whether it was as a young swimmer, as a soldier, training soldiers, doing fitness training with fat African military observers, training deminers, and now training housewives, rugby players, executives, golfers, yogis and now surfers.
I rerolled as a Personal Trainer for the professional qualifications, and then as a CHEK Practitioner (Corrective High-performance Exercise Kinesiology) as it is a more grown up way of viewing how the body fits together. I am a Golf Performance Specialist, but golf bores me. There are many aspects to professional, performance golf conditioning that easily apply to surfing. Golfers can learn a lot from surfing, and surfers from Golf!
Why surfers?
Surfing and the water is my thing. I find it challenging to empathise with other sports, who are clearly passionate, but that passion isn’t always shared. I have the surfing bug, and that shows in everything I do.
Why are you passionate about helping people?
I am not passionate about helping everyone, and in fact I am really fussy about who I take on as a client. If I am going to spend that much time with you, and I am not excited about seeing your name in my diary, then that’s a problem. Not just for me, but for the client too. They don’t get my best work and is a lesson I have learned the hard way.
The people I work personally with need to click with me, need to be willing to do it for themselves, and I need to be able to help them. That’s pretty fussy criteria for my industry, but it means that I will fight for my clients.
My surfing products are designed for the general surfing population, to solve very common surfing issues, with very specific surfing movements, and without me being there. Because the thing is you don’t need to work one-to-one with me the get the benefit of my experience, as there are common themes that emerge all the time, that have easy solutions.
What’s the most important aspect of training?
There is a four step formula to successful training in any sport, break the formula, break the athlete:
1. Restore flexibility, posture. You need a solid platform to build on, or you will just strengthen yourself into your dysfunction. Most commonly overlooked, or applied a one-size-fits-all approach to.
2. Get stable. Once you have restored joint mechanics, you need to teach your muscle memory how to behave in a way that you want. This doesn’t mean stiffening, often just resequencing movement.
3. Strength. Once you have adequate flexibility and stability, you need to get strong in the movement patterns you desire. For surfers they are twisting, bending, squatting, lunging, pushing & pulling.
4. Power. Only once you have a strong foundation in all three steps should you entertain power training. Surfing is a power sport for the lower body and trunk, and a strength endurance sport for the upper body. Power training IS a necessary step if you want your body to have speed, power and flow.
What’s the most common myth you hear in regards to health?
Calories in v calories out. It’s not that is has no bearing, it’s just way off the mark and leads to people either starving themselves, or beating themselves to death with exercise. You can’t out exercise sh*t food, and the resulting physical, chemical and hormonal sh*tfight it creates.
Five things you get stoked on?
- Uncrowded, glassy rights.
- The Pass in Byron Bay, my new favourite break. I could live there!
- The smell of fresh wax.
- Ink - not all ink, but mostly I think it tells a real story about people. Especially if it’s crap!
- Paddling out for one more.
Five things you don’t like
- Lefts. My backhand sucks.
- Exercise for exercise sake.
- Crunching off the floor and planking. Stop planking!
- Blown out choppy days.
- Ding repair.
And finally, what’s the easiest way for one of the federation members to get in touch?
Send me an email at [email protected], check out my website at www.weekendsurfwarrior.com, or pick up the phone. Always happy to give free advice, and to point anyone who wants help in the right direction.