For those of you who haven’t removed my email address from your spam list and hence did not receive my email about Dara here’s a repeat of some of her information as well as a good discussion on it:
– She’s 41 years old - a generation older than most of her competitors. She broke her first of 3 world records in 1982 and was medaling in her first Olympics in 1984…before many of her competitors this year were even born.
–She’s a mother - and still has maybe the most impressive abs I’ve ever seen on a women.
–She will go to the Beijing Olympics as the oldest ever member of the U.S. swim team.
–She’s medaled in four Olympic competitions… and Beijing will be the fifth because she’s favored to at least medal, and possibly win the 50-meter freestyle.
–She owns nine Olympic medals
–Last year in Germany, she swam the 50-meter freestyle in 23.82 seconds, breaking the American record and making her one of only five women to swim it faster than 24 seconds!
–She’s considered to have the purest most efficient swimming stroke… of any woman in the world.
–Shes absolutely, positively, incredibly, amazingly fit!…
And this is what I’d like to talk about…
You might be surprised by some of the successful strategies she’s now using in her training for elite competition (now that she’s mature)!!
Well, "Torres’s innovations for keeping her body in top shape, (as she advances deeper into middle age), are almost entirely out of the pool," states Elizabeth Weil of the New York Times. In addition to the two hours per day of massage and "resistance stretching" with two separate trainers, the weekly chiropractic visits and a host of other nutritionists and chefs ensuring that she’s performing at her absolute best, she performs weight training 60 to 90 minutes, four days per week, with a personal trainer. The focus of that training is on balanced, dynamic lifting movements that stimulate the nervous system. Her trainer, Andy O’brien explains, “the idea is not to isolate muscle groups but to get muscles contracting together in the right sequences.” (sound familiar?… like Athlon Elite’s motto of "Train Movements, Not Muscles" ??)
Athletes like Torres are starting to bring into mainstream attention the fact that "training smarter, not harder" is a better recipe for success. Whether you want to lose 12 pounds of bodyfat like Craig Stewart demonstrated here last week or win the Olympics in Beijing, a short focused workout plan for 3-4 days per week with built in recovery strategies is far better than killing yourself in the gym (or pool in Torres’s case) twice per day everyday. It’s about getting the body’s systems to work together to achieve optimum adaptations, and then creating a strategy to achieve optimum recovery. If you haven’t experienced how we do this at Athlon Elite get a free training consultation and sample workout today to see if you’re exercise program is smart or just hard. (click here)
More on Dara…
After her personal training sessions and a quick recovery meal (hopefully someday to include Fluid Recovery), she heads off to a two-hour long stretching and body working session where two separate "stretching trainers" work on her body. Torres puts as much time - and money - into her recovery as she does her training (and in fact she doesn’t separate the two… her recovery is her training). This "recovery concept" is key and starts with nutrition. This is something that we at Athlon Elite have subscribed to from the beginning. Often, the reason an athlete doesn’t perform well is not because they didn’t train enough… but because they trained too much and didn’t recover. The nutrition part starts immediately in the 30 minutes after your workout. The body is craving sugar with the right amount of protein to kick-start the recovery process. Get it right… and you’ll perform at 100% the next day. Get it wrong… and well you know what it’s like to have a bad day!
Recovery also includes sound stretching, massage, days-off of training