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Learning from world class athletes across the globe



In NCEA PE 1.2 (shoot hoops) the students have to learn about the short and long term physiological responses to exercise.  In class discussion one morning we were talking about some of the long term changes and we started to talk about sport specific changes in your body.  I mentioned how some big wave surfers train by expanding lung capacity, and do it to an extreme level so they have to have resuscitation gear by the side of the training pool and could easily lead to someone being in a sticky
situation.  The boys were fascinated by this, mainly because it involved the potential of someone being seriously close to death!!  I decided to run with it and put some clips up on the board of big wave surfing and other sports where you had to adapt your body through training to improve performance and safety.  The clip below came up showing +Andrew Cotton on his 2012 Billabong XXL nomination in Ireland, the boys were astounded and had never seen a wave that big.  At the end of the clip most of the boys thought he was actually dead (?!) so I suggested that we contacted him on twitter to find out if a) he was still alive and b) what type of training does he do to allow his body to take such punishment!



Andrew was happy to answer any of our questions, we used a collaborative google document to put together the questions and when the boys had worked out what they wanted to ask him I shared the document with him and he sent back the responses via his phone on the beach in Croyde, Devon, his personal trainer @bayfitness joined him at the start and attempted a bit of the local lingo!


The boys were thrilled to see Andrew answering the questions and his comments sparked more conversations about the responses to exercise.  It was an interesting learning task and the boys were captivated by the responses - they decided to thank Andrew in the video below.



*school haka to follow - blogger has some video upload issues at the moment!*

I'd like to thank Andrew again for his time and the effort he put into making a video to answer our questions - all the best for you big wave surfing career.  Here are the links to Andrews sites;

http://andrewcottonsurfer.blogspot.com/
https://twitter.com/andrew_cotton
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