How To Push Your Limits – as well as your depth

For those of us that are fortunate enough to have a workout space at home, the current lockdown situation has been a good opportunity to have a close look at our workout routines and make a few edits to them that the hectic nature of everyday life prohibits.

I’ve mentioned in past posts about how much freediving has influenced my training mentality but I thought I’d elaborate on this a bit with regard to some recent notes that I’ve made on moving forward with my training.

Training Goals for 2020

Reach the bottom of the blue hole in Dahab.

Switching Training Mentalities

The age old mind set of train hard – see results has often been misconstrued for years to mean ‘push yourself until you break and then you’ve done a good job’. This has largely been enforced by popular media and more recently social media, where it seems as if the top level athletes wake up at ungodly times in the morning, train for 21 hours before getting 3 hours of sleep and doing it all over again. No athlete, whether they be a marathon runner or a bodybuilder has ever trained in this way, despite what the Rocky franchise might have you believe!

Applying for The British Stunt Register

The application process for The British Stunt Register in 2018 is what I’ve come to consider as the 7th discipline needed to join this exclusive group of performers. The reason for this is that I think I underwent more stress during the application process than training for any of the disciplines.

6th Discipline – Trampolining

For my last discipline, I saved the skill that I knew would be easiest for me to pass, this way I wouldn’t get stuck on a discipline that I couldn’t finish and miss the deadline.

5th Discipline – High Diving

After much deliberation, experimentation and consternation I eventually settled on choosing high diving over rock climbing for my fifth discipline. Luckily, Edinburgh’s Royal Commonwealth Pool has a fantastic set of diving boards and a great club for adults to train at.

4th Discipline – Gymnastics

Much like swimming, gymnastics was another qualification that I took one look at and went ‘yeah I can probably do that’, and unlike swimming; it was actually true… Mostly.

3rd Discipline – Scuba Diving with PADI

As I mentioned in my last post, taking the swimming test as my first discipline turned out to be a great idea, because every subsequent test seemed easy by comparison. The scuba diving qualification required to be on the British Stunt Register was no exception!

2nd Discipline – Swimming

When I first contacted Equity about joining the stunt register, I was pretty sure I had swimming in the bag already. I made the common mistake of looking at the list of disciplines and assuming that I could walk into a pool or gym and throw most of the moves to get a pass.

I found out pretty quickly that this wasn’t the case.

3 Years Later – A Stunt Training Odyssey

On July 21st 2018 I was sat in a huge boardroom in Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, golden chandeliers hanging from the ceiling above the mahogany furniture and fixtures, it was like a scene from a Ron Burgundy fever dream. Two other stunt trainees and myself were sat at the massive, room length table, opposite 8 of the most well respected stunt coordinators and performers on the British Stunt Register; and that’s when Roy Taylor delivered the line that I’d been waiting almost three years to hear:

“Congratulations for getting on the British Stunt Register”

It took just under three years from me getting back from China to getting accepted onto the British Stunt Register. In this post I’m going to explain the process that led me to start training for, what at one point, felt like a seemingly impossible task. I’m then going to dedicate five separate posts going in depth into each of the disciplines (excluding martial arts, which I’ll cover here) and what my training regimes consisted of that eventually resulted in passing the five different tests.