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Start Your Kiting Day Right: 🏄‍♂️🌊🪁 My Personal Breakfast Recipe for Sustained Energy!

A common question I get asked is, “What do you eat for breakfast on days when you’re kiting?”

Well, in line with my principle of embracing a diverse diet (to ensure I get as full a spectrum of nutrients as possible), I like to keep things interesting and switch up my meals. However, I do have a few favourites that I regularly return to, and today, I’m excited to share one with you.

kiting nutrition

Why do I love this recipe? It’s not just quick to whip up. It’s also light and easy to digest, packs a punch with polyphenols (your gut will thank you!), and it’s kind to your blood sugar levels. This means no mid-morning crashes, just sustained, clean energy and minimal hunger all the way to lunch.

The Morning Berry Bowl

Ingredients:

  • 45 grams of pearl barley (soaked overnight in 150 ml of unsweetened hazelnut milk)
  • 2 tbsp of chia seeds (also soaked overnight with the barley)
  • 300g of organic raspberries (frozen works great), yes that’s a lot of berries!
  • 3 organic cherries
  • A handful of hazelnuts
  • A handful of pistachio nuts
  • A handful of ground flax or linseed
  • 2 Brazil nuts
  • 1 medium greenish banana
  • 2 tsp of organic, flavourless whey protein
  • 100ml of organic, flavourless kefir
  • 1 tsp of organic pomegranate powder
  • 1 tsp of organic sunflower lecithin

Method:

Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and devour. If you’re using frozen berries, give it a quick blend for that creamy, ice-cream-like texture. On chilly mornings, I pair it with a warm cup of tea to balance the temperature.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this recipe. And if you’re up for it, why not share your own breakfast favourite? Let’s inspire each other with delicious, healthy starts to our day which can keep us on the water longer!

Sam.

😎🤙

P.S. If you enjoy these little glimpses into my kitchen, let me know! I’m considering making this a regular share.

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Finding Your Balance in Kitesurfing: The Unsung Hero

Balance in kiting plays a crucial yet often overlooked role. Whether it’s boosting on a twin-tip or slashing a wave strapless, the ability to correctly balance the body is absolutely crucial to our performance and is often something most people ignore in their training, mainly as they have no idea how to improve it.

The Science of Balance:

Balance is about the intricate coordination of muscle strength and joint alignment, involving the entire body. However, there is one part of the body which is more important than all others when it comes to balance…

the foot. 

As the base of our entire body, it forms the foundation upon which all our balance relies. If we go even deeper, then there is one part of the foot which is generally more important still…

The Role of Big Toe in Athletic Performance

Recent research highlighted by ForeverFitScience emphasises the big toe’s strength and flexibility in enhancing athletic performance. It suggests that training the big toe is an underutilised method for performance enhancement.

Toe Muscular Strength in Athletes

A study on PubMed involving seventeen collegiate American-football players found significant correlations between toe-pushing force and the ability to change direction, indicating the big toe’s critical role in agility.

The Big Toe – A Pillar of Stability:

The big toe is foundational to our body’s equilibrium, especially in precision-required kiting.

The problem is that most people’s big toes are terminally weak.

Try this simple experiment…

Stand on your tip-toes and hold it for about 10 seconds.

Did your weight fall outwards onto your little toes?

If so, you likely have weak big toes as the body has been using your little toes for so long, they are now stronger than your big toe and so favoured when it comes to balance. 

This is a classic sign of a weak big toe. 

Why does this happen?

This comes down mainly to one thing… modern footwear. (and I’m really sad to say, flip-flops are perhaps the worst offenders!)

Modern shoes are designed to look good. To achieve this, they taper towards the toe. What this does is push the big toe outwards away from the midline of the body towards the little toes.

This narrows the spread of the toes, means the foot is no longer as wide as it should be and takes away that critical point of balance from what should be the most central part of the foot.

As a result, when you walk in shoes, the foot naturally collapses inwards (pronates) towards the midline of the body.

As a result of this pronation the knee naturally has to cave as the foot rolls (pronates) in due to the bad positioning of the big toe.

Now the brain detects a knee cave… which is an issue as it knows that over time this will lead to problems as cartilage grinds on cartilage and tendons become overworked, so it needs to come up with a solution.

So how can the body straighten the knee despite the fact that the foot is rolling inwards and causing knee cave?

Simple, it shifts the weight in your foot towards the outside of your feet, straightening the knee as a result. 

However, this now means the big toe is floating in mid-air when you walk and so not being used, which leads to it getting weaker and weaker.

The Impact of Weak Big Toes:

A weak big toe doesn’t just affect your foot; it has a cascading effect on the rest of your body. When the big toe fails to function properly, it disrupts the natural alignment and balance, leading to compensatory movements. This misalignment often results in knee, hip, and lower back pain and even problems much higher up…I’ve cured a lot of people’s shoulder pain by working on their big toes!

But more importantly, it means you are missing a lot of performance potential on the water and are much more likely to get injured and suffer aches and pains (especially knee, hip and lower back pain) as a result.

Strengthening for Balance:

To enhance the big toe’s strength, consider these practical exercises:

  • Toe Curls: Sit with your feet flat on the floor. Curl your toes as if you’re trying to grab a pencil with them. Hold for 5 seconds, then release. Repeat 10 times.
  • Marble Pickups: Place 20 marbles on the floor. Using only your toes, pick up one marble at a time and move it into a bowl. Do this until all marbles are moved.
  • Barefoot Balance Exercises: Stand barefoot on one foot. Try to maintain balance for at least 30 seconds, then switch feet. As you improve, try closing your eyes to challenge your balance further.

By incorporating these exercises into your routine, you can work towards strengthening your big toes. This can lead to improved balance and performance next time you’re out.

At the same time you have to ensure you are walking correctly. So when you walk from now on, I want you to concentrate on planting the whole foot evenly so the weight is distributed across the entire sole of the foot.

Now we all know that lower body exercises such as squats, lunges, and plyometrics are crucial for balance but only if you do them right. 

This starts with a firmly, evenly planted big toe… a lot of people, when they really rack the weight up or reach exhaustion, will naturally rock outwards on their feet to compensate… avoid doing this. 

Focus on perfect foot form and you’re one step closer to better balance and are a lot less likely to get injured to boot.

Understanding and improving the big toe’s strength is not just a minor aspect of training; it’s a revolution in how we approach our time on the water. This small but mighty part of our body holds the key to enhanced athletic performance and a more balanced lifestyle.

Sam.

😎🤙

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Why Getting in Shape is Like Learning to Kitesurf

Imagine if you turned up to your first ever kitesurfing lesson and the instructor handed you the kite, pointed at the water and told you to knock yourself out.

I doubt you’d be that impressed.

But that’s exactly what we do in the health and fitness industry all the time.

You rock up at the gym, have an hour induction and are left to it.

You sign up to a weight loss program, are given a few recipes and are told to get on with it.

No wonder so many people fail.

Exercise and weight loss are SKILLS, and they’re very complex skills. Let’s have a look at just some of the sub skills you have to learn:
* How to exercise correctly so you wont get injured.
* How often you can exercise and how much recovery you need.
* What you should be eating, how much and when.
* How to shop for food effectively.
* Strategies for dealing with social events.
* How to cook

And that’s just the start…there are literally thousands of sub skills you need to learn and like any complex skill they take a long time to master.

As a result there will be learning experiences (ie. failures) along the way, that means at times you will get off course, you will mess up…and you know what?

That’s OK!

Because each failure teaches you something and means you are learning the skill more completely.

True mastery in any skill isn’t something you’re born with, it’s something you learn.

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The Worst Kitesurfing Holiday Of My Life





“Absolutely awful experience, I want my money back.”

My eyes widened in surprise, my jaw dropped almost to the floor.

And this after a week of kitesurfing where we had been at the beach for between 6 and 9 hours a day, every day. In my mind it had been as good a week as you could possibly expect to have and I was certain everyone would have loved it.

I chatted with some of the instructors and all of them told me the same story.

Yes the wind had been amazing, yes, everyone had progressed a tonne, except for this person (who shall remain nameless, lets. call them X).

Why? I asked.

Because they’d spent most of the time in the bar!

WHAT? I said…

Yeah, they continued, for the first 2 days X was loving it, was out every minute, flying up and down and improving rapidly, then day 3 came and they had to wake X up to get them to the beach.

When they got there X had to go and have some breakfast and a few coffees and then came back and set up the kite very slowly, and finally got on the water about 4 hours after arriving at the beach. After about 30 mins X came back off the water, had a sleep and then went and had a few beers.

This set the tone for the entire week.

This very incident forced me to make a change in the way we operated. You see I was actually quite sympathetic to X’s plight. I realised that due to the fact that we could be at the beach kitesurfing for up to 8 hours a day, many people just weren’t in good enough physical shape to actually last for an entire week.

They’d love it for the first few days and then it would all catch up them and they’d end up treading water for the rest of the week, not improving and not really enjoying it, which wasn’t what they or I wanted.

So we started preparing people before they came. I would work with them personally to build a program they could do which would get them in great shape, burn through those extra kilos and ultimately give them a LOT more energy and stamina when they actually get on holiday with us so they could kitesurf at 100% for the entire week.

I’ve taken that program, refined it, perfected it and right now you can get it for FREE, just click the button below to download it…

>> DOWNLOAD THE FREE PROGRAM >>

Sam.

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Owner of Tantrum & Creator of The NTX System


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? My Hopeless Day Of Surfing With No Waves ?

What the hell were we doing? 

Here I was, lying on my kite board, on a totally flat ocean, freezing my ass off, attempting to surf.

And it was the best morning I’d spent for months!

There was absolutely no chance of me catching a wave but it was a windless, crystal clear day on one of the most beautiful beaches in the world and I was chatting to a mate.

I realised life doesn’t get much better than this.

One of the things we were talking about was how we had this all this on our door step, yet we barely if ever did it.

It had taken 2 months of lockdown for us to actually get off our ass and go “surfing,” or as it’s more commonly known sitting on a board, on an endless ocean, chatting shit whilst shivering our balls off, (well I was, he had a bit more “insulation” than I did!).

We got to talking about why this was?

We realised that as we’d got older our priorities had subtly shifted, we both had good jobs which we enjoyed but which also took up a lot of our time.

In my friends case he’d started sleeping less and less and as a result was working out less and less and even when he had the time he simply had less energy to do the things he really wanted to do.

So the thought of getting up at the crack of dawn to go surfing wasn’t something he’d ever really considered.

Unfortunately it’s something I see again and again. As people get older they make less and less time for the things they love. This happens naturally enough at first, job, kids, life just get in the way.

By the time they know it they’re 40, a bit chubbier, a bit more out of shape, and while they LOVE the idea of heading out and indulging their passions…

They just can’t seem to find the motivation, the time or the energy to do so…beside they’d better get in shape first, after all, they don’t want to get injured.

The tragic thing, which we we discovered that waveless day…

These sports, these things you love, once you do start doing them again they provide their own intrinsic motivation.

They become the reason to get fit, to lose those pounds, to feel awesome and perform better.

Sam.