PREPARATION
The pre-season slalom training in the style of ‘race simulation’ is still quite a recent development in the windsurfing world. As a brainchild of Mark Hosegood and the result of a 2-year developmental phase – “Pro X Training” was launched in 2013 in Tenerife. Talking to Mark about this he said that because of his background as a PWA judge he felt like he had a lot of insights into what was missing and how he could help to improve training methods. With a passion for sports science and of course windsurfing and an inspiration stemming from other professional sports and comparing this to what he was seeing as the top of the game of professional windsurfing training, he decided to become a qualified personal physical trainer before being able to offer a more complete training program to professional sailors. With the support and co-operation of Andrea Cucchi (founder and general manager of Point7) and a mutual vision of team training, the program was launched and immediately showed great results; Alberto Menegati and Matteo Iachino are perhaps the most shining examples of those results.
Mark Hosegood: “Looking back I can see that what started as a project to push some of the younger guys to their highest potential has effectively ended up revolutionising training within professional slalom windsurfing as a whole and perhaps also the general attitude amongst sailors within the sport. But whatever the case, I’m happy to be part of these developments and I will keep pushing at the forefront of what I see as training ‘technology’ in windsurfing.”