Antonio Bellu
When you start caving you realise you have muscles that go beyond your wildest anatomical imagination. Crawling, abseiling, climbing, swimming, moving through tight spots, using your arms and legs to hold your body in impossible positions, keeping your balance on slippery and weird shaped rocks: you don’t need to be an athlete, but everything requires constant attention. You’ll be in there for hours, in 99% humidity, in unchanging temperatures. You will be sweating, and then you will get cold: you need to keep moving, slowly but steadily.
As a rookie caver the strain on your body after a few days is difficult to sustain.
Last year we asked Antonio, a caver of Gruppo Grotte Nuorese, an expert in Chinese medicine, a physiotherapist and a fitness coach, to provide some recovery support after the end of the extended cave expedition, similarly to how we provide rehabilitation after a space mission.
This year we asked Antonio to prepare a fitness preparation programme for our cavenauts. The challenge was to design a programme that can be added to an existing fitness programme and conducted at any time during the day, lating only 15 minutes twice a day, without relying on a gym or any machinery.
We decided to share the programme with you. With the help of Sirio, Antonio also prepare a video that goes with the programme.
Enjoy, and get fit for caving!
Loredana Bessone
Discussion: no comments