“People only see the surfing she produced on finals day, but what they don’t see is the countless hours of work she puts in behind the scenes,” said Spencer Goggin, strength and conditioning coach for the new World Champion Molly Picklum.
Spencer had just made the short trip from Sydney to the Central Coast to join Molly in her homecoming celebrations as she paraded her latest addition to the mantelpiece.
“She is so critical and central to the surf community there. It’s amazing to see the support she has. She brought everyone together, everyone seemed so united in wanting Molly to do well and it was nice for me to meet so many people in Molly’s circle who are pushing her to be the best she can be.”
Spencer, originally from Oxford in the UK, has worked with a number of professional athletes in sports like rugby union and diving. He currently plies his trade at the NSW Institute of Sport and has been working with surfers for over a year now. As well as Molly, his roster also includes Cronulla goofy-foot wonderkid Jarvis Earle.
We hit up Spencer to get the lowdown on Molly’s training program and to better understand what role a bloke from a landlocked city in England is playing in Pickles’ journey to success.
Tell us a bit about what makes surfing different to the other sports you’ve worked in when it comes to programming strength and conditioning?
I’ve worked in a diverse range of sports from Rugby Union to diving and now surfing. Each athlete will solve the problem in front of them in a unique way. That problem is your sport. How they perform their sport, or solve the problem, is based on the individual’s physical attributes. So it’s not just variations from sport to sport, it’s from athlete to athlete. Each person will have their own individual needs in order to perform at the highest level in their sport and it’s about understanding that so you can provide the most beneficial program possible.
What individual needs does Molly have?
When we started working together at the beginning of the season she was just coming off the back of a foot injury, so our sole focus at the time was to rehab that and get her prepared for the first event of the year which was Pipe.
Our biggest point of discussion at the start and throughout the year was based around consistency. We asked her to ensure she was consistent with her training, we tailored the program so that it was easy to get her sessions in and we wanted to make sure she didn’t miss a single one and then we will see what happens.
For me, as it was my first season working with Molly, it was about having two ears, two eyes and one mouth, trying to accumulate as much information as I could.
How important is consistency with training?
It’s super important, it’s what can set you up apart from the rest. Professional surfers have so much going on when they’re on the road that having that bit of routine through training and knowing, understanding how a training session will make them feel, makes the idea of it a lot more appealing as it gives them some structure to their otherwise quite chaotic life.
How does your relationship with Molly work?
While I’m her Strength and Conditioning Coach, I’m part of a network of support staff based here at NSW Institute of Sport alongside those at Surfing Australia in Casuarina. My role is to be a soundboard for her thoughts. Molly know herself better than anyone else. My job is to unpack the thoughts she throws at me and put forward suggestions to combat those and help her. I never directly tell her what to do, I’ll always approach her and say ‘I have this thought’ or ‘what do you think about this?’
Having that level of reflection, deep reflection as a professional athlete is really important. You have to be able to look at how you’ve performed and be able to discuss what you can do better. You don’t even have to be a paid athlete to talk like, you could even be an aspirational amateur but having that conscious level of deep reflection will help you progress.
Also, no one likes being told what to do without having their say. So the programme and our relationship works by what we would call co-design.
What are you trying to achieve with the strength and conditioning?
The best way to get better at surfing is to surf. It’s the same with marathons. The way you getting better at running marathons is by running marathons. However, you don’t go and run marathons during training. It’s the same with surfing. We’re not trying to replicate surfing when doing strength and conditioning training. We’re trying to offset what surfing does. We’re going one layer beneath the surfing and preparing her body for it. We’re getting her ready to do the training (surfing) she needs to become a world champion. It takes hours and hours of practice in the water to get to the level she’s at, so we need to make sure her body can tolerate that level of stress, fatigue, force or whichever variable it may be. We’re aiming to make her more athletic so that she continue to perform her sport for longer at the highest intensity possible.
What does her program look like?
We set her program up so that it stayed similar, if not the same, throughout the year to give her that consistency that I spoke about it. We were doing all the things that everyone knows; strength training, power training, restorative work, all that sort of stuff. However, the strength stuff looked a little bit different to what most would conjure up in their heads.
There were no barbells or heavy dumbbells for the whole year. We adopted a method called Blood Flow Occlusion Training where you would use a set of cuffs to restrict blood flow to a limb while performing low-load exercises. This creates that same strength stimulus without using heavy weights. It’s perfect for someone like Molly on the road, she can do her session there and then wherever she is and it can be done quickly.
Towards the back half of the year, we really focused on what’s called ‘primers’ these are short, high-intensity, low volume exercises or movements which aim to fire up someone’s nervous system an readies them to go out and perform. This is something we utilised the day before the final five in Fiji. That short, high intensity work through a series of jumps, medicine ball work and other movements put her in the best frame of mind to go and perform.
What sets Molly apart from other athletes you’ve worked with?
What sets Molly apart is the pure clarity she had on what she wanted from this year. She wanted to surf well and to enjoy that experience. The second thing that sets her apart is her consistency and ability to reflect. She always showed up for herself and got the work done, it didn’t matter that she’d just had a 24 hour travel day, she would get it done and get it done well.
She would also do all the little things, like tell me how long she was in the water for, give me feedback on how hard a session was. It’s all these little pieces of data which we can gather that allowed us to adapt the program and fit all the little pieces of the puzzle together to allow her to surf to the best of her ability.
Will you two continue working together next season?
Yes – We’ve now got a whole season’s worth of data we can work with. There’s a massive opportunity for the CT surfers in the next seven months with the extended time they’ve got off. It will be very telling who has done the work in that time and who has purely treated it like a holiday. We’ll sit down soon and bring some strategy to the next seven months for Molly.
