Training facets of flying in the off-season

Winter cross training for your mind and body.

Author: Kiri Ellis

My goals for the last 2 Aussie flying seasons have been focused on chasing distance. My experiences preparing for these seasons during the Aussie winter has helped me to understand that my use of the off-season can be just as important for improving my flying as the actual flying season itself. I thought I would share this on the blog, in case the insight helps people to think outside the box about how to use the off-season (if you aren’t lucky enough to fly overseas every year) and noting that it touches on Brian's material from the Comp Skills Matrix.

During the Aussie summers of both 2013-14 and 2014-15 I have taken December through February off work to go flying. My flying stats are below and I have included these to illustrate the difference in my performance over the 2 seasons.

	2013-14	2014-15
Total kms:	2200km	5040km
Number of flights:	25	31
Hours flown:	102	169
Average km/flight:	88km	162km
Flights over 300km:	0	2
200-300km:	2	9
100-200km:	7	9
Best flight:	297km	332km

The ‘improvement’ in my stats from one season to the next is not due to any training in my piloting skills in the 10 months in between. In fact, I only flew 3 times in that period, just to make sure I remembered how. The difference, I believe (and allowing for the fact that it is a weather dependent sport, and no two seasons are ever the same), was mostly due to the work that I put in training my mental game and my fitness in the off-season.

My preparation for the two summers could not have been more different. In the lead up to the summer of 2013-14, the only preparation I undertook was to schedule my leave from work and call my flying friends to fire everyone up and make plans for a big summer of flying. And at the end of that season, I was pretty happy with how I went – I had some truly memorable flights with my mates and a fun comp season.

But my summer made me realise there were a few chinks in my armour. The most glaringly obvious was my lack of consistency. I had 10 flights where I got a start, but didn’t convert 50-100km into a big flight. I noticed that consecutive days in the harness took me a day or so to recover from and I was never as sharp on the second day. I also found I was exhausted by the end of each comp that I flew. Flying is mentally taxing and physically demanding. Even though I wasn’t terribly out of shape in the 2013-14 season, I wasn’t as tough or fit as I wanted to be to perform and fly at a consistently high level in harsh, pressure filled environments.

To prepare for flying the summer of 2014-15, I decided I would try to address the weaknesses I perceived in my mental toughness and my fitness, to see if I could improve my performance as a pilot.

I have a friend who works at the Australian Institute of Sport, who provided me with a lot of articles on various approaches to training these skill sets. I was mostly interested in how to develop the mental aspects of my flying, because that wasn’t something I had previously tried seriously to do. From my research, I realised that I could integrate training my mental game into my conditioning sessions. This was (relatively) time efficient, sustainable and seemed suitable given the close links between the mental and physical aspects of flying.

Since then, a typical week of training for me involves about 10 sessions (including recovery sessions) and I have had a lot of help from the trainers at my gym to develop a program, which incorporates weights, gymnastics, mobility and cardio. (I have also had to overhaul my diet and sleep patterns to sustain it, but that’s another story.) During the 3 month flying season, I dropped this back to a level that I could sustain while most days flying – mostly about 5-6 sessions a week.

So how do I integrate training my mental game into these sessions? The program deliberately practices every day what I want to be able to demand from myself in my flying. For example, I want to be able to turn up and fly, day after day after day, so I train day in and day out, even when I really don’t feel like it; I want to perform at a consistently high level in my flying, so I demand this of myself in my training; I want to be constantly pushing myself to achieve more in my flying, so I set and reset goals as I achieve them in my training; I want to be able to handle uncomfortable conditions, so I train even when the weather is unpleasant; and so on. The intention is to make my days of training feel very much like my days of flying.

My stats suggest that the work that I put in last year did improve my performance as a pilot over the summer of 2014-15. On reflection, almost everything about the season was easier for me – I was more consistent and recovered better, more confident that my mind and body would hold up, less intimidated by conditions and more aggressive in my lines over remote terrain, as well as fresher, sharper and more relaxed in the mental aspects of my flying and so on.

This approach to training for flying is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. I happen to have a lifestyle (no kids, plus a flexible job and an understanding partner) that allows me to dedicate myself to this kind of program. It does require quite a bit of self-discipline, however I enjoy it and I love my mates that I train with at my gym, so it doesn’t feel like a chore. I also realise that this approach will not be so useful for those lucky pilots who have a naturally higher level of fitness or greater degree of mental toughness and don’t need to train these things.

However, I hope the information proves useful to someone and I'd be interested to hear how other people approach their skill development in the off-season...

Author: Kari Ellis