Formula One or single seat motorsports is quite unique in a way that you do have to work everything. You need to be cardiovascularly fit because a race will take its toll in a similar way to, let's say, a half marathon in terms of cardiovascular demands, the calorie demand, the energy demand. You then need the strength component as well.
SPEAKER_01:In today's episode, we enter the fast lane of physiotherapy and performance in the world of Formula One. We're joined by Bradley Skanes, who is a specialist musculoskeletal physiotherapist and performance coach working in Formula One with two times world champion Max Verstappen. He also consults to the British gymnastics team and works in private practice in his hometown of Chelmsford, Essex in the UK. Today, we discuss what his role entails, including juggling a busy and ever-changing competition schedule and specific consider So, Brad, welcome to the podcast. This is the first time we've got you on, so thank you for your time and welcome. Thank you for having me. Good to
SPEAKER_02:come
SPEAKER_01:and chat. Brilliant. So we've got a small amount of time to cover an awful lot of information. And as we said, before we start recording, I've got to be careful not to get carried away with questions I'm going to ask as well. But do you want to just briefly introduce your role to the listeners?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So my current role is as a physio and performance coach in Formula One. And I do a little bit of private work around that face-to-face and online as well. Prior to that, I've worked in sport for 10 years. I've worked in the NHS. I've worked in private practice and done the round as a MSK physio.
SPEAKER_01:Wonderful. So we're going to focus, I think a lot of the listeners are going to want to know about your role in Formula One, reaching those dizzy heights and potentially might come out of this, the not so great parts of it, but we're going to kickstart it with this sort of the strength and conditioning side of Formula One and how you manage that across what is an incredibly busy and arduous season for the drivers. What does that look like?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's certainly not your typical planning condition for an individual or for a team or for a season per se. We have such a changing and flexible schedule, which involves lots of travel, both in Europe, but also right across the other side of the world. Lots of races back into a season. So I guess it's kind of. split for us into sort of three areas we have our pre-season we've got the season then we have the off-season pre-seasons relatively sort of standard in that sense we kind of have anywhere between six and nine weeks depending on when they went out want to start the season and then that will kind of follow a normal general preparation phase and moving into the more specific needs of a formula one driver and then once we get into the season it's more about that maintenance load, trying to maintain what we achieved in pre-season. But you can only ever really plan a couple of weeks ahead because we might be off to New York for a marketing event or travel schedule to Australia changes by a couple of days and you're knocked out for your training then. So we always try and break it into three or four races at a time, fit in some training around that, fit in some recovery as well from jet lag and the stresses of actually racing the formula one car as well so yeah it's a bit of juggling and going to be very flexible and adaptable both as a one driver but also as a coach working with someone in motorsports
SPEAKER_01:definitely and obviously i'm sure this is individual to the drivers but are there any kind of key areas that you work on or you find that are needed to be more robust for the drivers
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, of course. Formula One or single seat motorsports is quite unique in a way that you do have to work everything. You need to be cardiovascularly fit because a race will take its toll in a similar way to, let's say, a half marathon in terms of the cardiovascular demands, the calorie demand, the energy demand. You then need the strength component as well. And that's kind of all over body. We talk a lot about the neck. And yes, you do need a lot of strength in your neck muscles, the extensors and lateral flexors in particular. Some tracks, they'll have 6G to 4G. traveling through the side of the head and the neck for up to six seconds on some corners. So that could be a load of up to 42 kilos through the head and neck. The head is around five kilos and their helmet weighs around two. times six Gs of force, that's quite a lot to take. And then you have lower limb calf strength that you need for breaking forces. That can be up around four or five Gs of force as well, or a hundred kilos, the harshest breaking point in Monza, where they go from 330 KBH down to 90 in about a second. So there's all over body strength needed there. And then within that, you're trying to factor in a bit of reaction time, bit of coordination as well. So it's definitely a hybrid version of training. You build that in pre-C and then you're kind of maintaining the majority of that in season and then if you have key areas of focus that might have come out of your pre-season testing you'll grab any week or two weeks off that you might get from racing to kind of hone in and work on those. This season has been quite nice because China got cancelled, so we've just been on a three-week break now. We've done three races prior to that, so it's almost become an extension of pre-season where we've been able to get a lot more work in to prepare for busy time coming up.
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SPEAKER_01:Well I suppose that must be hard though because obviously with the travel etc the drivers probably also want to take some time to see families so incorporating it around that must be very difficult.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah absolutely myself and Max have a rule that when we set right at the start when we work in that if it's a non-race weekend then we will have that weekend off so we'll do all our work around that so you know Monday to Friday we'll get in what we need to do. We do the occasional Saturday morning on the schedule but we really try and kind of ring fence that time because otherwise you're away for 23 weekends of the year plus one or two other for testing. So it becomes 24, 25 weekends of the year. You're exactly right. That's super important. We have to take that bit of time away from the sport as well. So yeah, we make sure on that.
SPEAKER_01:Definitely. Do you work mainly with Max or do you work with the rest of the team as well? Do you look after anyone else?
SPEAKER_02:No, I'm solely looking after Max. That's my only role within the team.
SPEAKER_01:So I suppose that that does give you an advantage, as many of us would probably love that amount of time to focus on one person and see it all the way through a season. That's probably a big bonus, isn't it?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's a unique and special sort of role to have. You build a certain relationship, you get to know each other sort of inside and out from a being together perspective, but also from that kind of physical perspective as well. You learn what training works very well you learn what doesn't you learn the habits and routines that work very well on a race weekend and also those that don't as well i always remember saying to someone was after our kind of second season that would have been going into our third season pre-season and i remember kind of reflecting four weeks into pre-season and thinking am i missing something here because it it was so easy so in tune so automatic that i was kind of looking back thinking hang on a minute what are we not doing that it is but i think When you do work with that one person, you do get into that routine. But that's not saying you mustn't mix it up as well and make changes to keep it interesting, to keep on the edge of new or current research and make sure you're not missing those things.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's easy to make it easy in a comfort zone. And actually, as you said, take yourself out of the comfort zone, try new things. But if you've got that trust in that relationship, then that's probably much easier for you to be able to bring to Max and him. Trust that actually, yeah, it's probably a good way to go.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. And this season was quite a nice example of that because the F1 calendar change basically started three weeks earlier than they normally would, which lost us three weeks of pre-season. So we only had a six-week block of pre-season, whereas the last couple of years we've had nine or 10 weeks. And within that six weeks, the team will always have marketing commitments or media commitments that They have to be attended at as well. So you all of a sudden start losing two or three days out of those a couple of weeks in those six weeks. So we just had to find new ways of working this preseason. We utilize a few different things like BFR training and recovery to enable us to get more bang for our buck in a shorter period of time, which we haven't used previously. And it all went very well. And you're right. It was that kind of trust to let's do this and see what results we can get.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, especially with something like BFR, you know, if it's something that Max hasn't seen before and you suddenly turn up with that, it's kind of a trust. And honestly, this is a thing we can use. Yeah, mate, get strapped
SPEAKER_02:into this.
SPEAKER_01:Brilliant. So I think just the final one, I think it's something that I think is quite interesting as well. I'm going to give the listeners a second now to have a think about what do they think the most common injuries that you see within Formula One. In the short few seconds, I'm going to allow you to now tell us what is it that you see? the most
SPEAKER_02:yeah so it's probably different to what most people initially thought actually the highest recorded rate of injury is actually concussion in terms of time lost however what we see most across the board is lower back pain it's simply because the positions that these drivers are passing under the vibrations and high loads that the cars create tend to induce more lower back pain than anything else that we see neck would be second that mainly comes from crash incidences rather than the general driving hence why you see a little bit less of it because hopefully there's less crashes than driving itself and then following on from there you see sort of hand, wrist, finger sort of injuries again mainly from crashes and just being put into weird and wonderful positions as the steering wheel But yeah, a lot of that mainly, particularly last year when the cars changed and they were bouncing around a lot more. And we have a lot of drivers don't like street circuits as much because they're much more bumpier. tracks and there are a couple of very bumpy tracks on the circuit as well which cause drivers problems and you always hear I'm talking about it in the lead up for the lower back in this one so we plan a little bit ahead and a lot more work around those areas in the lead up to that and you know part of the pre-season work is specifically around making sure we're strong and robust through that lower back as well.
SPEAKER_01:Have you noticed obviously in the time that you've been working in Formula 1 there's been an awful lot of changes in terms of the cars and the development and have you noticed any changes in terms of injuries in crashes and things like that are they less severe are they different
SPEAKER_02:yeah i mean over the years the cars have got safer so the injuries and severity of crashes is definitely reduced even in the year that i've been working there's been some bad crashes which would have for sure ended up in mortality but it's not now because of the safety of the car so that's a real positive certainly last year the changes in the cars meant that they were vibrating and bouncing a lot more. So we certainly saw more pain and injury from drivers last year in the lower back or some also commenting on heel pain as well, just where they're right on the bottom of the car. Overall, there's not a massive sort of injury rate in Formula 1, which is a good thing. Most of it will come from crashes, but you very rarely see time loss injuries, which is good. That's
SPEAKER_01:brilliant. Well, Brad, we're going to have to call it a day there, although I probably could spend all evening talking to you and asking you questions about this. For our listeners, how can they see what you do? How can they follow you and where can they find you? Instagram is my main portal of exposure, shall we say. So that's just at Bradley Skanes. Brilliant. Well, Brad, thank you so much for your time and we'll no doubt get you back on the podcast at some other point to carry on this conversation. Thanks very much, Brad. Yeah,
SPEAKER_02:no
SPEAKER_01:worries. Thank you. Cheers.
UNKNOWN:Cheers.