 Hey guys, and welcome back on my channel today. I am actually just coming out of the shower from riding my bike in the morning. So sorry, my voice is a little bit gone. I wanna talk about physical training today and why physical training is important for motorsport. You may tell me that, you know, we just sit in the car and we turn the wheel and we accelerate and we brake and why is it physical? Well, well, there is a lot of physicality behind it. Before everything, if you liked that type of video about behind the scenes of a driver's life and what we do, please subscribe, comment, like, as always. So why do we train? Well, we train to two things. First thing is the G-forces. What's G-forces? G-forces is the load that you get on your body when you decelerate, accelerate, or turn the car. You have to imagine that you're driving down the straight line in Monza, 340 kilometers an hour, 210 miles. You jump on the brake, 110 meters to get down to 55 kilometers an hour. So you are losing almost 300 kilometers in 100 meters, which is absolutely amazing. That is a lot of G-forces. You know, if you have a car and you brake as hard as you can on a normal road car, you won't even get to one G and everything flies in the car, right? In a Formula One car, you get to six on a big, big braking when you have maximum downforce. It's a touch less in Monza because there's less downforce in the cars, but on a bigger, you know, circuitry high downforce, you get to six G's. So that's a lot of deceleration. So all that strength, neck, the neck wants to go forward. You know, your body is completely compressed forward. So you've got seatbelts, yes, but you still have to hold yourself a little bit. And then you have high speed corners. So Barcelona turn three, you go in at 250, 240, 250 kilometers an hour, flat out corners, very, very long. And ahead, there's two type of, well, there's one type of G-forces, but two most are working really hard. That's the right-hand side corner. So the right-hand side part of the neck is working super hard enough to have your head going completely on the left. And then on top of that, even though the seats are really well done in Formula One and molded to your back, you still slide through the seats. So your abs and lateral abdominals need to keep you in the car as well as your lats. So when you come back from winter, you've been working really hard in the gym or winter long, but nothing is quite like racing. So you do struggle a little bit with those muscles initially. And that's just fighting G-forces. In IndyCar, for example, we don't have a power steering wheel. So we're also fighting the wheel. And I don't know if you ever driven or tried to park a car without a power steering wheel. It's almost easy compared to turning a steering wheel in IndyCar. So it is super very heavy. I like it. I think it's cool. It just adds a physical challenge to driving the car. So that's just the G-forces and the weight of the steering wheel. But then on top of that, you have to imagine that you stay in a racing car in a cockpit where it's normally really hot, bloody hot. You've got a little bit of drink on board, but not that much. And it becomes very quickly very warm. So not that nice to drink. There's a lot of focus going on, you know, focus to get the best reaction time at the start, focus to be on top of your tools, to be looking after your fuel number, to be looking after your tires, to be looking in your mirrors to see who is behind you. So there's a lot of that. And even though you're just sitting on a race car because of the adrenaline, because of the risk involving racing, your heart rate is very high. So I mentioned at the beginning of the video, I was just back from a ride on my bike. I love riding bike, because I can go out there for two hours, two and a half hours, three hours, changing intensity. And that's what we do in racing, you know? I go on a pace of an hour and a half to two hours and the car races a little bit longer. During that time, you've got some paired with the safety car. So intensity comes down. These pairs like the race car, where intensity is at the highest. There's paired where you attack and that's very high intensity. There's pairs where you maybe save fuel and tires. That's lower intensity. So having bike cycling is really good physical training for adjusting all of that. And then in the gym, we try to create exercise. So we've got the neck harness that you've seen a lot of drivers. If you're on my Instagram, you've seen me using it. Most boring exercise in the world. I mean, you stay there for two minutes on each side of your neck. Two minutes per side. You've got four sides. So that eight minutes per round, you treat the rounds as 24 minutes just sitting in front of a machine having cable pulling on your neck. That is really boring, really hard. And then, you know, for IndyCar, try to create, replicate the sting wheel effort, finding tools in which muscle works the most. And that's what you do through racing. You know, racing is very strange. We've got very little testing. So it's like you were telling Rafael Nadal or Kilian Mbappe or whoever you want, sportsman you want, and just tell him that he's got like three days of testing, three days of practice in the year and the rest will be only tournament, only matches. And you're not allowed to practice your sport the rest of the time. You have to try to find ways in the gym, ways on the training to kind of replicate where you're gonna be suffering in the car. So obviously, carting is a big one to keep the muscle going, but it's still quite different from racing cars. So that's one of the big challenges that we're facing as a race car driver. That Formula One season finishing mid-November and late November starting again in March, the break is not that long. So, you know, you take a couple of weeks off and then you get back to training. So you never really lose 100% muscle. In Indica, we've got a six month break. So it's quite hard to keep it going, but that's what we have to do. And that's why every day I'm in the gym, every other day I'm on my bike. That's also what saved my life in Bahrain, 70. G-Force deceleration crash, Dylan's conscience didn't, you know, was able to fight my way through the fire and escape from the car. And without that physical preparation, having my body with us just given up and I would never have been able to escape that fire. So that's also why we do a lot of our core work in case of high deceleration, big impact. Try to protect your organs, internal organs, because the G-Forces have to go somewhere and everything is just, you know, feeling like you've been through a washing machine. We also do a lot of work with reaction time, you know, light parts that you have to hit when they turn on and stuff like that to keep your eyes and hand and eyes coordination going. So you can also play squash, which is pretty good tennis. Sports where you need to have a good spatial environment, have a good coordination between your eyes and your hands because that's what you do by racing. I was lucky to have a trainer for a lot of years in Formula One. I'm not training on my own in Miami, so it's up to me to motivate myself and go to the gym, but it's not always easy, I'm gonna be honest with you, but I know that if I don't do it, I won't perform. So that's why I really try to go for it and make sure that there's no, if I train better, I would have won the race. That will never go well with me and that's why I always go and train harder than I should actually. Once you've been doing your training, you'll physically fit, then you need to be in the right mental space. You know, racing is a lot about the mental. Some days, everything's gonna be easy. The car is gonna be able to nicely, you know, find the way to drive it and it's just gonna be smooth. Some other days, it's a little bit harder. Some other days, it doesn't work the way you want. You can't brake as late as you would like. So you have to be very open minded about how to drive the car, evolve through the race and then diet, obviously, eat well. You know, don't come hangover to a race. That won't go well, but eat well. Make sure that you've got enough intakes in terms of carbs and proteins and vitamins and vegetables and all of that. And sleep, you know, I'm a big sleeper. I sleep pretty much 10 hours a night, which is beautiful, but also a pain in the ass. You have to wake up at seven in the morning. That means by now you need to be in bed and it's also a bit annoying, but that's just the way I feel good. And if I don't do that sleep pattern, I'm just not feeling good and not performing well. So you have to know your body. You have to be very disciplined. And of course, you can enjoy a little bit more, but most of the time when we go racing, that's the way it is. And that's the way, personally, I just do it to perform well and you have to know your body, to know your head and know where you are. Same if you have eggs in the school. Same if you have, you know, big decision to make in your job or whatsoever. Yes, that's what we do as race car drivers. As always, please, if you liked that video, just subscribe, like, leave a comment. I'll be happy to read them. And I'll see you very soon for a new one. Bye-bye.