Jays: Huot tips help Martin swim against the tide of aging
DUNEDIN, FLA.— When Russell Martin decided to take up swimming as an off-season workout option a year ago, he was amazed at how quickly he progressed in the pool.
It didn’t hurt that his coach and training partner was a nine-time Paralympic gold medallist.
The Blue Jays catcher has trained alongside Longueuil, Que., native Benoit Huot for two straight offseasons at the Institut National du Sport du Quebec (INS).
“I never really practised swimming in my life, I was never really that interested in it, but as I got older my body was changing and I felt I needed to do some different things to stay in shape,” Martin, 34, said. “I just wanted to find ways to balance out my body a little bit better and turns out Ben is a really good coach. In one session I got a lot better with just a couple techniques he showed me. And he’s a tremendous competitor.”
Huot, who was born with club feet, won three gold medals in his first Paralympic Games in Sydney in 2000 and followed that up with five more in Athens in 2004. He has a total of 20 Paralympic medals.
Martin first met Huot years ago through a mutual friend. The two had spoken about training together in the pool but Martin didn’t take Huot up on his offer until last year.
Martin played 137 games last season — and nine more in the playoffs — while dealing with a left knee issue. He had arthroscopic surgery in November to remove floating torn cartilage from the knee.
While Martin’s knee had “mostly healed” by the time he got in the pool with Huot, swimming helped in his rehab process and he worked with his physiotherapist on a workout plan he could do underwater.
“I’d start with very easy stuff and I would do them and get back to (my physiotherapist) and tell him it felt good or it felt worse and we’d work together from there,” Martin said. “We got more aggressive each time and the next thing you know the knee just started to feel awesome.”
The exercises, which are listed on a chart Martin still keeps in his locker, consisted mostly of different types of squats sandwiched between a warmup and cool-down of walking in waist-deep water.