With his debut column, the big-wave surfer wants you to do the opposite of everything gym rats tell you. by Laird Hamilton I’ve been hanging upside down a lot lately. Nothing decompresses me more or has a better overall positive effect than that. It stretches and elongates my spine, gets blood flowing to my head, and takes pressure off my organs. Being upside down is the ultimate counter balance to the repetitive motions we do in our vertical lives — walking, standing, paddle-boarding, sitting upright. There’s a saying among yogis that a man who can stand on his head 20 minutes a day masters time. I haven’t mastered time, but I do try to put in 20 minutes a day upside down — whether I’m doing a headstand or hanging from a harness in my garage — to provide a little counterbalance to the rest of my life. And I never would have done it if I hadn’t torn my ACL and been forced to really think about what I was doing to my body and why I needed to find a way to counteract the motions I wasoverdoing. I blamed the ACL injury on biking. I loved biking — I’d been riding hard a few hours every day — but the sheer volume of repetitive motion was killing me. It built up certain muscles — quads, hip flexors — while ignoring others, which was creating tightness in my lower back and IT band, and I wasn’t doing a thing to counteract it. So I started riding backward. At first, it was just a hunch, an unformed theory. I did it mainly because I hoped it would help me avoid injury. But then I started to see and feel the results, and that’s where the revelation came in. When I went back to pedaling normally — that is, frontward — I discovered that I had a better relationship with my stroke. Not only did going backward counteract the repetitive motion that was causing my problems, it also improved my dexterity and coordination. It made my normal stroke feel more fluid and instinctive. I later found out that backward pedaling is something world-class cyclists have been doing for years. I