Underwater training with bull riders
The bulls weren't there. The goggles didn't fit them.
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The following appears in the latest issue of Western Horseman magazine. Subscribe here.
HEAD FIRST
Sunlight poured through windows behind them. The smell of chlorine hung thick in the air. Wearing swimsuits and nothing else, the New York Mavericks bull riders stood in a circle on a pool deck and eyed the water wearily.
This was opening day of the Mavericks’ 2024 training camp, and it was taking place where none of them could have guessed: at a pool in Fort Worth, Texas. Coach Kody Lostroh had hired a company called Deep End Fitness Dallas to conduct underwater physical training to teach his team about facing fears, recovering calm amid panic, and working together.
And now Greyson Calem, the owner of Deep End Fitness Dallas, stood before them. Tall and lean, with wavy hair and a toothy smile, Calem looked like the end result of a lifetime of underwater physical training. He described what he had in store for them for the next three days—swimming underwater, treading water for long stretches and carrying 35-pound dumbbells along the bottom of the pool. “I love helping people address their fears,” he said.
And in six hours of training with the Mavericks, he had had plenty of opportunities to do just that. He led them through increasingly challenging workouts that took them to the brink of panic and beyond. The point of the training, he and Lostroh said, was to teach the riders to overcome that panic by calming their racing hearts and minds.
Those hearts and minds were racing before they even entered the pool. Rookie Marco Rizzo summed up what the rest of the team felt: “I’m really scared,” he said before getting in the water on Day 1, a startling confession that ultimately provided a vivid contrast to what he said when the training concluded.
“I feel confident,” he said at the end of Day 3. “Nothing can stop me.”
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Lostroh invited me to participate in the training to give me an inside look at how he transformed a group of bull riders into a team, which is a relatively new task within the sport.
When PBR CEO Sean Gleason proposed the Camping World Team Series, some in the industry scoffed. Professional bull riding has always been an individual sport. Why mess with that? Gleason is an astute observer of the sports landscape, and he sees it as in constant flux. A league that never changes, never adapts, never tries anything new, will die.
In its third season, PBR Teams has grown in size and complexity. With the addition of the Mavericks and Oklahoma Wildcatters, the league now has 10 teams.
In Year 1, no team would have dreamed up anything as ambitious as underwater training. Lostroh’s hiring of Deep Water Fitness Dallas shows that teams are looking for an edge, any edge, as the league gets more competitive. The Florida Freedom went deep-sea fishing together, the Austin Gamblers flew to a ranch in Brazil, and the Carolina Cowboys worked with a trainer who is a former Navy SEAL.
“Where we’ve matured to now is just the tip of the iceberg,” Lostroh said.
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I arrived at the pool on Texas Wesleyan University’s campus on a hot Monday afternoon with the same fears as Rizzo … and also with the same questions: Swimming, treading water, walking with weights at the bottom of a pool … What does any of that have to do with bull riding?
Nothing.
And everything.
The first time we swam across the pool underwater, rookie Hudson Bolton, 18, the No. 3 pick in this year’s draft, could almost have completed a qualified ride as he waited for the rest of us to finish. “You’re like a fish,” Lostroh shouted from the other side of the pool. “You kicked all their asses.”
“He’s a merman,” Rizzo said.
During a circuit drill, Lostroh offered cash to whoever completed the most sets. Mauricio Moreira, who rode for Arizona in 2022 and Kansas City last year, dusted all of us.
As impressive as those displays of athleticism were, they were irrelevant. The point was not to swim fast or hold your breath for a long time or walk a great distance along the bottom carrying heavy weights. Those skills don’t translate to bull riding. But what happens after them does.
The point was to use that training—whether we swam fast or slow, walked underwater a long distance or short, carried heavy or light weights—to push ourselves to the point of fear, even panic underwater and then use techniques Calem taught us to calm down. “You find out where the holes in your mental game are when you get in the water,” Lostroh said.
With that in mind, the connection between underwater training and bull riding became clear. Bull riding is not about being fearless. It’s about being afraid, seizing control of that fear, and nodding your head. “Your heart is pumping right before you get on,” Bolton said. “If you can slow that down, you’re going to ride better.”
Deep End Fitness’s training used strenuous activity in the pool to create the body’s response to fear—elevated heart rate, erratic breathing, mental panic—and teach participants how to calm down. “It’s good to see they’re hitting that panic point and how they react to it,” said Lostroh, whose hiring of a sports psychologist propelled him to the 2009 PBR championship. “And how they react the next time. And the next time.”
We hit that panic point through a series of drills, each one harder than the one before. Highlights included swimming 25 meters under water, bobbing to the 12-foot bottom and back up for 2 minutes and a brutal 10-minute burpee/bob/swim sequence after which I crossed out all the nice things in my notes about Calem and replaced them with expletives.
If that sounds challenging, difficult, scary, well, yes, that’s exactly the point. Lostroh’s goal was to create panic. That wouldn’t happen if we didn’t push ourselves to our limits and beyond.
The most obvious example came from Braidy Randolph. On Day 1, while walking across the bottom carrying a 35-pound dumbbell in each hand, Randolph ran out of breath and wanted to surface. Sounds easy, right? But his behavior showed his panic.
Rule No. 1 was don’t drop the weights, so at first he lifted the dumbbells as if curling them. Then he started to swim to the top while holding them, a nearly impossible task, especially considering he was already fatigued. Finally, he placed the dumbbells down and swam up.
Just like it didn’t matter that Bolton and Moreira crushed the drills, it didn’t matter that Randolph panicked. In fact, it was a good thing because it showed he was testing himself. What mattered was how he handled it when it happened again. By Day 3 he had made huge strides, staying under for far longer and recovering much more quickly.
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Founded and run by special ops veterans, Deep End Fitness says its mission is “to promote a positive shift in mental and physical health.” The company has affiliates across the country and has trained athletes on a variety of sports teams, including the San Diego Padres in baseball and New Orleans Saints, Cleveland Browns and Buffalo Bills in football.
The Mavericks entered the training without an identity and left it with one of a team forged by enduring trials together. Though some riders knew each other from the rodeo world, they had never been together as a team. Bolton, 18, met most of the guys for the first time by swimming alongside them … or far ahead of them, I should say.
One challenge to forming a cohesive bull riding team is that the riders don’t spend much time together. So coaches have come up with efficient ways for riders to forge bonds.
On Day 3, Calem told us to tread water in the deep end and set the timer for 5 minutes. No problem, we thought, because we had done that on Day 1 and Day 2 and entertained each other by yap-yapping throughout that time. And then Calem added a new wrinkle by giving us a 10-pound brick.
We passed the brick around the circle, each of us shouldering a small bit of the burden, just as each rider has to shoulder a small bit of the team’s burden during a game. There was no yap-yapping this time; it was too much work to talk, tread water and hold it. Well, almost no yap-yapping. According to Rizzo’s ever-present nervous chatter, every exercise needed to be longer, harder, heavier. He told Calem the five minutes should have been 10.
“Shut up,” Randolph cracked. “Or I will drown you.”
Someone passed the brick to Lostroh. Most bull riders are so skinny they have to face the sun to cast a shadow. Lostroh, 39, is ripped, with a thickly muscled trunk. Instead of sinking with the brick or passing it along, he managed to tread water while holding it for 10 seconds, 20, 30 and more, all while imparting instructions about team building. “Sometimes you need to pick up the slack for your buddy,” he said. “Do something hard for him. Remember: You’re a team.”
He passed the brick to me. I tried to mimic his long turn … and I lasted maybe 5 seconds before I had to pass the brick to Calem.
Sometimes a rider opted to sink to the bottom 12 feet below, push off, and swim back up before handing the brick off. Sinking while holding 10 pounds is easy. Swimming back up, not so much. That made it harder on the rider who did it but easier on everybody else because the sinker had the brick longer.
Nobody would have or could have done that the first day.
But now all the riders did.
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I paired with Dalton Rudman for a drill in which one partner sank to the bottom, walked with dumbbells out and back, set them down, counted to four, then swam to the top, while the other partner waited his turn.
Like the brick was an add-on to treading water, the four-count was an add-on to the weight-carry. Rudman made it even more difficult by staying down far longer than a four-count.
I joked with him about whether he forgot how to count. Bull riders have precise mental clocks from a lifetime measured in 8 second bursts—was that what he was going for? He said he wanted to make sure he stayed down there long enough.
I think he was being modest. I believe him that he wanted to be sure he stayed down for four seconds. But I think he was also pushing himself to that ragged edge of panic that Randolph found.
At riding practice later that day, Lostroh played off Rudman’s long stays at the bottom, encouraging the men to ride for 10 seconds, even 12, because if they did that consistently, 8 seconds would be a snap. “Just like in the pool,” Lostroh said. “We’re pushing ourselves a little further and a little further.”
A few minutes later, Vitor Losnake nodded his head, the gate opened, and his bull jumped halfway out of Fort Worth’s famed Cowtown Coliseum.
“Keep going! Keep going! Keep going!” Lostroh shouted.
The eight-second mark came and went, then 9, then 10, and still Losnake hung on.
Finally, at the 13-second mark, he dismounted.
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Day 1 was about setting a baseline, Day 2 was about focus under pressure and Day 3 was about mindset and implementation. The most surprising moments came during daily breath-holding sequences. I expected the bull riders to muscle up during physical elements of the training, which they did. I did not expect them to embrace the stillness. But they did that, too.
Following Calem’s commands, we put our faces in the water, then lifted them to breathe, put our faces in the water, lifted them to breathe. Each day the lift-to-breathe portion got shorter and the face-in-the-water portion got longer. At one point I thought Calem had gone to the bathroom or something and forgotten to call time for us.
Just kidding.
Sort of.
“Close your mental tabs,” he told us as we clung to the side of the pool. “Visualize your heart rate slowing down.”
I deadman-floated and felt stress roll from my neck through my shoulders, down my arms, across my fingers and into the water. Calem encouraged us to meditate. I opted for prayer. Indeed, this portion reminded me of an altar call at church when the pastor says “every eye is closed, every head is bowed, nobody’s looking around.”
Well, I got curious, so my eyes were open, my head was up, and I looked around. I could almost see stress leaving the bull riders’ bodies as it had left mine. Their faces in the water, their bodies limp, they looked serene, unburdened, light.
If they reach that level of calm right before a ride, they might never get bucked off.
And it wasn’t just the calm, it was how long we buried our faces in the water. “The first day you guys would get to 5 seconds and start …” here he flopped his arms like a child throwing a fit.
We laughed because we knew he was right. Now we all zoomed past that mark and kept going.
“Watching you hit those ceilings, and push past them, so they’re not ceilings anymore, has been awesome to watch,” Lostroh said.