Over the past year we've been blessed to receive monthly contributions from Dr. John Baker. Not only is Dr. John trusted by some of the most elite surfers in the word, he's a gifted wordsmith and crafts better analogies than anyone I've ever met. He's not some pseudo-authority who just preaches on Instagram, he's a healer through and through.

So far he's offered articles ranging on how to treat and train different areas of the body--shoulders, hips, feet, etc--and for this one he asked me, "Chris, any thoughts on what could be a good next piece?" I thought it would be most helpful to speak to how to care for your body when in the midst of a hyper-active period, in other words, winter swell season.

He came back to me with this following piece, essentially a "multi-vitamin" of sorts that doesn't cost you a damn thing. One thing he has in common with other true healers is that he's all about giving you the tools you need to let your body do its thing--no fancy contraptions, extensive supplement regimes, or expensive treatments--just honest to God information and simple remedies and movements to keep you both buttery and solid as a rock.

Of course, if you want to take it further and meet with Dr. John, or his wife, Dr. Lily Baker, they'd be happy to meet with you in person on the North Shore or virtually from wherever you are. So without further ado, the Watermen Doc will take it away.

How to Stay Fired Up All Winter Without Frying Your System

Winter surfing demands a strange mix of things from your body. You need enough baseline strength to handle long paddle-outs and heavy drops – but once you hit that threshold, performance stops being about being able to create and absorb brute force and starts being about how well your body organizes itself.

That’s the part most surfers never train. Everyone thinks about things in terms of muscles – pulled muscles, tired muscles, activated muscles – but there’s a lot more going on than that. Your ability to surf multiple days in a row – without blowing out your back, stiffening your hips until they hurt, or feeling like your pop-up suddenly runs on dial-up internet (as I am typing this I am realizing that some of you may have to google what that even is, haha!) – comes down to how well you manage the coordination, recovery, and rhythm of your entire system, not just muscles. 

Hip mobility, length–tension balance, rib expansion, foot elasticity, fascial mechanics, circadian timing, sleep quality, the state of  your nervous system and hormones, and even how your body interfaces with sunlight and the ground – these are the things that quietly decide whether you’ll surf well all season or fall apart halfway through it.

Winter surfing pushes your body to its limits and exposes every inefficiency you carry.  However, winter also gives you the perfect opportunity to dial in your biology, movement patterns, and recovery habits that will (or won’t) keep your body feeling springy, powerful, and adaptable.

The goal isn’t to train harder, it’s to train smarter, recover intelligently, and sync your body with the environment you’re living in. Here’s how to stay sharp all winter using the tools your body actually responds to.

Circadian Biology: The Most Underrated Performance Tool in Surfing

Your body runs on environmental timing signals — light, darkness, magnetism, temperature, grounding (electron exchange), and food timing. These signals guide hormones, tissue repair, energy production, inflammation, emotions and mental health, and everything in between. When they line up, you feel good… real good. When they don’t everything feels harder… sometimes way harder.

Sunrise: The Master Reset

Natural morning light (from the sun) hitting your eyes calibrates the hormonal rhythm that drives your energy, recovery, and coordination for the rest of the day. Grounding your feet outside (on something not man-made) during sunrise allows your body to absorb free electrons from the earth, helping neutralize excess inflammatory charge and support the recovery process.

It’s not mysticism, it’s quantum biology, and even five minutes can shift how your whole body performs that day. Just simply go outside barefoot, expose as much skin as possible (think about your skin like a solar panel… if it’s not exposed, it's not charging) find a place to stand, watch the sun come over the horizon, and let nature and your body do the rest.

Midday Sun: Build Your Sun Callus

Midday sunlight increases mitochondrial energy (recall: the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell) – your body’s fuel. Small, consistent exposure up to your tolerance builds a sun callus, improving your body’s ability to soak up all the positive health benefits of  the sun, leading to improved resilience and recovery.

You should also ditch the sunglasses when it’s safe to do so (i.e. pretty much anytime you’re not staring into intense glare). Your eyes need unfiltered light signals to regulate hormones and circadian rhythm accurately. Blocking those signals (UV and Infra-Red light hitting your eyes’ retina) disconnects the brain from the environment. Wearing sunglasses disrupts your eyes from being able to tell your body and skin how much sunlight it needs to be prepared for – leading to diminished positive health benefits and increased risk of sunburn.

Nighttime Light: The Silent Recovery Killer

Phones, TVs, LEDs, and bright overhead lights all broadcast a false daylight signal, wrecking melatonin and keeping cortisol elevated. When that happens: tissue repair slows, inflammation stays high, nutrient utilization decreases, morning stiffness increases.

But here’s a really simple fix: actually watch the sunset, dim the lights in your space after sunset, and switch bulbs to red incandescent lights. Your body treats it like sunset and will start to move into repair mode (we have done this in our house and we now go to sleep at 8pm consistently) – red light peaks during sunrise and sunset, using red lights at this time helps match the corresponding environmental cues.

Eat With Your Environment

Local and in-season foods carry microbial signatures, water structure, and light-encoded information that match your surroundings. Your body handles them more efficiently, stabilizing inflammation, blood sugar, recovery signals, and overall energy.

Time Your Caffeine

Caffeine after midday lingers into the night and disrupts deep sleep. Even if you feel like you fall asleep fine you will have decreased time spent in deep sleep, which is vital  for optimal recovery through the night. For consistent winter performance, keep caffeine away or just to the first half of the day.

BowSpring: The Movement Reset Surfers Didn’t Know They Needed

Surfing locks your body into repetitive patterns that often result in overuse injuries. In order to keep your performance at its peak, mediate injury risk and keep your system as primed as possible I suggest starting a BowSpring practice. This is something that my wife, Dr. Lily Baker DC CSCS RYT-E (@theopenposturedoc on instagram), initially found and it has had profound effects on us as well as our patients. We have a 7-day challenge on our YouTube (below). I would recommend checking that video out first to get your feet wet and learn the fundamentals. We will be releasing an incredible 8-week BowSpring course soon, you can sign up for the waitlist here: Join The Waitlist

BowSpring – developed by John Friend and Desi Springer – counters those patterns by teaching you to move as a connected, elastic tensegrity system, not a stiff stack of joints.

Hip–Low Back Differentiation

Most surfers hinge from their low back because their hips are stiff. BowSpring restores that separation so your lumbar spine stops taking hits your hips should be handling, and so you can really unleash the power that your body may be hiding currently. We have found that most people who stick with practicing for just a short-period of time notice profound differences in their ability to recruit their glute and the muscles of the hips, while also experiencing less symptoms from overuse injuries, commonly in the low back, hips and knees!

360° Rib Expansion

Paddling compresses your ribs hour after hour. BowSpring reopens that space, improves breathing mechanics, helps resolve that congested and tight feeling between  your shoulder blades and along your spine, and helps reduce the aching tone in your shoulders too. We have found that people over time are able to paddle longer, with less pain and fatigue, and feel better out of the water.

Elastic Feet and Calves

Your feet are your springs. BowSpring helps restore elasticity, improve landings, speed generation, and rail-to-rail transitions. As we have discussed in previous articles, healthier feet lead to healthy knees, hips and spine!

Total-Body Tensegrity

BowSpring spreads load across your entire system instead of dumping it into hotspots like the low back or neck. It reduces wear, increases fluidity, and helps your body stay adaptable through long swell cycles. It’s not uncommon for our patients to see resolution of multiple complaints with implementing this one philosophy of movement.

Self-Bodywork: The Four Zones That Actually Matter in Winter

Long stretches of winter surf usually overload the same general areas from my experience working with surfers here on the North Shore:

Feet & Calves

Your feet and calves should act like springs and shock absorbers. If they stiffen, everything above them suffers — hips, knees, low back. This can prevent you from being able to get low, maneuver into the barrel or through turns, but also increases the chance you injure your knee, hip or low back. Check this video for your calves and shins, and this one for your feet.

Hips

Your hips (or pelvis) are your power center. When the hips lock, your spine compensates and everything you do is gonna feel slower and weaker. Mobile hips make life easier and movement more fluid. Check this video for your quads / thighs and the one below for your hamstrings.

Lats

These guys are your paddling engines. But, when they’re tight, the lats cause a lot of low back and neck pain. This is because the lats run all the way from the front of the shoulder to the low back, effectively wrapping from the front half of the body to the back half. When they’re tight and locked up they affect everything between those areas negatively.

Neck

Cold water + paddling + tension = classic (and often chronic) surfer neck. Tightness here disrupts breathing, shoulder mechanics, movement efficiency, and can even cause a lot of people headaches

When you’re scraping or doing any kind of manual work on those areas, you just need something that helps the tool glide. Lotion, coconut oil, olive oil — all of that works fine. What a lot of the top guys I work with use — Billy Kemper, Kainehe Hunt, Landon McNamara, Makai McNamara, Kala Grace, Lucas Godfrey — is Catalyst Cream.

It’s loaded with things like tallow, DMSO, magnesium, arnica, MSM, gotu kola, noni, vitamin C, copper, rosemary, and menthol, so you’re not just greasing the skin — you’re giving the tissue extra support for recovery, inflammation control, and reducing that sharp, sensitive feeling while you work.

The way I think about it: if your body’s recovery is a job site, Catalyst is like having a Home Depot right next door — everything you need is right there, so the work gets done cleaner and easier.

The Winter Reset Routine

Here’s the simple, repeatable formula:

• Watch the sunrise (light + electrons)
  
• Get midday sun up to your tolerance
  
• Avoid sunglasses for some unfiltered exposure
  
• Hydrate with electrolytes
  
• Eat local foods when possible
  
• Keep caffeine in the morning
  
• Dim lights at night or use red bulbs
  
• 2–5 minutes of BowSpring
  
• Scrape feet/calves, hips, lats, neck
  
• Use Catalyst Cream if you want smoother glide and added recovery support
  

Do this consistently and winter shifts from something you survive to something your body genuinely thrives in.