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Laird Hamilton’s Revolutionary Pool Workout

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Laird Hamilton just turned a Malibu swimming pool into the most brutal gym in California.

Forget treadmills and dumbbell racks. On the new Outside TV feature “Laird Hamilton’s Revolutionary Pool Workout,” the big-wave surfing legend and his wife, former pro volleyball player Gabrielle Reece, put a group of athletes through XPT — Extreme Performance Training — a system built almost entirely underwater. There are no machines, no mats, and no way to fake your way through it once you’re standing on the bottom of the deep end holding a dumbbell with your lungs burning.

• XPT was created by Hamilton and Reece at their Malibu compound, adapting ancient Hawaiian waterman training where surfers historically carried rocks across the ocean floor to build lung capacity and leg strength.
• Sessions open on dry land with Hamilton personally leading hyperventilation and breath-control drills before athletes are tested with underwater breath-hold laps in the pool.
• The signature drill, the “Reece jump,” has athletes sink to the bottom holding dumbbells, launch to the surface for one quick breath, then sink again as gravity and the added weight pull them back down.

From Ocean Floor to Pool Bottom

Hamilton didn’t invent the concept out of thin air. He’s talked for years about how Hawaiian watermen trained by carrying stones along the seabed, a method that builds cardiovascular capacity and leg strength without ever putting a foot on dry land. XPT takes that same idea and drops it into a controlled pool environment, swapping rocks for weighted dumbbells and letting Hamilton and Reece dial the resistance up or down depending on who’s in the water that day.

The appeal is obvious once you understand the physics: water removes the joint pounding that comes with running, jumping, or lifting on land, but it doesn’t remove the effort. If anything, working against water resistance while managing your own oxygen supply adds a layer of difficulty that a normal weight room simply can’t replicate.

Inside the Pool Session

The actual workout is a rotation of drills designed to keep athletes working at or near their breath-hold limit. Underwater dumbbell walks send participants shuffling across the pool floor under load. Single-arm swimming forces them to propel themselves while gripping a weight in the other hand. Squat jumps in the shallow end pile on heavier dumbbells as fatigue builds, and the Reece jumps close out the set — sink, launch, gasp, repeat.

Hamilton frames the entire protocol as a way to manufacture stress on purpose, in a setting where it’s actually safe to do so. The goal isn’t just physical; it’s mental. Athletes have to override the panic response that kicks in when the body senses it’s running low on air, and learn instead to stay calm and let the pool bottom become a place to reset rather than a trigger for fear.

The pool bottom isn’t the danger — it’s the reset button, and learning that difference is the whole point of the workout.

Breath, Heat, and Cold

The pool work is only one piece of what Hamilton and Reece have built. XPT pairs the underwater resistance training with dedicated performance-breathing instruction and extreme thermal exposure — saunas followed by ice baths — to round out what they consider a complete stress-adaptation system. It’s a similar philosophy to what shows up in military-style physical screening programs, where the test isn’t just strength or speed but how well someone functions when their body is telling them to quit.

That combination of breath control, resistance, and thermal shock is why XPT has drawn attention well outside the surfing world, landing Hamilton and Reece coverage in the broader healthy lifestyle space rather than just action-sports circles.

Hamilton has spent decades finding water that most people would never dare paddle into. Watching him stand at the edge of his own pool, coaching strangers through a breath-hold squat jump with a dumbbell in each hand, is a reminder that for him the ocean and the swimming pool are really running the same experiment — just with the depth turned way down and the control turned way up.