Falling down fit: the Yahoo! Skysurf Team shows you how to make core strength and flexibility keys to your training

Even if you have never, will never, jump out of an airplane--never mind perform aerial acrobatics with a modified surfboard strapped to your feet--Brian Rogers can give you a pretty good idea of what it's like. "If you're driving along a highway at 60 miles per hour, and you stick your arm out the window and wave it around for about a minute, it's going to get pretty tired," he says. "Now imagine going twice as fast and resisting the air and doing tricks with your whole body. That's skysurfing--and it takes athleticism to do it."

Rogers, 29, and his teammate Stefan Klaus, 26, make up the two-man Yahoo! Skysurf Team and represent a new brand of athlete with a unique approach to fitness that you can adapt to your own requirements. When it comes to conditioning, especially that ever-precious "core" section, these two have a lot to offer you, even if you'd sooner eat night crawlers than launch yourself into the wild blue yonder. Although their fitness is in part the result of spinning like dervishes at NASCAR speeds more than two miles above the earth, they also do regular workouts on the ground that set a good example for average fit guys to follow.

Especially critical to Rogers and Klaus' success and safety is core strength and flexibility--both key, often neglected elements of fitness. Having a strong core--the erector muscles of your lower back and the rectus abdominis, obliques and transverse abdominis of your stomach--will help you avoid nagging back injuries that can not only make for a painful golf swing, but can also knock your training off-track. A firmed-up midsection will help you handle heavier weight with exercises such as squats and standing shoulder presses, which translates to more muscle gain. Lastly, increased flexibility will reduce injuries and muscle soreness and give you greater range of motion.

TRAINING SPECIFICS

On days when he doesn't jump out of a plane several times, Klaus usually lifts weights for an hour to an hour and a half. Because his work recruits even the smallest and most out-of-the-way muscles, Klaus performs a variety of exercises for each area of the body to ensure a comprehensive workout.

CORE MUSCLES

While most guys focus on their "beach muscles," Klaus concentrates mostly on his core, performing crunches and back extensions (he also includes lat pull-downs and rows to strengthen his upper back). This not only provides him with stability during free fall, but also builds those boxer's abs that most women prefer to beach muscles anyhow.

Rogers does a rather brutal daily abs workout utilizing a Swiss ball. His typical routine includes crunches, crunch twists, trunk rotations, reverse crunches and flail sit-ups. Generally, he does sets of 40 repetitions, but occasionally he'll throw in a five-minute sit-up "sprint" (this shocks the muscles and stimulates development). To round things out, Rogers does some light upper-body work with dumbbells, often using the Swiss ball as a seat or bench in order to target stabilizer muscles.

CARDIO & STRETCHING

Klaus also goes for a short run (two or three miles) once or twice a week and stretches extensively every day. "Lifting weights makes my muscles strong, but the stretching allows me to use them," he says. "There's no way I could perform some of the tricks I do without getting injured if I didn't have the flexibility." For guys who lift weights regularly, Klaus says full-body stretching will enable them to get the most out of their newly developed strength.

YOGA

Rogers took up yoga several years ago, and it has been his primary fitness activity ever since. "I haven't found any other kind of exercise that gives you so many benefits," he says. He cites increased strength, flexibility, balance, concentration, relaxation and general body awareness as benefits he's drawn from yoga that have helped him as a camera flyer and with all of his physical activities. Rogers does his yoga workouts at home with a video called Power Yoga, instructed by California-based fitness guru Bryan Kest. Rogers performs the 45-minute routine four times a week.

Wherever you are in your fitness program, you'll benefit by paying attention to core strength and flexibility. So adopt some of the Yahoo! team's training into your own regimen; for example, try taking a yoga class once a week, and include a variety of ab exercises with a Swiss ball two or three times a week. Even if you have no plans to step out of a perfectly good airplane, you'll know you could.

EXTREME ADRENALINE

Combining elements of skydiving, snowboarding and high-velocity camera work, the spectacular and very extreme sport of skysurfing involves a pair of athletes at 15,000 feet recording a live video that is scored by judges stationed on the ground. The skysurfer, in this case Stefan Klaus, performs a series of tricks on a specially designed "skyboard" during free fall, while his camera flyer, Brian Rogers, follows him with a helmet-mounted camera.