plyometrics

STOP YOUTH SPORTS INJURIES: What Every Parent Needs To Know

Posted on by PEAL

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‘The gravitational field of the earth is easily the most potent physical influence in any human life. When human energy field and gravity are at war, needless to say gravity wins every time. It may be a man’s friend and reinforce his activity; it may be his bitter enemy and drag him to physical destruction.”

Ida P. Rolf, Ph.D.
You just bought a new Lexus. You decide to teach your kid how to drive. You both get into the car, with him or her behind the wheel. You pull out of the driveway, and then you instruct your child to “smash into the nearest wall!” Imagine how dumbfounded your teenager would be. But you explain, “Hey, since crashes could be a part of your driving experience, I think we better go out and teach you how to crash more effectively.” Obviously, this seems like a ludicrous idea and somewhat over-the-top. Why not just improve the driver’s skill behind the wheel and lessen the chance for collision, or even avoid the situation completely?
It has been well-documented that a surprising number of injuries that befall athletes are of the non-contact variety. Without the impetus of a strike or blow to the body, athletes are continually suffering a host of repetitive and overuse trauma. These injuries can be as subtle as musculoskeletal aches and pains, and as debilitating as ACL tears. With so many young athletes affected by this epidemic, the predicament of how to keep your child injury-free remains elusive to most people.
The problem is simple: athletes don’t move properly. They don’t sprint correctly, jog correctly, throw correctly, jump correctly, lift correctly, condition correctly nor change directions correctly. If they did, they wouldn’t get hurt. A lot of well-intentioned coaches, therapists, physicians and researchers have attempted to combat this problem with a seemingly logical approach to prehabilitation and general preparedness. However, by reducing this issue into either isolated factors (“get stronger”, “stretch more”), specific culprits (the core, non-firing muscles), or research-supported protocol (foam rolling, dynamic warm-up), the actual reason why-kids-get-hurt has been misconstrued. Lost in the reductionist dogma so prevalent today, is that all movement is a consequence of interrrelated actions. These actions, done poorly, and deeply rooted in athletes’ understanding of how to move themselves or an object from Point A to Point B, is the genesis of non-contacts sports injuries.
There has been conjecture, based on scientific data, that most significant injuries happen to athletes while they are decelerating; specifically, absorbing forces when landing from a jump or while changing directions rapidly i.e. cutting. A belief in this premise leads to the conclusion that learning to decelerate perfectly is the answer. Which is why the prevailing formula pushes towards the idea that the more we get accustomed to forceful impact, the more resilient our bodies will be. Unfortunately, consistent exposure to high velocity force, has a deleterious, not adaptive effect. This is akin to our “drivers learning how to crash better” example. Thinking that the body can be trained to overcome forceful tension and pressure is a mistake often conveyed from examination room to gym floor to playing field. Cars don’t survive crashes. Neither do we.
I see this far too frequently. We make athletes lift more, run harder and compete incessantly weekend after weekend believing that this is way to athletic prowess. And when they get nicked up, the advice is simple and straightforward: just rest up for a bit then repeat – with even more vigor. Because if that much didn’t stop the injury from happening, then that much more surely will. We are not designed to generate or consume heavy doses of external force. We are designed to attenuate and channel these forces to boost our speed, strength and performance. What matters most is our finesse and efficiency when interacting with our environment, not our muscular efforts. The objective is to redirect the accelerated, rotational forces of movement – not to try to stop or overcome them. Moving energy is a flow, not resistance and loading.
Most of my athletes never sustain these commonplace injuries. I don’t have clients waiting for surgery. If I do, it’s because they haven’t been compliant or followed protocol, or left the program too early. Athletes aren’t injured because of gender, genetics, bad luck, strength imbalances, inflexibility, fatigue or overuse. These are symptoms, not determinants. The keys are in your hands. Make better choices and drive well.
PEAL
America’s #1 Sports Performance Coach & Gait Analyst

LSD or Speed?

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Last weekend I had the opportunity to be a part of the 2011 edition of the Wineglass Marathon. Thanks to Sheila Sutton (assistant race director), I was invited to present a couple of lectures during my stay in Corning, NY, and otherwise mingle with the few thousand runners in attendance. There was a two-day (Friday and Saturday) expo held inside the Corning Community YMCA where the runners, vendors and race staff congregated for the usual pre-race/last-minute frenzy.

In between lectures I did some gait analyses (notably with new client Jennifer Brower-McNutt, former 2004 Olympic Trials marathon participant) and answered running-related questions. Jen, and another of my athletes (John Weiner, 49, who ended up finishing 4th overall) were running the 1/2M, so I bundled-up early Sunday morning and headed towards the starting line at Campbell-Savona School. Just prior to the race start, many of the runners lined the school’s hallways (it had started to rain outside), going through the usual stretching and idle chatter routine. Typical of runners, in between calf and quad stretches plus keeping-myself-warm bouncing, was the predictable query posed to anyone within earshot: Am I prepared?

The question was always answered with positive reinforcement (“you’ll be fine!”) – and even more so when the questioner assured the listener that “I got my miles in.” It’s as if those five magical words were the key elixir to surviving any test of human stamina. Having those miles under one’s belt, although seemingly effective, has yet to guarantee any type of success regardless of the distance run. In fact, despite the folklore that “you gotta get that 20-miler in” pre-marathon, how many of you, or people you know, have suffered in that final 10k regardless of their “long run” preparation.

So, if endurance doesn’t give you endurance, what the hell does??? In a leap of faith few are willing to accept, it may sound illogical at first but is truly at the heart of maximizing your running potential: Speed is the foundation of endurance. I first learned this concept from my friend and mentor Dr. Nicholas Romanov (Pose Method) and have witnessed it’s veracity with my own athletes and clients. The adage of “building your endurance through long, slow distance (LSD)” to give you the physiological base to tackle endurance challenges is misleading. Coaches from Arthur Lydiard to Bill Bowerman have stressed, in one form or another, the necessity of optimizing one’s aerobic capacity. Perhaps because of the prevalence of the “jogging” culture, which has led to a boon of recreational runners, or the narrowly-scoped obsession of the scientific community with the physiological effects of prolonged exercise, the concept of running better is all about heart and lung capacity. Unfortunately, all LSD gives you – with a modicum of aerobic benefit – is the ability to move slowly over periods of time while exposing yourself to fatigue, bonking and injury. If our aerobic reservoirs were the linchpin, then why doesn’t someone like Lance Armstrong, whose aerobic engine is legendary, run the fastest marathon times? You may argue that cycling requires different muscles or skills than running, which would point to something else at issue here: technique.

With good technique comes speed, and with speed the potential to endure. Remember, the fundamental requirement is how precisely a runner can interact with the forces available (gravity, ground reaction, muscular stretch-reflex), visible in how effectively he or she can remove their foot from the ground. The kinesthetic awareness that allows the body to move forward hinges on the understanding that there is an exact time-frame for economy – one that is beyond the amount of oxygen consumed per kilogram of bodyweight per minute. The less time you can spend on the ground, the less taxing it is to the muscular system and the less oxygen needed to fuel stressed-out muscles. Humans are built to survive (i.e. slog through marathons), but at great cost. Speed, in the true sense, is that proper combination of skill/effort/awareness/precision you’ll never find while running slowly for slow’s sake (although I want to point out that jogging can be treated as more skill development for improving one’s running technique).

Great distance runners can perform at a sub-5:00 pace, mile after mile. Yet, even Ryan Hall (after Sunday’s 2:08/5th place performance in the Chicago Marathon), commented that he needed to improve his “turnover” and drop his 1/2 marathon time to solidify his Trials and Olympic chances. The idea of strengthening one’s ability to accelerate in shorter intervals succeeds on many levels, physically and emotionally.

The belief that speed cannot be trained year-round is a falsehood. Much research has proven the positive cardiovascular results from repeated interval training. The blueprint is the knowledge of what intervals will bring out your best? How many? How often? With proper interval work and ample recovery, the lessons learned during speed training pay dividends for elite and recreational runners alike. Which leads us to the ultimate question: how fast can you be?

Running Economy

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In his recent post “Running Economy: Overrated and Misunderstood” (Running_Economy.pdf), Steve Magness, exercise scientist and newest addition to the Nike Oregon Project team, bemoans the “sad state of a lot of physiology research out there”  which has streamlined exceptional running performance into a neatly tied package of  running economy (RE), maximal ventilatory intake (VO2max) and lactate metabolism threshold (LT). To him, these physiological markers are informative yet underwhelming. “There are no easy variables that can tell us how good of a runner you are or can be.” Really? So, what methods can we use to predict and evaluate running performance? How then, do we address the most cogent underlying question of What makes a great distance runner?

Magness attempts to answer this question by explaining that although “it would make sense that the ‘better’ ones running form, the more efficient” that person is, someone like Alberto Salazar (who had poor mechanics) was efficient based on the current scientific nomenclature. The problem, he states, is that RE is a complex variable, and that there are “three types of efficiencies that govern how [economical] a runner is in a whole body sense” – mechanical, physiological and neural. According to Magness, “some parts of you will be very efficient while others won’t.” In this way, RE “reflects the sum of all those parts.”

There is some truth to what Magness says. In “Web of Life”, Fritjof Capra reveals that in the systems thinking view, “the essential properties of an organism, or living system, are the properties of the whole, which none of the parts have. [These properties] arise from the interactions and relationships among the parts.” By defining RE as the relationship between several types of efficiencies, Magness owns some understanding of the the parts contributing to the whole. However, states Capra, “the belief that in every complex system the behavior of the whole can be understood entirely from the properties of its part” is the central idea of the reductionist approach of modern movement science. So Magness is just as guilty as the scientists he criticizes – by reducing RE to smaller parts and missing the point that the properties (of efficiency in this case) are destroyed “when the system is dissociated, either physically or theoretically, into isolated elements.”

It was biologist Joseph Woodger in Biological Principles, 1936 (cited by Capra), among others, who emphasized that “the key characteristics of the organization of living organisms was its hierarchical nature.” In other words, there are multileveled systems within systems. In humans, every step we take displays the connectedness between balance and falling, support and motion, thought and action. Economical running form relates to our ability to interact with our gravitational environment.  Our bodies are already attuned to the slightest fluctuations. All we need to improve is a better sense of our “loss” of bodyweight when falling forward during the gait cycle.

It’s not about the body becoming more efficient “at sending the neural signals from the brain to the muscles,” as Magness argues. The brain does not determine “what muscle fiber to fire to do a certain movement.” Muscles have pre-determined functions as agonists/antagonists. It’s not our job to tell them what to do. This is handled by the precise, dense network of interactions that criss-crosses anatomical, physiological, psychological, emotional and biomechanics barriers. We are still discovering how to predict and define the potential of human performance. Capra summarizes that “all scientific concepts and theories are limited and approximate.” Science can never provide any complete and definitive understanding.”

The Movement Master

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If you’ve followed my tweets or Facebook status updates, you already know I’ve made my annual pilgrimage to Miami to see my teacher, friend, colleague, sensei Dr. Nicholas Romanov. As usual, my trip to see Dr. R was fulfilling, as I eagerly gobbled up every proselytizing nugget of information he shared. This time, there was an undeniable wisdom to his words, a deeper acknowledgement of our interdependence on gravity to move, and more importantly, to sustain the youthful vigor all of us cherish. “Life is movement and movement is life”, he emphasized.

In his lectures with me, Nicholas dissected the essence of movement: support – action – support. Because of gravitational pull, our body mass has “weight” and this weight is discernable by the pressure we feel (think, the load we feel on our feet when we stand). Pressure automatically engages our muscular system, preparing us for the specific coordination of actions required to release our bodyweight and immediately return to the next point of support. The most efficient means of releasing our weight is by falling.

This means that the pillars of sports performance (speed, agility, quickness, endurance, stength) are linked to how far and fast you will fall and the skills necessary to do so.  According to Nicholas, the key is your ability to understand and apply these concepts to your movement. Through your psycho-emotional network of sensing, perceiving, desiring and thoughts-processing, each of us possesses the ability to improve our performance exponentially.

Although my stay at the Romanov’s home was brief, Nicholas was always the gracious host, generous with both his time and insights. As he drove me to the airport for my return flight to Philly, he reflected on our conversations. “Who was that, actor, very famous, died young?” he asked. “Uh, James Dean?” I guessed. “Yes, right,” he said before poignantly summing up life’s seemingly endless complexities.  “I love this quote from him: ‘Live life like you will die tomorrow, do as if you will live forever’.”