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Want to improve your overall athleticism quickly? Add balance training to your workouts.
Balance Training and Proprioception
How to improve performance and reduce ankle sprains
from the About.Com Sports Medicine Page
Excerpt:
Pain caused by sprained ankles, and a variety of other injuries common to highly trained athletes, often have nothing to do with strength. They often have little to do with flexibility. And rarely do they have anything to do with endurance. More often than not, sprains and strains have to do with balance. Proprioception, to be exact.
Balance training better than tai chi at improving mobility among older adults.
From the Bio-Medicine website.
Excerpt:
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Physicians and physical therapists in recent years have explored whether tai chi, balance programs and fitness routines can help decrease the likelihood that older adults will fall and injure themselves. Many of these programs have shown promise, but their relative value is still open to debate.
Here are a few videos that can help you get started:
And one for Randy (our resident DIY expert):
Have fun.
Damn, I thought I had some skills on the double end bag, then I saw this guy. Take a look:
I know what I am going to be working on later today.
I thought I would post this video. I really like the drill. Have a look.
This is a series of basic drills we use at TKRI-MO to enhance student’s ability to move in relation to a threat while simultaneously motivating the importance of “getting inside” when it is strategically useful. The “LARP” stick is just padded PVC.
We do not pretend that this drill is at all sufficient for representing movement in relation to strong “motivated” attackers (either armed or unarmed). This set of drills is designed to begin getting students moving fluidly, and thinking about movement in relation to a threat.
Gradually we edit out less efficacious gestures, identify strategically useful ones, relate those to techniques, and then drill and integrate those techniques into more “realistic” and spirited encounters. This helps to establish for the students a “schema” or context for the techniques.
At TKRI we make a careful distinction between evasion, parrying, and blocking. This drill helps students experience first hand the difference in the metabolic challenges (to the defender) between evading (in which the entire body must move in relation to the attack), parrying (in which some redirection of the attack is allowed while simultaneously moving the intended target), and blocking (which requires one to either forcibly redirect the trajectory of the attack, or stop the momentum of the attack entirely).
Here is the video:
In response to some curious/critical e-mails:
Yes, one of the guys is wearing his old BJJ gi top in these videos. Do not worry we are not going all MMA/BJJ (although there are certainly worse things we could do). It is cold here and has been raining for days. The field we train in is pretty swampy. No one wants to muddy up their nice “whites”, and blue does not show grass stains as badly. The gi top is thick and warm.
Of course I am kind of proud of the guys for getting out there and training in the cold and rain. They train whenever they can, where ever they can, wear what seems appropriate for the conditions, make their own training tools, and they seem to like to hit anything that I explicitly do not tell them not to. They hit pretty hard too. Sort of like a “folk” art I think.
We occasionally use the drills in this video to enhance our balance, stability, and our ability to use our legs eccentrically to control ground reaction forces. A great many injuries in athletics result from poor balance, and from under developed eccentric and isometric control of the body. This is especially true when moving in the frontal and transverse planes. People tend to emphasize sagittal plane movements like squats, push ups, cable pulls, and bench presses in the gym while forgetting that fighting requires that we are able to control our movements in all three planes. These drills are designed to help address these issues prior to engaging in activities that emphasize agility and quickness.
It is not hard to find people referring to the Q-angle in discussions of sport related injuries and conditioning. Here are a few helpful online resources that explain what the Q-angle is, how it relates to knee injuries, and that give a little information related to leg conditioning to prevent injuries.
The “Q” Angle from Sports Injury Clinic. net
Excerpt:
What is the Q angle?
The Q angle is an important predictor of biomechanical abnormality throughout the lower limb. It is a measurement of the angle between the Quadriceps (Rectus Femoris is usually used) and the patella tendon. This provides useful information about the alignment of the knee joint, which if outside of normal ranges, can be a precursor for overuse injuries.
“The Q-Angle and Injuries in Women Athletes” from About.Com.
Excerpt:
Women are more prone to several sports injuries than men based simply on biomechanical differences. One such difference is a wider pelvis in women then men. Many sports medicine experts have linked a wider pelvis to a larger “Q” (Quadriceps ) Angle – the angle at which the femur (upper leg bone) meets the tibia (lower leg bone).
Knee Injuries and the Female Athlete from the NISMAT.org site.
Excerpt:
Knee injuries, especially tears of the anterior cruciate ligament, are becoming more common in female athletes. Interest in woman’s athletics at the college and professional level has changed the face of sports. Greater participation has heightened appreciation of health and medical issues specific to the female athlete. Studies comparing male to female susceptibility to injury of the anterior cruciate ligament have shown women to have considerably higher rate of injury.
From the Huffington Post comes this story about an undergrad who killed an intruder with his katana:
John’s Hopkins Samurai Sword Incident
Here is a a note of caution for all of those enchanted by plyometrics from the Sports Injury Bulletin site.
Excerpt:
Plyometric training can improve speed, strength and power. But can it also cause serious injury? Here’s a review of the literature:
An athlete’s hunger for success is fuelled by a constant supply of new products and training principles. During the past decade plyometric training has increased in popularity and is now considered to be an essential training method for athletes competing in a wide variety of sports. Donald Chu, one of the most prolific writers in this area, considers plyometrics to be the ‘icing-on-the-cake’ that can enhance an athlete’s ability, allowing him or her to remain at the cutting edge of their sport (1992). Donald Chu is not alone in this and many other respected coaches believe that, when performed correctly, plyometrics can improve speed, strength, acceleration and explosive power.
Click here to read the rest.
If you have followed my posts over the last year you will have seen lots of links to videos of people using foam rollers to help relax overly tight soft tissue. Here is another video demonstrating self myofascial release techniques with the foam roller:
Cheap foam rollers break down pretty quickly so I have created an inexpensive, durable DIY alternative. It requires a two foot section of two inch diameter pvc pipe, some weather stripping foam, and (drum roll) duct tape.
Wrap the middle section of the pvc pipe with the foam weather stripping and then cover it with duct tape. The foam may break down, but it can easily be replaced, the pvc should last pretty much forever. I spent about four dollars for ten feet of pipe (cut into two foot sections), and about three dollars and fifty cents on the foam. I already had the duct tape so I spent less than eight dollars total. The entire project took about ten minutes.
Here are some pics:
Robert Miller CPT CES
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