Getting Better or Getting Tired

This will be me getting on my soap box, sorry. This is something I rarely do, but I get frustrated with people who train athletes who have no business training athletes.

Just this week I had a lady come into our facility to participate in our Adult Fitness Program and as we started talking her daughter plays soccer. She mentioned that her daughter is going to this so called "Sports Performance" facility for off-season training. She also mentioned that here daughter has developed knee pain ever since she started training at this so called facility. Starting this week her daughter will stop her off season training program.

The first priority of any Sports Performance Coach is "Injury Reduction". An athlete should never develop pain or get injured while training, PERIOD. There are so many coaches and parents who think that if the athlete is not vomiting at the end of the their training session than there was no benefit. Running athletes through drills without a purpose is not proper training it is just "working out". For an athlete "each training session needs to be strategically placed in the context of the previous workout and subsequent workouts, in other words as part of an overall plan of development to meet the athletes’ needs. Focus on the need to do activities that relate to sport, the positional/event demands and above all meet the needs of the individual athlete" (Vern Gambetta). In other words "Develop a Plan". That plan should come from the Pre-Performance Assessment that measures: Flexibility, Mobility, Speed, Power, Quickness, Agility, Stability and Balance. From the Pre-Performance Assessment the coach should devise a plan that best fits the needs of the individual not the team.

The athlete that I was talking about earlier came by my facility to have a Functional Movement Screening performed.

Here is what I found:

Has instability in the knee when performing functional movement such as squatting and lunging, the knee caves inward, which is a sign of weak hips. We also found out that she has a asymmetry in the right & left sides of her thoracic spine. When testing her active flexibility in her hamstrings she has very limited range motion as she raises her leg. The core assessment showed an unstable core and the single leg assessments showed an unstable knee.

The body is a kinetic CHAIN and when one link is weak the whole chain is weak.

Bottom line is this: When you have someone coach you or your child step back and take a close look at what they are doing. In all probability they are probably just finding different ways to make you/your athletes tired, but are they really making them better?

At Athletic Republic we TEST-TEACH-TRAIN. Our program revolves around this one philosophy "Movement Education".

Do you have a weak link, if so, came into Athletic Republic of North Louisiana: Monroe and Shreveport for a free Functional Movement Screening.

Monroe: 318.3232.1613
Shreveport: 318.869.1600