One of my favorite core exercises for training adults and athletes is the stability ball stir the pot. Most people make the mistake of doing a ton sit ups, leg raises, and side bends. The abs are meant to create stability of the spine and help transfer force during dynamic activity.
For this exercise, assume a front plank position with your arms on the ball and your feet out wider than normal to create a stable base. When performing this, draw small clockwise circles with the ball, as you maintain a flat back and squared up hips. Repeat on the other side once completed.
This may look easy, but if you have never done this before, I guarantee you your abs will be feeling this one!
The world’s leading sports organizations have spent decades and millions of dollars to discover the formula to build great athletes.
Dear Parent,
We’ve been in the sports profession for decades, and have helped over a million athletes. We’ve examined athlete development systems around the world. And most importantly, many of us are parents as well.
We know the awesome, positive aspects of youth sports participation. It can help athletes develop a fit lifestyle, learn to work hard and build a growth mindset.
Like you, we believe in the work ethic, attitudes, and character developed through sports training and competition. We help young athletes strive to pursue their goals. That’s everything from making the team, getting more playing time, or even becoming a professional.
We are inspired when we see an athlete or team striving to be their best. Operating at elite levels, we see the stage of international sport as a showcase for the human spirit. Our love of sport includes the process of building great athletes.
This why we love what we do! Some days though, it is hard to see good people, with the best of intentions, making mistakes developing young athletes.
We understand it is hard to know what’s best for your young athlete. What’s best for them to have success now and in the long term. There is so much conflicting information.
There’s so much pressure to win now. There are the demands of sport, life, and school that make it hard sometimes.
What does it take to create GREAT athletes?
Organizations like the US Olympic Committees, US Soccer, USA Hockey and others have a mission to develop great athletes. The world’s best. They’ve spent decades researching and testing these different methods. In international sport, it’s a race to build the best.
In youth sports today, we all know that there is tremendous pressure for an athlete to “win now” so they can make the elite team. The coach and the club are under pressure to “win now” or they risk losing their players to another team or club. Parents feel like if they don’t get their young athletes in the right place early the future opportunities will be gone.
All of this “win now” leaves little time for actually developing. Don’t get it wrong, we want the young kids to compete. We want there to be winners and losers in games. Yet, if we sacrifice developing a well-rounded athlete for winning at 10 years old, we are mortgaging their athletic future for a win today.
A great athlete in most sports starts with athleticism. Without question, there are also different key sports skills you must start early. For example; dribbling in basketball, groundstrokes in tennis, and ball touch in soccer. You need to play the sport at a young enough age to start developing this.
In an athletes’ earliest years, they might rely on this skill to stand out. It’s the sport after all! Looming underneath is a need for athleticism. It becomes important more and more as they move up in levels and competition gets tougher. As the other players also have high-level skill, then athleticism becomes another route to gain an advantage.
Does Playing Multiple Sports Help Athleticism?
If you’re not sold on it yet, let’s look at a few examples of this playing out in the real world.
Urban Meyer, a famous football coach at The Ohio State University, recruits multi-sport athletes. In fact, some reports show that a whopping 89% of his football recruits are multi-sport athletes.
image from @ohiovarsity
Let’s go wider than only football and look across all Olympic Sports. The United States Olympic Committee has done extensive research for decades on what builds a champion. They’ve looked at hundreds of Olympians and medalists to see when they specialized.
Many would expect to be an Olympian you had to specialize early and give up other sports and some times that’s true. But the data shows a different story. Olympians are arguably some of the most elite athletes on the planet. Yet, the USOC study shows they play multiple sports through their high school years!
But it’s not just about specializing in one sport; it’s about the training that often goes along with it. Developing only “sport-specific” skill, without a route to increase overall athleticism does them much more harm than good!
Our job as a Sports Performance organization is to create a better athlete, which means a well-rounded athlete.
Skipping Well Rounded Athletic Development Can Have Harmful Effects…
As coaches, we hope to create great athletes who have a chance at being successful for the long haul. To support this, our programs are based on the concepts of Long Term Athletic Development.
Just like a baby needs to follow steps in development, so does a young athlete. A baby must learn to roll over before crawling, crawl before fore walking, and walk before running. Athletes need to build a solid foundation for elite athletic performance before they can reach their full potential.
The Injury Problem
When athletes skip critical steps in building this athletic foundation, they are at a much higher risk for injury and burnout. We’ve seen it in our centers across the country and we’ve seen it in Olympic development systems around the world. Olympic Committees have contracted with us to help solve the problem of injury due in large part to overspecialization.
• In a Loyola University study of 1200 youth athletes, researchers found that early specialization was one of the strongest predictors of injury. Athletes who specialized were 70-93% more likely to be injured compared to multi-sport athletes.
Without a well rounded athletic base, missed pieces act like cracks in the foundation. They might not be a problem now, but they can lead to future problems down the line. Small cracks have a tendency to grow over time and under pressure.
The trouble is building the foundation early isn’t always sexy. And it is really hard for parents and young athletes to find the time.
The Long Term Athletic Development model has been developed over several decades. It’s been adopted by many successful elite organizations. The best-known expert might be Dr. Istvan Balyi, a coach and sports scientist. He helped implement this model in professional tennis, with USA Hockey, in the UK to prepare for the 2012 London Olympics and through Sport Canada.
The concept is simple. There should be a long-term view of developing an athlete with the highest chance of success at the elite level. To do this we need to have some outline of what they should be doing from the youngest ages all the way through their pro and Olympic career.
A Model For Developing Champions
Now don’t misunderstand, this isn’t some fluffy “they all win and there is no competition” model. It comes from elite sport and supports competition. It doesn’t support winning at the earliest ages at the expense of being a great athlete later. This document from LTAD.ca is a great summary:
From the start to finish, we progressively build an athlete’s foundation, skills, and mindset so they can reach their full potential. But we know every athlete doesn’t have the potential to succeed in a Gold Medal in every sport.
So doesn’t that make this a waste for most athletes?
NO. Because it helps athletes reach their best potential. Because an athletic foundation of fundamental movement and sports skills improves the likelihood and opportunity to participate in sports and fitness life long.
This balance of elite development and sports participation is why so many sports organizations have adopted this model. These examples help show how Sport Canada and USA Hockey are applying it to their systems;
Since 1999 the Velocity model has incorporated the LTAD concepts and has evolved with continued research and experience with over 1 million athletes. We think about athletic development as a pyramid and if we are going to build this pyramid to great heights we need a broad and comprehensive base.
By building a broad base of athletic skill and movement we create a foundation. An athletic movement foundation that they can build on and without wide cracks. This way a young athlete has more movement skills and physical resources to draw from. Then they have more opportunity to find their best position or sport as they get older.
Just go back to that USOC graphic about how many sports Olympic athletes played. They had the athleticism to pick the one that they could excel at, in part because they had a broad athletic base.
How Can a Parent Help a Young Athlete in Todays Sports Environment?
As we know, the demands of time, year-round participation and advancing technical level make it hard for young athletes and their parents. You don’t want your kids to fall behind because they took the time to play another sport or training. You fear they won’t be on the right team or have the opportunity later.
It’s a real concern and as parents, one many of us have felt as well.
Sport coaches can be as frustrated. They fell pressure to focus on skill development. So often they cant incorporate the overall athletic development they might want as well. They only have a few hours a week and parents bring a lot of pressure to succeed now.
But we have insider knowledge. You can do both. While our young athletes in the US are playing club and school sports, they can still develop as athletes.
Through the year they can just continue to develop athleticism. Not just sport skills. Not only sports training, just general, all-around athleticism. For our youngest athletes, this means as little as 2 hours a week that builds fundamentals.
Then as they enter middle school and high school training becomes more focused on strength, speed, power, and fitness. Just 2 – 4 hours a week adds to their athletic foundation and develops movement patterns beyond their specific sport.
During some parts of the year, they can increase the time spent on developing these qualities. If they want to be their best and can spare 2-4 days a week, they can do more to reach their full athletic potential.
Developing Athletes Is About AND, Not OR.
We hope parents understand; it’s not a question of sport-specific skill OR overall athleticism. It’s a matter of AND. You can develop your sports skills, compete AND keep becoming a well-rounded athlete.
Our experience in elite sports and youth sports confirms this view. We’ve seen what works and building better athletes in key in our belief.
If you’ve spent any time around a gym, reading fitness blogs, or even scrolling through your friends’ Instagram posts, you’ve probably seen a kettlebell. You’ve also probably heard people say it is a great tool to make you strong, lean, and fit.
This is true, but how does this cannonball-looking thing work? What do you do with it? Do you just buy one watch the fat magically melt away? Most definitely not.
There is no magic shortcut to the results you want. A kettlebell is a great tool to help you reach your fitness goals, but like any good tool, it must be used correctly to be effective.
Kettlebell Warm-Up
Our kettlebell warm-up moves from simple to more complex exercises will help you master some of the fundamental KB movements. While you might not be able to get into some of the advanced exercises, like the KB snatch right away, with dedication and practice you will quickly feel comfortable performing them.
This is what the Velocity kettlebell warm-up looks like:
20 KB Swings (American)
5 Single Leg RDL (each leg)
10 Goblet Squats
5 Presses (each arm)
8 Thrusters (each arm)
8 Clean & Jerks (each arm)
5 Snatches (each arm)
1 Turkish Get Up (each arm)
20 Swings (American)
So why should you bother to learn how to do all of these exercises? The rumors about the KB are true: with a very short workout you can get incredible results. It can help you lose weight, gain weight, add strength, or just be more active, depending on how you use it.
Buy A Kettlebell
For you to reap these benefits, you must commit. Get your own KB or go to a gym that has some. Even though we coach at a gym with a complete kettlebell setup, many of our coaches like to keep some at home so there’s no excuse not to use one every day.
None of us will get any better if we are not committed to our goals. Part of that commitment is planning around what works for you, and even the coaching staff and Velocity doesn’t always have time to make it to the gym. If you can keep even one kettlebell at home and learn to use it, you have a cheap an effective home gym in your garage or back yard.
Master the Kettlebell Movements
Owning a KB is the first step. The next is learning how to use it properly so you don’t hurt yourself and have a longer list of exercises from which to choose; our kettlebell warm-up is a simple and effective place to start.
The focus is not just learning the movements, but mastering them. As you get good at these basic exercises and understand how best to use the kettlebell, you can begin to create your own workouts. You can combine exercises in any way you like; you can add other exercise elements in like running, jumping rope, push-ups, or anything that excites you.
The possibilities are endless, but you have to earn this this freedom of movement by first learning the basic exercises. Do this, and you will always have a way to strong and fit – with just one piece of equipment.
Every player who wants to excel is working hard on the ice. But it’s your off-ice training hat’s a great opportunity to get an edge over other players. If you want to get ahead and not fall behind the competition, here are three keys to your off-ice training.
Get Stronger
Off-ice is the place to get strong. With general physical growth young players get stronger and practicing hard will build some strength, but it’s a lot tougher. If you can get in the gym 2-4 days a week for you’ll see incredible gains.
Strength has a correlation with reduced injury risk, lower-body power, and on-ice speed. To get these benefits, a hockey player needs to increase his or her athletic strength. This means your strength training must be ground based, use multi-muscle/joint exercises, and include elements of both force production and rapid muscle contraction.
While it may seem to be counterintuitive, training to improve your hockey game doesn’t always mean more hockey drills. When you increase your overall athleticism through dynamic movement training or even playing another sport, you challenge your coordination, functional strength, and have fun at the same time.
Building a broad base of athletic skills can help reduce the risk of overuse injuries and increase your long-term potential. When an NHL team has a choice between two equal players, they typically pick the one who is more athletic across a broad spectrum.
Get/Stay Fit
Hopefully you worked hard in the off-season to get fit. When you are in-season, don’t lose your fitness. No one wants to go into the new season fit, only to lose some of it if practices are running slow or there’s limited ice time.
Keeping up your base of aerobic and anaerobic fitness is key even if you’re not on the ice. In-season, one day of longer aerobic work helps maintain or build a good base and help you recover from the strength and power work. Another 1-2 days can be used for higher intensity intervals and circuit style workouts.
Use the your off-ice to get an edge. If you’re fast now, you can get faster. The strong can be stronger, and the fit can be fitter. Imagine where you want to be at the start of next season and get to work!
High intensity interval training, CrossFit, and bootcamps are all popular and effective ways to exercise. While they are great methods to improve your fitness and performance, there is also a risk of injury if you don’t approach it intelligently.
Results and Risk
These programs often include skilled movements and explosive exercises like plyometrics and other high-intensity movements. Olympic lifts, sprints, power lifts, and variations on gymnastics are also common.
The benefits of these types of exercises are that they stimulate maximal muscle engagement and quickly take joints through their full range of motion. However, the same qualities that make these movements so effective also makes them very challenging if you haven’t been doing much fitness training.
“They are great exercises to get results because they are ground-based, engage multiple joints and muscles groups, and have high intensity” says Coach Ken Vick, High Performance Director for Velocity Sports Performance.
“They are more athletic, but with that comes some risk of injury just as in sport. The key is to know your limits and follow good coaching.”
HIIT Keys to Success
Vick says for those who are interested in training this way, there are Four Steps for Success:
Assess your own readiness
Have you done these types of workouts in the past? Do you have past injuries? Are there limitations in your joint range of motion? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you need to get some guidance before you start.
A qualified coach can help assess if you’re ready, and a sports medicine professional can help identify any injury risks and how to alleviate them.
You don’t have to be in great shape before you can start taking these kinds of classes, but you do need to realistically assess your readiness with the help of professionals. They can give you a roadmap to a safe starting point.
Check your ego at the door
One of the benefits of these programs is the energy and intensity that comes from training with a group of people all pushing through a challenging workout together. Be wary that you don’t let pride and ego tell you to push yourself farther than you should, lest you pay some painful consequences.“I can’t tell you how many times we’ve heard someone say: I knew I was pushing myself too far,” says Coach Vick. “There will always be others better than you at any given exercise or workout. They may be younger or older, male or female.”
The key is to change your focus from competing with others to competing with yourself. Focus on improving your skills, technique, results, and your own PRs and you will not only get better, but you will stay safe.
Find an on-boarding class
Find a class that on boards you with a coach who can get you involved safely rather than joining an advanced, competitive class. A good coach teaches you the correct mechanics and form for exercises and has variations to adapt them to your needs and skill level.
Know when to stop
Severe pain is always a red flag. While soreness is normal, the amount of soreness you experience with workouts should decrease as your body adapts over the first few weeks.If you experience joint pain, swelling or instability, stop. See a sports medicine specialist for evaluation. They can figure out how to eliminate the pain and how you can correct the underlying causes. They should work with you and your coach to adapt your training so you can keep building fitness while fixing your injury.
Research has shown that when an experienced coach or trainer is involved, the rate of any kind of injury decreases dramatically.
To prevent injury from happening in the first place, it’s very important to perform an active or dynamic warm-up to prepare the muscles to work at high speeds or under heavy loads. Some programs incorporate a warm-up into the workout, while others will show you what to do and give you time to do it beforehand.
Train Harder, and Smarter
High intensity interval training adds the intensity, motivation, and fun of these kinds of programs can inject new energy into your fitness regimen. All of these elements can help you work harder and push your fitness to a higher level than ever before. If you’re smart and follow these four keys, you can reap all the benefits and avoid injury.
A good warm up is an essential component of any type of training. What you may not know is that it is probably the most important time for a coach. Typically, the function of a warm up is to raise our athletes’ core temperature, which also increases their heart rates and blood circulation, decreases joint viscosity, restores joint range of motion, and prepares them physically and mentally for the upcoming workout. However, for the coaches here at Velocity, this is just the tip of the iceberg; we can learn a great deal about each athlete just by looking for the right things.
Our sports performance coaches teach athletes speed, agility, and quickness by making their movements more efficient. As in any field, teaching first begins with assessing what a new “student” does or does not already know. Furthermore, excellent teachers and coaches do their best to understand the individual in front of them. Without this knowledge, it is very difficult to know how best to coach and correct an athlete. We might be telling them what to do, but they are probably not learning or improving. In the worst-case scenario, coaching an athlete through a session without knowing their level of experience may lead to injury. The tasks we prescribe must be appropriate to their skill level. Too much difficulty and the athletes won’t get better; not enough difficulty and they aren’t challenged and still don’t improve.
How do we quickly discern how much they know and the level of their movement skills at Velocity? The warm up! Especially when it is an athlete’s first session, we pay close attentions to the athlete’s movement quality. “What is his hip mobility like?” “How’s her sprint technique during the acceleration phase?” Even though an athlete may be experienced and has trained with us for a while, the warm up is still the best place to review their movement quality and gives us tons of important information. “How much did he learn from the last session?” “Did she improve her change of direction skill since last week?” By collecting this information, any coach will be better equipped to run a coaching session more efficiently and it with better results.
Everyone knows sprinting is an important part of performance in soccer, but it doesn’t take an English Premier League coach to see that other things like quickness, agility, and change of direction are important parts of game speed.
Today, with combinations of GPS and video tracking we have more information than ever about the movement demands of soccer players. At Velocity, we look at data from around the world, in different leagues and levels of competition. We know everything from how many runs players make at different speeds to how often they change direction.
What does it tell us? The game keeps getting faster every decade. It also gets faster as you move up each level, so if you want to compete you’d better be fast.
During a match, a professional player makes between 30 – 40 sprints. We’re not talking about a 100m dash; these sprints range from 1 – 4 seconds over distances of 3 – 39 yards.
Sprinting has two main components: acceleration and maximum (or max) velocity. Acceleration is speeding up rapidly, and maximum velocity is sprinting over ~75% of full speed. Since the sprints can reach 39 yards, and this is far beyond the distance even the best payers can accelerate, we know that soccer players need both.
We know the technique needed for acceleration and for max velocity are very different. The two most apparent differences between acceleration sprint mechanics and max velocity sprint mechanics are body angle and leg action. Soccer players need to develop both movement skills to be exceptional.
Agility
While sprinting speed is very important, soccer isn’t a track meet. It’s not a linear game and elite players display incredible agility. To develop soccer specific speed, you need agility. We’ve talked about soccer agility in other articles you can read. Agility can be broken down into two key components: quickness and change of direction.
Sprinting speed is great, but if you can’t change direction, you’re going to get burned.
Quickness
Lightning fast movements in 1-2 steps can make all the difference in reacting to an opponent or leaving one on the ground.
Change of Direction
The game isn’t linear; it constantly changes direction. A player who can change direction in fewer steps and faster than the opposition has an advantage.
Fast on the Field
So to play your best game, you need several kinds of speed. Players will usually be better at one part or another, but you can’t afford any glaring holes. As an elite player you need:
Acceleration
Maximum Velocity
Quickness
Change of Direction
You don’t have to leave your soccer specific speed to chance, nor should you. While you may need the right genetics to be the fastest in the world at any of these, through training you can improve – at anything. Improve both your physical attributes and your motor control and you’ll be faster. Speed is a skill, and like any skill, it can be taught.
You might also consider viewing these articles as well:
Hockey players know that they while they need superior hockey skills on the ice, they also need to work off the ice to keep up with the competition. You can use your off-ice training time more effectively by adding these three steps to quickly get ahead of others.
Strength and Stability on One Leg
Part of developing athletic strength is the ability to apply force the same way you do in your sport. For hockey, that means you need to be able to explosively push-off of a single leg, stabilizing the hip and core as you do it. While common strength training like squats and deadlifts are a great start, they are bi-lateral exercises (they use both legs). A great way to take your results to a higher level is to add some uni-lateral (single leg) exercises.
Training on a single leg might not let you lifts as much weight, but it will certainly lead to high levels of muscle activation while adding balance and stability to the mix. Some ways to add single leg strengthening to your mix could include:
Single Leg RDL: 3-6 reps x 3-5 sets per leg
Bulgarian Split Squat: 3-6 reps x 3-5 sets per leg
Lateral Box Step Up: 3-6 reps x 3-5 sets per leg
Build Your Power Through Plyometrics
While basic strength training builds a foundation, you need to develop power to be more explosive on the ice. Power is the combination of strength applied with speed. Olympic lifting and plyometric exercises are two great ways that both develop strength and speed.
One of the advantages of plyometrics is that they can be performed on a single leg to work on stability and balance at the same time. They also can be done focusing on movement in vertical, horizontal, lateral, and diagonal directions. These are all things that build a better hockey player.
The list of potential exercises is long and includes any form of jumping, bounding, sprinting, and medicine ball throws. A few suggestions are:
Squat Jump or Box Jump: 3-5 sets x 5-8 reps
Lateral Jumps or Split Jumps: 3 sets x 5-8 reps per leg
Hurdle Hops: 3 sets x 3-8 hurdles (line them up in a row)
Clap Push-Ups: 3-5 sets x 5 reps
Kneeling Med Ball Chest Passes: 3-5 sets x 5-8 reps
Train Your Core to Transmit Power
Most hockey players recognize that a strong and stable core is important for performance and preventing injuries. Unfortunately, the majority of training time is spent on crunches, sit-ups, and a long list of their variations.
There can be a place for these in training, but excessive use can actually stress the spine more and create imbalances, all while ignoring key functions of the core. We have to understand that the core isn’t designed to create and initiate diagonal or rotational movement; its key function in hockey is transmitting forces from the lower body and stabilization so you can use your upper body.
Think of both resisting movement through the core as well as making it move. Then think of training in all directions. A few suggestions could include:
Pallof press: 8-15 reps x 3
Diagonal Cable Chop/lift: 8-15 reps x 3 per side
Sit-Ups: 10-15 reps x 3
Medicine Ball Rotational Throws: 5-10 reps x 3 per side
3 Effective exercises to make you explosive without a barbell
Athletes need power, which means a combination of strength & speed. The reason Olympic lifts are so popular among elite athletes around the world is that they are really effective. However, what if you don’t have a barbell and bumper plates, or no coach to teach you the technique?
While Olympic lifts are great, they aren’t the only way to train your explosiveness. Here are 3 exercises that are really effective and don’t require the barbell. You still need to use good form; it just may be a bit easier to get it even without a coach.
There is nothing new about this one, but it’s been around a long time for a reason. Like any jumping exercise it combines the speed of rapid muscle contraction, with the application of large forces into the ground. It also takes coordination through multiple joints in the body. That’s a great recipe for athletes wanting to improve explosiveness.
Using a rapid counter-movement, you put the muscles around the hips, knees and ankles on stretch, then explosively contract them to get full extension in all 3 joints. This “triple extension” action is key in many sports and why this exercise pays dividends.
An important added benefit is in the landing. By focusing on landing soft and balanced, you are training explosive deceleration. That’s the ability to absorb forces rapidly and it’s critical in most sports. Its also a huge help in preventing injury.
Jumping on turf or grass surface.
3-5 sets
3-5 jumps
Skater Jumps
Another tried and true favorite, skater jumps have all the advantages of the standing broad jump, while adding a lateral movement component as well. These might have you looking like a hockey player jump sideways from one foot to the other, but they benefit athletes in so many sports.
In addition to generating explosiveness in the take-off leg and eccentric power in the landing leg, they are really functional. Functional, because you’ve added the challenge of moving on a single leg. This is needed in so many sports.
Add in the the lateral movement and you are really working on all the stabilizers of the hip and some aspects pf balance. All combined, these are things almost every athlete needs.
Jumping on turf or grass surface.
3-5 sets
3-5 jumps on each leg
Depth Jumps
Not for the beginner, depth jumps are an intense plyometric exercise guaranteed to stress your body. That stress, when done in small doses, can have a big impact on increasing strength and power. This is the plyo exercise where you step off a box, land and then go right into another explosive jump.
The benefits in this jumping drill are magnified because of the step off the box. Dropping from a height lets gravity accelerate you towards the ground. When your feet make contact all the involved joints and muscles must absorb and then generate even higher forces. To protect yourself, the body is going to do this reflexively and you’ll put more force into the jump that immediate follows. The key is to not overdo it.
Jump from a box 12-36” high
2-5 sets
2-4 jumps.
No Barbell, No Problem
While Olympic lifts and their variations are great for athletes wanting to build power, they may not be possible for everyone. These 3 classic exercises have been proven for decades to help athletes improve their power. They are also a great addition when you can do Olympic lifts. Give them a try and see some gains.
Athletes from pros through weekend warriors have recognized the importance of using different types of sports recovery techniques to recover faster, feel better, and train harder. However, with all the different options to choose from, it’s hard to know which one works best.
The first thing to remember is that everything isn’t for everyone all of the time. So, when someone asks “what kind of recovery tool is best?” the answer is, it depends.
Here’s what you need to understand to get more benefit from your recovery strategies.
Recovery works by helping your body through it’s natural processes of returning to a state of internal balance. Training, competition, injury, and even life, are all stresses that add up and push your systems out of balance. Recovery means something to help bring you back into balance.
Returning the body to a state of equilibrium after stress requires you to address the specific type of stress you just endured. This is where a lot of recovery plans and techniques fall apart. If you don’t target the right type of stress or systems in the body, the recovery you try won’t make a difference. It’s like putting more insulation on a house when the real problem is a hole in the roof.
The Velocity sports recovery methodology was developed for the world’s elite athletes – to keep them at their best under enormous pressure. One of the foundations of is that there are 4 big categories of stress. We classify them as:
This is physical damage to your tendons, muscles, bones, and joints caused from contact, pressure, and tension in sports. It might be microscopic, but it takes a toll.
Repeated foot strikes while running, repetitive tendon stress on a pitcher’s elbow, or contusions and damage from collisions in rugby, football, or MMA are exactly the kinds of things that add up to potential or actual injury. Tissues need to heal properly on the microscopic level after each practice or competition.
Physiological
This is probably the area people think of most when talking about sports recovery. When you are putting in long hours of training, doing high intensity MetCons, or logging long distances, there’s a large metabolic and biochemical demand on your system. The numerous physiological elements all need to be returned to normal and metabolic wastes need to be removed.
Mindset
Whether it comes from sport or life, mental and emotional stresses have an impact on both mind and body. It can come from from emotional challenges, learning new tasks, or just intense focus for practice and competition. Our bodies’ physical recovery mechanisms are tied to our mental state.
States of mental stress and anxiety trigger particular functions of our nervous system and release stress hormones. While these can be useful during competition or training, they inhibit or even completely block natural recovery mechanisms. Therefore, in order to achieve physical recovery, the mind must be in a state of relaxation.
Neuromuscular
Often overlooked, neuromuscular fatigue doesn’t necessarily make you feel tired in the way you might think. Instead of feeling stiff, sore, or a generally fatigued, you just might lose that “snap” in your movement.
When you perform high power exercises like sprinting, jumping, and weightlifting, you stress the nervous system as well as your muscles. Until you recover, you won’t be able to fire them at full speed or intensity.
Make your recovery specific
Knowing that all regeneration methods aren’t the same or equal is the first step towards getting it right. Make sure you know the specific type of sports recovery you need at different stages of training and even different days of the week to make to make your recovery process better.
At Velocity, our coaching and sports medicine staff can help you decide which combination of regen and recovery tools you need to help you stay at your best.
Kettlebells are great for building fitness.
