I hate it when it hurts to walk


Detraining is a terrible, terrible thing to experience. Back in action with 10s (> bodyweight, but nowhere near previous levels) in the squat rack yesterday and my quads are screaming. Now, one might wonder why a bright person like myself would do such a thing.

It's actually very informative from a functional perspective. The R leg (subjected to a total medial menisectomy and knee athrotomy circa 1979--see above) continues to need single leg remedial work. It is smaller than the L and when push come to "push harder" it relies on the L to do the work. I can distinguish the difference in soreness, just as I perceive my L leg doing the work during the latter reps of the set. The neuromuscular journey continues. Anyone care to suggest additional single leg work to help remediate the situation?

On a more fun note--AJ is BACK! Ms. Studly is working hard at practice; she is the bane of her teammates existence as she easily knocks off the 20 total push ups (usually in 3 sets of 7--perfect form) the coaches want them to do. Her teammates barely get 5 sets of 1. Her ankle and hip flexibility continues to improve and she shows progress with pressing movements.

Stay tuned for the new guy--we'll call him TJ. Junior-to-be volleyball player. Tall, good all-around player, but needs fundamental physical work to build some power, agility and quickness on the court. Dad and son have the right attitude. It should be fun.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Form and Function

Image
Way back in 2002, I scanned these images by Howard Schatz from Sports Illustrated (October 14, 2002). A fascinating array of elite female athlete physiques, heights and weights, eh? These are some of the women featured in his book Athlete --a very cool pictorial essay that celebrates athletic form and function.
Read more

It's About Preparing People, not Preventing Injuries

ACL injuries do not happen in a void. People sustain injuries when their infrastructure is unable to manage a specific set of physical circumstances. To describe the mechanism of the injury without the context of the person and their level/type of sport, is to miss valuable insight. In sport, we prepare the person, to the best of our understanding, to meet the physical demands of that sport. We do not just work to prevent one particular injury; we prepare athletes to navigate the total sport physical environment. By "we" I mean the coaching and support staff -- specifically the athletic development staff.  Athletic development (AD) coaches prepare athletes through the development of physical literacy and movement competencies via movement progressions. It is more than strength, power, agility; it is the acquisition of knowledge, skills, abilities and behaviors to manage themselves within the entire sporting environment. At the higher levels of sport, AD coaches coordinate wit...
Read more

Strength: Overcoming Tradition & Assumptions

Image
The term "strength" comes with many images and stereotypes. The most common stereotype usually includes intimidating men who look like action figures, in spaces that look like iron jungles. Strength is associated with mass gain, limb girth increases, muscle hypertrophy and maximal force production against an external load. With regard to lower body strength, we speak in terms of multiples of bodyweight (BW), with the ratio of 2x BW historically viewed as necessary and desirable. We have historically trained in terms of 1 RM. There has been a trend recently to adopt a VBT (velocity based training) approach, as we know 1 RM changes on a daily basis and technology now allows us to more finely tune things with velocity as the target within each set. These things can be helpful as we initially learn to measure and document progress. But I think it is important to step back from this narrow outlook, because this view of strength does not serve all of us well, in either the rehab or...
Read more