Training Matters:

By Ed Stiles on August 9, 2019.

Prepare the body! Sorry to all the old school non-believers out there who think that things like stretching, foam rolling and warming up are just another coddling of soft kids and a waste of time. Twenty years ago, I agreed with you. But the reality of today’s youth is that they simply don’t move like the kids of yesteryear. The times they are a changin’, leading to a couple extremes that we need to address with young athletes.

First is the “don’t move until my sport happens” group. Our technology-dependent reality has increased sedentary behaviour in our children. What that means is many kids are sitting and texting, and watching fails videos through many critical periods of growth and development. The physical literacy challenges and the tightness, weakness, and imbalances that this lack of motion creates makes it imperative that we deal with these issues prior to throwing them into training or competition and hoping they survive. Sadly many don’t, and youth sport, the very thing that could help them, hurts them and they hobble back to the couch…forever.

Second and on the far end of the spectrum are the early specializers who live and breathe a single sport year-round. Repetitive strain and overuse injuries are predominantly caused by muscular imbalances; weakness in some, tightness and over activity in other groups. Picture the powerful slap-shot, volleyball spike and serve, tennis serve or any one sided explosion executed literally thousands of times a year. Old school guys take note, even my level three coaching theory course in 1989 said that we can’t ignore the imbalance this creates.

So, whether group one or two, we need to invest some time to help the body move better. There truly is no better time than prior to training or competition to turn down the dimmer switch on short, tight, overactive groups, and dial up and activate long, weak, lazy tissues. Then we take this new physical reality and build a fundamental movement vocabulary on top of it, improving tissue tolerance and injury resiliency in the process. In addition, we avoid rehearsing motor patterns built around the imbalances as those critical periods for motor learning make it very difficult to change faulty patterns once established.

Preparation task No. 1: Dial down the tight, hyperactive tissues.

Deep tissue massage, myofascial release, and trigger point therapy are scientifically proven approaches to helping the muscular system function better. So those foam rollers that some young athletes use for chairs while they chat and selfie actually have a coveted place in preparing the body, just lose the phone already. Then prepare to wince a little as deep tissue pressure in the belly of the muscle, while beneficial, doesn’t feel wonderfully relaxing, quite the opposite actually. Be aware, don’t roll the joints, there are ways to adjust the amount of pressure, and there are areas that are more pain than they are worth. See a knowledgeable trainer to maximize your safety and results.

Rolling without stretching after is like setting the table and then not sitting down to eat. You have prepped the system now zero in on the tight groups. But only static stretch the tight stuff. The detractors of static stretching are correct when they assert that we actually weaken the targeted tissue after a static stretch. Fantastic, that is exactly what our goal is; after stretching the chronically tight Hip Flexors the abdominals get a chance to do the job they were designed for rather than the HFs taking over. The overriding key is to target only those groups which we know are tight. Everyone is different, although the postures assumed in certain sports make it easier to generalize, but in a perfect world a muscle mechanic would assess and identify which area needs lengthening and which ones we need to wake up as opposed to dial down. Speaking of waking up I am out of room but will be back next week to talk about Preparation Task No. 2: Activating the long, weak, lazy tissues. Catch you then. Stay cool.

Ed Stiles BPE, Certified Exercise Physiologist is a member of the Alberta Sport Development Centre’s Performance Enhancement Team and is the Fitness Coordinator at the Family Leisure Centre he can be reached via e-mail at asdc@mhc.ab.ca, or at ed1sti@medicinehat.ca.

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