Returning to sport after an ACL injury is a long and demanding road. The common time frame following surgery is 9-12 months before a person can make a safe return to sport. The main reason for this is the time it takes the anterior cruciate ligament to vascularize (more on this later). However there is several problems within providing a recommendation based solely on a time frame, or even just evaluating the knee itself to see if it is intact. What I am going to show you in this article is that the evaluation criteria for returning to sport which uses a blanket template can be majorly flawed, for it often ignores that each person is different, and their weaknesses or reasons for sustaining the injury in the first place is what must be identified and corrected before returning to sport. Neglecting to address faulty movement patterns or restrictions at other joints is why so many athletes, both professional and amateur will suffer repeated injury and can derail even the best of athletes. If you are an amateur or professional athlete and looking to return to sport after ACL surgery this article is a must read as I show you 5 critical factors you must achieve if you want a safe return to sport and minimize your risk of another rupture.
How To Structure An Effective Strength Program Using Multi-joint Exercises?
The last few years I have written articles and filmed You Tube videos showcasing some complex functional multi-joint exercises where I explain the purpose of the exercises and how to do them. What I did not explain fully is how you would organize them into a strength workout effectively so you ensure you keep everything balanced and avoid over-training. While it is great to know how to do these exercises you can create problems if you do not know how to structure your training schedule and program. Program design is a real science in itself when you really understand certain principles around movement and the human anatomy. It can be constant balancing act between using certain muscles too much and creating stiffness and injury, versus not using them enough and creating weakness injury. A great program can avoid this. If you have tried completing several sets of these exercises you will soon realize they are extremely exhausting and very difficult to do too many of them effectively in one workout. Secondly, while these exercises are very good at trying to use the body the way it was designed, they will often require regressions to help the body restore mobility, stability, or strength to specific areas that are restricted or inhibited. The needs and abilities of each person will vary significantly from one to the next so it is impossible to provide a template that works for everyone. Having said that there are a few guidelines that I use to help me structure a program where I can get the most out of these type of exercises, and in fact for all exercises. In this article, I will explain what these guidelines are and give some examples of how to do this yourself. Enjoy.
How To Improve Endurance Without Losing Strength, Speed & Power
Ask anyone who plays in sports like AFL football and basketball how tough it can be to train for speed and power, yet at the same time try to improve your fitness endurance capacity. Many sports demand that you have high levels of strength and power and be able to sustain these repeated bursts in games that last between 2-3 hours. Physiologically the two processes of building strength, power, and speed versus endurance are completely opposed to each other and training both methods at the same time cancels out their effectiveness. This is the equivalent of trying to be a 100m sprinter and a marathon runner at the same time! All good strength coaches and elite athletes are aware of this principle and know that to improve performance these two opposing methods are best trained on their own which is known as periodization. Unfortunately, sporting codes that run for several months of the year do not allow for this perfect recipe to be adopted. Compromises must be made, and usually, it is strength, power, and speed sacrificed for fitness and endurance. But is there a way you can minimize the losses of strength and power by adopting smarter implementation of your fitness training? This is the question we explore in this article and provide you with some simple ideas you can implement into your training that could be a real game changer.
Agility Training Is Vital To People of All Ages & This Is Why
When most people think of agility training the first image that pops into their head is some sporting athletes jumping over hurdles and running in speed ladders. While agility is a great training method for sports it is so much more than that and a very under-valued training method that can provide incredible skills to our body. Far too many people avoid using agility exercises for they lack coordination and have never been great at sports. Their fear of looking silly and making a mess of the exercise makes them avoid using this method which is unfortunate for they miss out on the amazing benefits they provide. What you will find out in this article is how valuable this type of training can be to people of all ages and abilities for improving how they move.
8 Key Abilities You Must Use In Your Training If You Play Sports
One of the misconceptions in the sports world is that to become great, all you need to do is devote endless hours of playing your chosen sport. While it is true you need to put in lots of practice and dedication to learning the skills needed to excel at your sport, just playing the sport and not working on the finer principles of movement will not take you to your full potential. All of the greatest athletes from every sport, even golf (Tiger Woods) attribute their conditioning as a key part of their success. If you just want an average level of performance, and be good at completing a few limited skills, then just playing your sport will achieve that. However, if you want to be the best you could possibly be as an athlete and become great, then you need to design and implement a “specific to you” conditioning program. This requires more than training strength and aerobic fitness and in some cases you may not need to be all that strong! In this article, I will explain the 8 key abilities you need to consider and help you understand what sports conditioning really means.
Tennis Specific Strength Training Secrets To Enhance Your Game & Prevent Injury
Across the globe, tennis is a game in which many people readily participate in. Whether at a recreational, social, competitive or professional level, the game involves various complex movement patterns, moving in all directions that include a great deal of strength, speed, power, balance and endurance. Just by watching a game of tennis at a professional level, one can really appreciate the great amount of strain that is put on the body, especially when games last upwards of 3 hours. Unfortunately, as with most sports where this is long standing time of physical strain, comes a high risk of injury. There are many factors that can predispose a player to wrist, ankle, knee, hip spine, shoulder and elbow injuries such as differences in bio-mechanics and poor physical condition, equipment, weather conditions, muscular and structural or postural imbalances and repetitive movement strains on joints. In the general population, there is approximately about five injuries per 1,000 hours of participation, and 33 injuries per 100,000 tennis players require hospitalization. Thus, the importance of strength and conditioning for injury prevention is overwhelming. However it must be specific to you, the sport and your weaknesses otherwise the conditioning program will create your injury! And on top of that you are unlikely to play well without the best conditioning methods and techniques. In this article, I will look specifically at the role of conditioning to improve performance and why just using a random approach to strength and conditioning will set you up for injury and poor performance.
Why Unilateral Strength Exercises Provide The Biggest Gains
The value of using bilateral or unilateral exercises with strength training is one of those topics that has been greatly debated in recent years. There is one school of thought believing it is preferable to predominately use bilateral heavy exercises like the bench press, squats, and deadlifts where maximum load can be lifted. And the other school of thought believing it is more beneficial to use single limb exercises that try to even out imbalance and asymmetry. There are pros and cons to using both types of exercises and I fall somewhere in the middle and often use a combination of both types of training depending on the person and the situation in front of me. I always believed the unilateral exercises were more for rehab and core stability and the bigger bilateral exercise the preferred choice for sports and increasing serious muscle and strength. However, this is not the case and in this article I will explain exactly how unilateral exercises provide greater strength gains than many realize.
Power Training – Why It Is So Important & What Are The Best Exercises?
Power training is a very unique training method that is often misunderstood, neglected and even abused in many strength programs. In simple terms power is the ability to exert maximum muscular contraction instantly in an explosive burst of movement. Most sporting and athletic activities require a fair degree of explosive power, whether it is needed to move explosively to hit a golf ball or tennis ball, jump, sprint, break away from an opponent, react to an opponents offensive tactic or handle an open-field hit, the need to produce power is an essential component. However, it is not limited to sports with many daily activities also requiring this ability. We need power and speed to complete simple tasks like getting out of a chair, walking up stairs, starting a lawnmower or crossing a road quickly. When you understand that we lose this ability very quickly if nothing is done to prevent it, you begin to see just how important power training is to ALL of us. In this article, I will explain how to not only preserve it, but improve your power no matter what age you are.
How To Avoid Over-training & Maximize Your Training Efforts
As a person who has had a strong passion for sport and exercise all my life, I have made many mistakes that led to injury and pain that could easily have been avoided. For the past 20 years I have worked closely with many clients as a trainer and seen countless others make these same mistakes. The desire to get the most out of my own body and also my clients, motivated me to learn as much as I could about the best methods and strategies to deliver great training results without the risk of more pain. Many of you reading this article are like me, trying to find the missing ingredient or magic formula to maximize performance success. With such a determined focus on progression and performance it is easy to begin to push too hard, train too long or simply do way too much. It is in our nature to strive for perfection and often we are led to set goals that may be out of reach. While we can work to achieve our potential, we must always consider our abilities and our limitations and avoid the danger of over-training which can be a serious problem to your health. It can lead to decreased performance, decreased energy, depression, and potentially serious injury. Stress, nutrition, hydration, training, practice and, competition schedules, rest & recovery are all important factors to be carefully considered and organized in order to avoid over-training. In this article, we will give you some great ideas and knowledge to avoid the mistakes I and many others have made.
6 Running Workouts To Improve Speed & Acceleration For Sports
We all know that to excel at sports like Football, Basketball and Soccer you will need an incredible amount of fitness. Skills are great to have, but if you gas out quickly due to poor fitness levels you are of no use to your team. This means you need to spend time improving your running fitness, and unfortunately for many sporting athletes and coaches this is where they make the mistake of over-using endurance focused workouts. Sports like football, soccer, and basketball incorporates multiple high-intensity efforts interspersed with periods of lower-intensity exercise. The physiological demands of these sports require players to be competent in several aspects of fitness, which include aerobic and anaerobic power, muscle strength, and agility. Running in a straight line for 10-15 minutes will improve fitness, but not the specific fitness of what these sports demand. In this article, I will discuss how you can design a running workout that meets all of these demands.