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Aug
23
The Myth of Core Stability
Filed Under Athletic Development | 2 Comments
Few people would argue that core training is an integral part of an athletic development training program. Aesthetic benefits aside, core training is widely accepted as improving:
- Lumbar stability and therefore reducing risk and/or symptoms of low back pain
- Force transfer between the lower and upper body, which improves power in just about every athletic movement (kicking a soccer ball, swinging a bat, lacrosse and hockey shooting, fighting off defenders in every contact sport)
- Stability of the pelvis to allow for more efficient lower body movements, such as rapidly changing direction
Because of the core’s importance in both maximizing performance and minimizing injury risk, core stabilization concepts are one of the underlying foundations of all of our training programs at Endeavor. If you’ve been following my site for a while you know that I do my best to actively seek out new information to better design programs to help our athletes. Last week I came across a draft of an article from Eyal Lederman, a professor in London, titled “The Myth of Core Stability.” I’m always intrigued by articles that argue against the norm as these are usually the most eye opening.
Lederman argued that the evidence in support of core stability training to back pain is pretty limited. He notes that strength may not be the issue since some of the major core muscles are minimally active during activities of daily living. As a quick background, muscles become “active” when the body sends an electrical signal to the muscle to contract. For study purposes, the signal is often “normalized” to a maximal value for that muscle (MVC). When we talk about these “maximal” values, we need to keep in mind that maximum activation is highly dependent upon the length of the muscle and direction of the movement, but I won’t bore you with all the underlying neuroscience.
The article cites research demonstrating that walking necessitates average values of:
- 2% MVC from the rectus abdominis (the six pack muscle)
- 5% MVC from the external obliques
Further research is cited painting the picture that normal activities (even some with external loads added) require minimal trunk muscle activity (between 1-5% MVC).
The underlying tone of the article was that core stability training is foolish and scientifically unsupported. I bring up this article because many times these things work their way to your eyes and ears through the media with headlines like “Core Training Is Not Important” as some staff writer attempts to create an interesting story with out-of-context research. Within an athletic context, there are a few things worth keeping in mind:
- The article cites trunk activity during walking and standing, not hockey-relevant movements like skating, changing directions, shooting, taking hits, etc.
- The article is put within the frame of solving back pain, not optimizing performance
- The article largely ignores evidence of active people with back pain resolving symptoms by putting a greater focus on improving their posture and core stability
- Like many academics, this article systematically (although using flawed logic) dismisses many commonly held beliefs about core training, but fails to offer any alternative
At Endeavor Sports Performance, our core training system functions to integrate appropriate mobility and stability of the pelvis and spine into athletic movements. We follow a basic progression of:
- Reinforce core stability in static positions (front planks, side planks, glute bridges, anti-rotation belly press isoholds, etc.)
- Increase challenge to static core stability by adding a dynamic component (chop and lift variations, plank and bridge “marches”, rollouts, tight rotations, 2-Way Bunkie side planks, dynamic anti-rotation belly press’, etc.)
- Maximize unexpected dynamic stiffness through perturbation training (Split stance belly press with perturbation, overhead stability ball perturbation, squat with overhead stability ball perturbation, split squat with overhead stability ball perturbation, stability ball front plank with perturbation, side plank with perturbation, etc.)
While I think most people are at least loosely familiar with the first two steps of this progression, few athletes have been exposed to perturbation training. I strongly believe this type of training will drastically increase in popularity over the next several years. Check out videos of a couple of the more advanced progressions of perturbation training below. Have you ever seen anything like this?
Split Squat IsoHold with Overhead Stability Ball Perturbation
Stability Ball Front Plank with Perturbation
Colby Cohen and Jeff Buvinow do a great demonstrating these exercises. The goal is to not move at all or, more realistically, to minimize the displacement and return to “neutral” as quickly as possible. It’s hard to tell from the video, but I’m really “cranking” on them pretty hard. We progress to more vigorous perturbations, but ultimately we want to challenge their stability in multiple directions. In the first video, I’m randomly alternating amongst pushing, pulling, and rotating the ball in a variety of directions. In the second video, I’m somewhat randomly alternating between rotating the hips, rotating the shoulder, and laterally deviating the hips and shoulders. By creating a random variety of stresses, the athlete learns to reflexively generate stiffness.
To your success,
Kevin Neeld
Aug
18
I’ve been on a huge continuing ed kick recently and have come across some great stuff I want to share with you.
New Study Finds 70 Percent of Able-Bodied Hockey Players have Abnormal Hip and Pelvis MRIs
This brief article was written in mid March so it isn’t “new” anymore, but it’s still worth the 2 minutes it’ll take you to read if you haven’t yet. For hockey players, this is huge. This study highlights the fact that a positive MRI finding (e.g. they find something wrong with you) doesn’t necessarily mean you need surgery. It’s just a piece of the puzzle. Almost identical information has come out regarding the shoulders of baseball pitchers. Forget the specificity of the joint (or population), the big take home here is a doctor telling you something came back as “wrong” doesn’t mean you should immediately sign up for surgery. Intelligent conservative treatment may be a more advantageous option!
Turns out single-leg transitional power correlates to sprint performance. Could it be that single-leg training is important for athletes??
Counter-Intuitive Rehabilitation
Charlie Weingroff did an AWESOME interview for Super Human Radio that you can listen to for free at the link above. Charlie delves into a lot of the problems, or more politely “limitations” of most physical therapists and gives some great examples about how the body functions as a unit. Even if you aren’t a physical therapist, this is a great listen for every athlete and parent because it gives you an idea of what you should be looking for in a great physical therapist. Do your best to ignore the supplement promotions during the commercials.
Diaphragmatic Breathing Questions
Every time I visit Carson’s site, I learn something new. I’ve started incorporating breathing exercises and coaching cues into our programs at Endeavor a lot more over the last couple months, in large part because of what I’ve learned from Carson about the importance of proper breathing in athletic performance. Carson answers a handful of really well thought out questions in this post.
Nick Tumminello discusses some interesting research that questions our understanding of the role of the upper trapezius. Functional anatomy is probably my favorite area of study so this one really caught my attention.
To your success,
Kevin Neeld
Aug
16
For the last decade or so, the words “sport specific training” have frequented the marketing of people with services claiming (sometimes accurately) to develop athletes. The “sport-specific” movement was initially characterized by people taking identical movement found in sports (e.g. a baseball swing, a hockey shot, etc.) and providing some sort of resistance to the pattern.
The “Sport-Specific Training” Mistake
Unfortunately, the approach of loading skilled movement patterns is counterproductive. Whether or not you get stronger from doing these loaded repeated movements is somewhat debatable, but in the interest of optimism, let’s suppose that there is a strengthening effect. The problem is that the skilled pattern itself is negatively affected. The loaded movements ruin the movement pattern; usually in terms of both neuromuscular timing and outcome accuracy. This is just a fancy way of saying that the way your muscles control the movement and the accuracy of the movement are negatively affected. Think of the implications this has for ice hockey. Altered shooting form and accuracy can make a HUGE difference since most players only get a shot or two a game!
The other, less frequently acknowledged downside of this comes back to the idea of tissue stress accumulation I discussed a couple weeks back (Long Term Hockey Development and Injury Prevention). The more you move through a pattern, the larger the amount of stress the involved muscles and surrounding tissue take. Because we are a stimulus driven society and typically focus little, if at all, on recovery, doing extra work on top of playing your sport in these sport specific patterns can push you closer or over your injury threshold.
Do We Need “Sport-Specific Training” At All?
While the training was a bit off, the intention was great and it made a lot more people in the sports arena aware of the necessity of physically preparing to play. With that though, it gave the allusion that every sport had it’s own secret training protocol and that athletes need highly sport-specific training in order to get the results they deserve. In other words, hockeyplayers needed “hockey-specific” training, soccer players needed “soccer-specific” training, and so on.
In reality, most popular sports (soccer, baseball, hockey, football, lacrosse, basketball, field hockey, and volleyball, amongst others) share more athletic qualities than people realize. Maximizing athletic performance in any of these areas requires training to ensure:
- Appropriate multi-planar joint stability of the ankles, hips, thoracic spine (upper spine), and glenohumeral joint (shoulder).
- Appropriate stability of the knee, lumbar spine (lower back), scapulothoracic joint (shoulder blade), and elbow
- Improved full body power
- Improved strength of all major muscle groups in FUNCTIONAL movement patterns (e.g. lunge and squatting patterns, NOT machine work!)
With this in mind, over 80% of training will be almost identical for athletes of all the above sports. I remember hearing Mike Boyle joke once that he created the Boston University Field Hockey program by taking the Ice Hockey program, deleting “Ice”, and adding “Field”. I’m not sure if he actually did that or not, but his point was clear. The major differences in training programs between sports are:
- The proportion of work in the areas outlined above. For example, a lacrosse player may need more explosive upper body work than a soccer player because of the physicality and shooting in lacrosse
- The direction of the training stresses. For example, sports like volleyball and basketball necessitate more vertical power training (e.g. vertical jumping) than sports like soccer and ice hockey, which are predominantly (although not entirely) horizontal-based. Similarly, sports like baseball, golf, hockey, and lacrosse will necessitate more horizontal rotational power training than sports like football because of the importance of shooting in these sports.
- Conditioning. The metabolic demands between sports like football, volleyball, and soccer are completely different. As a result, so is the emphasis on conditioning. While almost all conditioning for sports should be interval-based, the frequency, intensity, and duration of the conditioning should be specific to the sport.
Sport- vs. Sports-Specific Training
The major take home from all of this is that athletes and parents should be actively seeking out “sports-specific” training, not “sport-specific” training. Sports-specific training creates separation from the largely irrelevant personal training and body building alternatives out there, but encompasses the important idea of training in the interest of athletic development.
Training for athletic development is the key to experiencing a long, successful sports career while avoiding the injuries imposed by so-called “sport-specific” training programs.
To your success,
Kevin Neeld
Aug
9
One of the most prevalent movement flaws we see on a daily basis is an inward collapsing of the knee during cutting, squatting, and jump landing patterns. This is especially true in females, who tend to have a more difficult time preventing this motion due to their skeletal structure (wider pelvis). This pattern can lead to a variety of knee injuries, the most threatening of which is the well-known ACL tear.
Retraining Proper Movement Patterns
The approach we take in retraining this pattern includes educating our athletes on what the pattern should look like, strengthening the muscles on the outside of the hip, which is influential in pulling the upper leg and knee out, and practicing proper technique in a variety of athletic movements (including speed training, plyometric training, resistance training, and conditioning). This approach has proven extremely effective for just about every athlete we’ve had.
The exception is athletes that have a flat foot (or two). When the foot flattens out (or pronates), it drives the lower leg into internal rotation. My colleague John Pallof calls the talocrural joint (what many refer to as the “ankle joint”) a torque converter, since inversion and eversion (inward or outward tilting) at this segment leads to internal and external rotation of the lower leg. He also pointed out that a few degrees of excessive inversion (as is the case in individuals with flat feet or “over pronation”) translates into even more degrees of internal rotation of the lower leg, which translates into even MORE degrees of internal rotation at the hip.
Try This!
One way to illustrate this concept is just to move your arm in large circles. If you look at the diameter of the circle made at your arm by your shoulder, it will be considerably smaller than the diameter of the circle made by your hand. In the above example, your lower leg would be your upper arm (small circle) and your hip would be your hand (large circle).
In athletes that have difficulty keeping their knee out, despite a few weeks of training and coaching under their belt, I take a closer look at their feet and am starting to notice a common theme.
If you look closely, you’ll see that the achilles tendon appears to head straight down, and then take a somewhat sharp turn toward the outside of the foot. This is indicative of an over-pronated foot. This athlete appears to have the problem on both feet. Can you imagine what his knees will look like?
See how his knees appear to point inward? In a correctly positioned foot, the achilles would appear more vertical and the back of the knee would be facing straight back instead of rotating toward the inside.
There is some debate about whether we can restore an arch in our feet through training. I’ve run this question by my friend Ryan Chang, who was a fellow grad student when I was at UMass Amherst, but current works as a Pedorthis at Kintec Footlabs and has done biomechanics work for Adidas, and he seemed to think getting an orthotic was the better route. John Pallof agreed. It’s better to get a corrective orthotic in there early to prevented undesirable motion at the knee and hip. As I mentioned in last weeks newsletter, unwanted motion accumulates into serious injuries. Knee meniscus tears and hip labral tears are amongst the many injuries that could result from this.
If your feet look like the gentleman’s in the picture above, it may be worth scheduling an appointment with a specialist to see if you’re right for orthotics. John Pallof was kind enough to pass along his “go-to” resource in this regard: Sole Supports. If you go to the site, you can find a provider that’s near you.
Take Home Message
My hope is that you take this information seriously and don’t push this stuff to the back burner. I recently heard my friend Joe Heiler (a PT from Traverse City, MI) mention that Jan Eckstrand presented research at the 2009 Soccer Industry Medical Symposium 2009 stating that an analysis of 70 teams from 18 countries over 8 seasons (over 9000 injuries!) revealed that previous injury was BY FAR the best predictor of future injury. This isn’t to say that previous ankle sprains are predictive of future ankle sprains (although they are); this means that ANY injury is the greatest predictor of ANY future injury. This point CANNOT be overlooked. Injury prevention should be the primary goal of every athlete, and is the primary reason I think athletes need to be training year-round.
To your success,
Kevin Neeld
P.S. Don’t forget to check out the re-release of my Hockey Development Coaching Program! The bonuses alone are worth the investment.
Jul
23
Grooving New Movement Patterns
Filed Under Athletic Development | 1 Comment
Over the last several years, I’ve become a strong believer in developing individual-specific ideal movement patterns both to improve performance and to minimize injury risk. I have to put the “individual-specific” disclaimer in there to highlight the fact that everyone’s joint anatomy is a little different and you can’t always expect the exact same movement patterns from every player.
With that said, a lot of the hockey players we see need work in a few movements. Three big ones are:
-Pelvic stability during lateral miniband walks
-Scapular stability during pressing movements
-Knee/hip control during double and single leg landings
Grooving new movement patterns generally follows this progression:
1) The athlete needs to understands EXACTLY what you want them to do and can picture themselves doing it the right way in their heads.
2) Once they have that, focused coaching/cuing is necessary to get them to FEEL themselves doing it the right way.
3) The volume of the movement needs to be steadily increased to help reinforce the correct performance of the movement
One of the biggest problems I see in the proper execution of this progression is that, especially in youth team settings when proper movement technique learning is most important, massive amounts of volume are loaded on top of an improper movement base.
I think of grooving new movement patterns like starting a new river. Picture drawing a line in the sand with your pointer finger about a foot long. Imagine what would happen if you slowly poured water in one end of that line. After some water was absorbed the sand, the rest would trickle along the rest of the line to the other end, bringing some sand from the border with it, and ultimately making the line a little wider, deeper, and longer. If you kept doing this over and over, you’d get a strongly grooved water pathway.
Now, play that tape back in reverse. Imagine you just drew the line in the sand with your finger. Instead of slowly pouring water in, somebody’s kid runs over and dumps an entire bucket of water on the end of the line.
Can you picture the explosive ruining of your line-signifying movement pattern?
As you’ve heard me say before, it comes down to QUALITY being a prerequisite to QUANTITY. I’ve heard the idea that it takes 10,000 repetitions before something is “perfected” and can be performed without much thought, but those 10,000 repetitions need to be performed at a HIGH quality, and doing them all in one day won’t get you very far. Sometimes less is more. “Do less.”
To your continued success,
Kevin Neeld