One thing a lot of athletes struggle with is maintaining a stable pelvis while pushing laterally.
It’s common to see the torso bend back toward the pushing leg in exercises ranging from Lateral MiniBand Walks to Lateral Bounds and lateral cutting in transitional speed work.
While there’s a time and place for emphasizing this type of “bend”, more often than not it’s causing the athlete to lose time/speed by creating a lag between the push-off and the body moving laterally through space.
One simple way to start to address this is with the Lateral Wall Push exercise in this video.
The goal here is to keep the torso upright by maintaining wall contact with the hips and shoulders and to use the outside leg to “push the floor away” to generate maximum push-off force.
This set-up can be used in a couple different ways – either to: 1️⃣ emphasize push-off strength at different hip angles (more upright = less hip abduction) or to 2️⃣ focus on end-range strength, starting as deep as possible and shifting slightly deeper as range of motion opens up from rep to rep.
The feedback from the wall will help the athletes isolate motion at the hip while maintaining a level pelvis, which creates a foundation for them learning how to push laterally without folding over the back leg.
Typically performed for 4-8 reps of 5s holds.
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To your success,
Kevin Neeld
SpeedTrainingforHockey.com
HockeyTransformation.com
OptimizingAdaptation.com
P.S. For more information on how to assess movement and integrate specific strategies to improve mobility and movement quality in training, check out Optimizing Movement. Don’t have a DVD player? Send me a note through the contact page after you checkout here Optimizing Movement and I’ll get you a digital copy of the videos!
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