Monthly Archives: March 2012
Volleyball Warm-Ups Gone Wrong!
I’ve pretty much shouted loud and clear the research and MODERN thought processes on stretching, but I still cringe every time I go to a national qualifier and see circles of girls get in a large circle and start to do stretching.
DO YOU WANT TO LOSE? DO YOU WANT TO GET INJURED?
Watch this video and then lets keep talking! (I don’t know Dr. Polka, but he is right on track!)
Did you see the quadriceps? Did you see how weak they got? Do you think you can jump in volleyball with weak quadriceps muscles? and yet we pull our legs behind us up to our tail and say that we feel loose after we finish stretching….right?
So now I ask the same questions? Do you want to get hurt? Do you want to LOSE matches?
Not all coaches know the same information. Does that mean they are bad volleyball coaches? Not at all. Does it mean that they might be bad volleyball performance enhancement and conditioning coaches? Most likely.
Coaches Recommendation:
Your club and/or school should have a warm-up and training routine provided by a knowledgeable professional. What does this mean to Coach Anderson? Your program must be designed my someone holding a Master’s degree or higher in the field. If you find a trainer with a CSCS from the NSCA to write your volleyball program, you are ahead of the rest. As many people of say in Master’s programs, “What I learned from my masters degree is that everything I learned in my undergraduate degree was wrong.”
See you on the court!
Decreasing Vertical?
In a recent article from VolleyballMag.com, Brian O’Keefe wrote an article on his decreasing or at least decrease vertical jump and his desire to stay competitive on the floor. He goes on to discuss his achilles tendonitis and its possible effect on his vertical jump.
To start, one thing to note is that he mentions age. Starting at about age 30 our muscles begin to make a phsyiological adaptation to conserve energy and begin to convert unused muscle into fat. Two bad things happen here; the first is that you are losing muscle. The second is that your strength to weight ratio is decreasing. My favorite line I hear from athletes as they get older is “I haven’t gained any weight since high school.” You may not have gained pounds on the scale, but a comparison of your high school body will tell us many things.
To continue, the muscle you lose to fat is not necessarily the most important change. The other thing changing is that some of your muscle fibers are actually converting into slower muscles. This usually occurs because you aren’t using your “fast” muscles as much as you were previously. (The physiology behind this is way more complicated than I have explained here.) By losing your “fast” muscles, you lose the ability to create large powerful movements using those muscles.
Basically to solve these two problems, the answer is to train. You can gain those muscle fibers back and you can decrease your body fat, but both will be necessary to get back to your starting point.
I’ll continue in my next post…..
See you on the court!
