Is Inflexibility Holding Your Performance Back?
by: Manny Aragon
If you are an athlete and you have reached a plateau in your performance then you already know that you must either need to train harder, smarter, or take a break in order to break through to the next level- or so goes the conventional wisdom. As athletes, we come to know at some point in our athletic career (some early on, some as ageing progresses) that we are either “gifted” with the right genes for our particular sport or we aren’t.
So, what of those who are gifted? Why do some of them consistently dominate the top end of their respective sports? Conventional wisdom says that the winners must have “worked harder” or “smarter” or have some other secret sauce. While its possible that some of the winners simply worked harder or smarter than everyone else,that seems to be the exception rather than the rule in most cases.
Professionals are professional. They take their sport very seriously. It’s highly unlikely that the winners always work harder and smarter than everyone else. So then, what’s to explain for their consistent wins? One of the areas of intense study, particularly in endurance sports and technique oriented sports is “movement form” and the biomechanics of movement. Running, for example has two well known “form” training methods: Pose and Chi running (amongst others).
So, lets take the running example a bit further then. The theory behind studying running form is that supposedly there is a way to “learn” a more efficient way to run, thereby saving energy and allowing the runner to generate additional speed. There is no argument that some runners have a form that looks elegant and fast while others look terrible and seem to be able to hammer out the speed nonetheless. But on the pointy end of the professional endurance running community, this is not the case. Runners tend to have variations of the same form.
When one looks closely at the form variations of the top runners, it starts to become apparent that some (who tend to be the winners), even within this community of elites, are simply more efficient than others (who tend to not win as often). At this high level, the biomechanics of movement become vitally more important as the performance differences between the winners and runners up are often measured in seconds or minutes over a long course.
Assuming that all of the top runners are training their form constantly, how is it that some have better form than others? In a word: Flexibility. A runner who cannot separate his legs as far apart and as easily as the next runner will have to take more steps and thereby do more work over the course of a race. This is simple biomechanics. The less flexible runner (swimmer, cyclist, tennis player, volleyball player, pitcher, etc.) will have to work harder for the same result.
The problem inherent with stretching is that you can only get a small increase in flexibility of the muscle before you run into a much larger problem: micro fiber adhesions. Micro fiber adhesions are a compensation of the body to overuse of the muscles both within as well as between muscles. This causes the muscles to literally “stick together”- the practical effects being shorter muscle range of motion and lowered efficiency. This is a trade off by the body in return for greater stability in the area of overuse trauma (which causes muscle breakdown and the resultant response by the body of “splinting” the tissue with microfiber adhesions).
These microfiber adhesions don’t go away and over time they tend to accumulate- hence the reason why older folks tend to get stiffer with age. Funny thing is, by the time we usually notice a lack of flexibility in our movement, we have generally lost about 50% of our range of motion! So whats an elite athlete, age grouper, or aging athlete to do?
The first thing to acknowledge is that each sport has a collection of movements that are required to be executed successfully. All sports have some sort of biomechanically efficient “form” associated with their movements. So, what ever your sport is, those movements and ranges of motion associated with those movements are the only ones you really need to be concerned with. How efficiently are you able to move through your sport’s movement set and with what range of motion or efficiency are you able to execute proper form? Or are you unable to execute proper form at all?
Once you assess the form and resultant limitations in your range of motion (flexibility), then it is time to look at how to improve your ROM by way of improving your flexibility. As some point you will need to address the microfiber adhesions ( the “glue”) sticking your muscles together and restricting their freedom of movement.
Traditional foam rolling, sports massage, and even connective tissue massage, can get you some additional flexibility but it doesn’t solve the fundamental problem associated with microfiber adhesions. My newly developed method does. You see, first you need to know what to look for (biomechanical analysis), then you need to know where to work (professional judgement and experience), after that you need to know what type of gains you are looking for, and then, you need to be able to quantify where you started and where you finished. This is a complicated process!
The result is effortless improvement and efficiency in your sport. You can’t train this and you can’t stretch your way to this type of improvement. Give me a call and schedule your Sport Specific Assessment to see if you can benefit from this new program. Both assessment as well as results are quantifyable.