Good morning
Been a busy couple of weeks for the coach. Four days at the Ideafit Personal Trainer conference, followed by a quick trip to New Hampshire to meet with some NFLR clients and now back in Pinehurst and I must get ready to head back to classes tomorrow. Spring break was quick for sure!
The Ideafit conference was very interesting and provided a lot of great information. My class on “stability & mobility” was probably my favorite, as it delved into the importance of balancing strengthening (weights) and mobility (range of motion). Often most active people, focus on just one or the other. resulting in poor movement functionality, bad posture and long-term problems. I suppose that I could have inserted the word “potential” in front of those results, because some would say that it is not certain that an imbalance of stability and mobility will have a negative impact. It is possible that an individual that lacks one or the other may never be adversely affected, however I believe ignoring strengthening and proper mobility, will always result in a negative outcome. Some outcomes will be more obvious, such as poor posture, while other outcomes are less obvious, yet lead to overuse injuries and poor efficiency in our activities.
Running as well as most if not all activity requires muscles, tissue, and bones to all function as they are intended and as a team. For example, we spend our entire day sitting at our desk and this position causes our hip flexors to shorten (frontside muscles). The first affect, is that some important muscles are now in a shortened state and we lose mobility (range of motion). The second affect is that the opposite side muscle (glutes), shut off. So, we now have reduced range of motion on our frontside and we have glutes that are not active participants in our moving. Now, we get out of our car and we do some active stretching and we think we are ready to run. We feel tight initially, but we eventually loosen up and believe that all is well. Yes, we do loosen up in some areas of our body, but in reality, we are not really functioning as we are designed. Our glutes, which are an important participant in our running, are mostly inactive, which means our hamstrings are being asked to play a much greater role than they are designed to do. Asking the hamstrings to increase their role can lead to multiple abnormalities and various long-term injuries.
Understanding “stability and mobility” is important for a running coach, a personal trainer and anyone that wants to function properly (which should be all of us). Through education, experience and technology (gait analysis), we (NFLR) want to provide the running community the best possible personal coaching that helps individual have the right amount of stability and mobility.
Time to get along. Have a great week!
God Bless!
Mike
Coaches running tip:
Dynamic stretching before running and static stretching after your run.
