Water is an excellent medium that provides unique qualities that athletes can exploit for various needs such as conditioning, specific strength, joint mobility/flexibility, and rehabilitation. What I like about the zealous enthusiast is that they explore all the possibilities that water can do, even if another option is superior. This is important for well rounded programs, as even if a tool or pr [...]

Found this in the archives - Thought it would shed some light on this now "controversial aspect of training. This was written in 2002, before movement prep was born!Warm-up is the most neglected part of the workout, yes it is part of the workout. The workout begins with the warm-up! The first mistake that people make is to take warm-up for granted. It sets the tempo for the workout to follow. It [...]

Dennis wrote the following: Can you please share your thoughts on why you don't like the straight leg marches and the 1-leg rdl's?I believe the straight leg marches cause hamstring problems. They are too ballistic in warm-up. As far as one leg RDL or the RDL for that matter, if you are doing them to strengthen hamstrings, there are better more functional alternatives - the multidirectional lunge [...]

Each of the last five teams we have played with Venice volleyball have done some version of the so called movement prep. It has been interesting to watch. One team spent 18 minutes on this stuff. All at a walking temp almost at Tai Chi rhythm. Folks that does not prepare you to play a ballistic game like volleyball.Vern's post was again a shout of wisdom to an audience that doesn't have a basic [...]

I feel vindicated the Play Magazine section of the Sunday November 2, New York Times. They talked about things in the article some of us figured out 35 years ago - (Sorry for the sarcasm) but warm-up is just that, it is movement. Two of the exercises they illustrate in the article the straight leg march and the scorpion are two exercises I would NEVER do in warm-up. I think they are not appropriat [...]

Inspired by biological development, computational development is seen as a potential solution to such problems. This paper reports on a small subset of experimental results summarised from a doctoral thesis. The work addresses the problem of understanding the self-organising mechanisms and principles of development. The application chosen was that of constructing primitive 3D, geometric shapes, wh [...]

Mobility is the trendy item of the moment and it looks like the usual suspects of sports performance are at it again at your expense. In efforts to stay cutting edge they share new progressions, foreign exercises stolen from PT, misinterpretation of basic research, or unfortunately original moronic epiphanies. The prime example is dorsiflexion of the ankle joint. Well people the foot has over 30 j [...]

The analogy of the mast of a ship being the spine is very popular but has a few problems. First, the support wires are not guy wires ( some PT from Toronto supposedly referred to them as guide wires for some reason) they are strays and shrouds. Ship building requires a lot of engineering and spouting off lame rehashing of Paul Chek is outdated at best. Paul has helped the industry back in the 90s [...]

Summation of forces is simply to time the links of the skeletal segments in an orderly fashion from the ground up. This is a simple concept as many events in sport movement occur this way. Training needs to encourage summation of forces as much as possible as the strength ratios of muscle groups must be cultivated in harmony. Many times athletes will hear working on the posterior chain catch phras [...]

"This is a difficult question to answer in this format for what folks mean by intensive, extensive and low intensity work varies. I have seen very consistent results from programs that do intensive and extensive work as classically described. I do things that I consider to hit both realms albeit not purely classical in design. For example, we do a lot of 100m "up-backs" in the early training ph [...]