I got an email yesterday with a request for my opinion on Mike Reinold’s post on the cobra pose, noting the Anatomy Trains reference and yoga. My first thought was the thread with Elitetack.com member the Muse bringing up yoga a few weeks ago. The intent of the email was not a set-up for some me to hammer a sarcastic response, but to create dialogue of the fact that some are back to using yoga again. It never left. The question was integration of various postures into training. One thing I liked about the post was Mike included a chart of how the posture could unwind the front line with those that are stuck in a hunched position. This was sort of a joint by joint approach to training shared by mike and it was a nice look to see what areas could be affected by the big back for your buck exercise. I think it has merit but for who? I find that overhead actions stretch out the front line more such as snatches but with his baseball populations that is a bad idea perhaps. I do think young athletes will benefit but an older athlete will need manual therapy. With guys like Curt Schilling playing videogames locked up for days the rate of change to his fascial system is likely to be months (18-24 according to Myers) that perhaps the cobra pose would be too long and slow. Here are some parting thoughts.
Athletes sometimes like good manual therapy because they can just lay down and let people work on them. I do think therapy starts with training but the older the athlete the more likely therapy is the solution because it’s much faster than training. The youth need more training and less therapy.I stand with Al Vermeil that sometimes manual therapy is necessary. Last, Mr. Glove like many coaches want to see how training and doing things better may help with some of the PT type needs and I attached one detail of why I do a lot of core barefoot. I saw divers training and like the fact that they had great plantar flexion abilities when they were doing core work, so I tried this with swimmers who were not gifted in the ankle flexibility and I saw measurable changes over a few months. The physioball and weight of the body did a nice stretch, so much of the needs in flexibility for athletes is done by indirect training. So many things in training my slowly seep into the body over time we must patiently wait to see all of the adaptations, not just the primary and obvious ones.