Now that the blogs on sports performance slowed down and the hype is died off a bit, I decided to do some careful reflection on some of the work of Guy Voyer from the late 90s. What I wanted to do was see what the impact of various seminars and conferences had on me. If I wrote my workout on Friday, what would Monday’s changes be after the weekend course or seminar? Would the big picture be much different? In the profession of sports training I see a lot of bias and rewriting of history, and now everyone is an expert of fascia. Some coaches is claiming varied vector training is being done with their athletes. Some are suggesting that they are doing fascial fitness with athlete X. My question is why wasn’t this shared years before? Perhaps we are better at describing training or sharing how training works, but are we making training work better? Does the training results actually improve? Here are 3 thoughts on fascia:
(1) Squatting Deep and Heavy – I watched at the University Gym in 1997 an Australian athlete squat all the way down to the floor with perfect form. It was the best squat I ever saw in terms of load and mechanics. My first reaction was fear, as I was more exposed to butt to bench vs you know what to grass as knee health was brought up with many coaches. Currently I think a heavy front or back squat pain free is the biggest assessment you can have because of all the demands necessary to do it well. Remember some sedentary people will have mobility scores similar to elite athletes but very few people in the athletic population can squat deep correctly with 2 x BW.
(2) Yoga- What if you had a PHD, olympic lifter, and yoga instructor all into one? I spoke to a guy that was just that composition about real mobility. After the Sydney Olympics ironically, Meridian Stretching was brought up because stubborn areas with athletes seemed to make great progress with the stretches that Dara Torres did. After discussions with coaches we joked about Vertical Integration Stretching by using alternating methods of stretching with some yoga-like movements. I will get back to more specific programming this year as it will not add more time to the training and it will be interesting to see if the lower body flexibility increases more.
(3) Biochemistry and Biomechanics- The research on timing of exercise has hinted that adaptations are highly dependent on order or sequence of training. The research on fascia shares the unique sensitivity to specific chemistry of the body in order to elongate it. Often one must weigh the entire sequence of training and see what combination will reap the biggest benefits. This is the most tricky. I think those that follow the conventional process ofdynamic–>Speed–>Power–>Strength–>Mobility will see greater changes in joint performance scores.