Over the summer, I walked past an informal summer league team practice on a nearby field and noticed that an amazingly high number of the players wore at least one ankle brace. As Dr. Nuwer reminds us in her injurytimeout.org article on ankle, ankle sprains are one of the most common injuries in Ultimate, but in general many folks interested in getting stronger, faster, or even just want to get out of knee / ankle / foot pain don’t think twice about their ankle complex when they plan out their training program.
In this blog post, we’ll cover a few ways to think about how you (re-)train your ankle/foot complex. We’re not going to cover acute care or serious ankle dysfunction here, go see your medical and fitness professionals to take care of that first. But, if you’ve already been to the doctor and gotten an opinion or two from a physical therapist or personal trainer, here are a few points to ponder.
Earlier here on UltiTraining.com, we briefly touched upon the joint-by-joint paradigm of looking at the body, looking at when, where, and how the average athlete may need more mobility and/or stability. Zooming in on the ankle complex, Gray Cook and many other fitness professionals today would agree that many typical athletes may need more mobility in the foot and ankle, whereas many also need to learn how to stabilize under load at the knee (for example avoiding valgus collapse–caving in as you squat).
But let’s simplify things further a little bit, and just look at how well an average athlete moves her feet or ankle. Or perhaps more accurately, doesn’t move them. She might wear stiff sneakers all the time, which means that the 33 joints, 26 bones, and 20 muscles in the foot alone aren’t getting much work. In other words, her feet are getting weaker and dumber. With an elevated heel, she might have extremely limited dorsiflexion–difficult bringing the toes back up towards the knee–and a tendency to heel strike as she runs, which some research suggests may increase eccentric load on her knees.
We’re not going to cover barefoot training in detail in this blog post, but suffice it to say for now that warming up once in a while in bare feet on grass just might be a useful tool, *if* you currently are not in any ankle/heel/foot pain and already have good hip mobility and knee stability.
Earlier we talked about feet getting “dumber” and by that we mean to remind ourselves that the joints of the foot are supposed to be mobile and move, from your toes on up, and not only that but the mechanoreceptors in your foot/ankle joints and muscles are constantly sending back information back up your spinal cord about what’s going on down there. Think of it this way, if you threw a disc with mittens all the time, would you expect to have a really good sense of where your fingers are when you catch and throw? Why do the same for your feet and ankle joints?
Photography by 'shadowcompanion2'
The ankle joint itself is a hinge joint, and as we talked about earlier, many modern humans now have restricted and/or asymmetric dorsiflexion, which basically means you can’t hinge your ankle up very much. This doesn’t sound that bad, until you remember that the body tends to act as a function biokinematic unit, and with every single-leg footstrike, you can put up to 8-10x your bodyweight on each foot if you’re sprinting hard for that deep cut. A joint-by-joint perspective may suggest that the load gets shunted higher up the kinetic chain, and suddenly your knee joints are working way harder than they need to.
I could go on but I’ll just lob out three high-level suggestions.
First, keep symmetry in mind as you think about your ankles. If you sit down and dorsiflex (“pull up”) your ankle, is it the same on one side compared to the other? Can you deep squat staying on your heels?
Second, remember that your body as a biomechanical unit needs a good sense of proprioception to move well and manage injury risks. Research on ACL injuries in soccer suggest that proprioception training can be an important tool in injury prevention. Don’t have an Airex pad? Try standing on a pillow and doing bodyweight single-leg movements such as a squat or deadlift. Single leg balance work? Your ankle is gonna like it.
Finally, try to balance soft tissue work (self-myofascial release, perhaps a lacrosse ball for your plantar fascia/aponeurosis or a Tiger Tail on your calves) with mindful joint mobility, whether it’s a wall ankle mobilization and ankle circles, a simple rolling motion and alphabet tracing, or a targeted Z-Health R-phase lateral or medial ankle tilt before you do those calf raises.
If you’d like to learn more, Gray Gray’s institute page is a great place to dive in. Ankle’s away!
With just two days left to vote in the 2009 UPA Board of Directors elections, we thought we’d bring one candidate to you and encourage to vote for whichever UPA Board of Director candidate strikes your fancy.
One candidate wants 50,000 folks in the Rose Bowl to see Ultimate in 2015, while others want to focus on outreach or the college series.
Jason Chow stood out to this UltiTraining.com blogger for his work on UltiSpace.com in the virtual world, his coaching at ARHS and the National Ultimate Training camp, and his candidate platform focused on the growth of youth programs, injury awareness & prevention, and developing awareness of the sport of Ultimate.
Tell us about yourself.
I started playing ultimate in high school at Amherst, spent four great years at Syracuse, and have been playing and coaching ever since. This year played on Dark or Light for the series, a team of current ARHS players and alumni. Coaching at the National Ultimate Training Camp has to be one of my annual highlights. The community of players and coaches who come together for purpose of growing in skill, fitness, and competition is unlike anything else I know. I currently teach at ARHS, run the fall intramural league, winter indoor league, and coach in the spring. I plan on pursuing my M.Ed this coming spring and am really excited to go back to school.
I skimmed both sides of the argument and my thoughts lie somewhere in between Mike and Adam’s. I believe that regulating play like Mike is talking about (maybe not as extreme) is a fine idea. I like the value it puts on safety and responsibility. I think that limiting play should be league-based. I don’t think it should be an all-encompassing rule that governs youth over all levels.
There is a good book out now called Essential Ultimate, written by Michael Baccarini and Tiina Booth. I think it’s a great resource for coaches and players who are looking for support.
Thanks Jason!
If you are reading this then you probably aren’t at Club Nationals right now. I feel the same way.
Thanks for the submissions this week. Keep em coming!
Some good reader submissions this week. Let’s get into it.
TMuscle.com just posted a new article by Andy Bolton and Elliot Newman, reviewing the tips and tricks to Andy’s deadlifting technique. I really love deadlifting so this was a very interesting article to me. I took note of 2 different things right away:
- Andy recommends a belt on DLs over 400 lbs. I always wondered where a belt should come into play. I have never worn one, but it is good to know when I should.
- Not to use chalk until you need it. Using chalk enhances your grip, but you can strengthen your grip without using chalk on until you need it. This is how I feel about using straps for DLs as well.
The article also breaks down Sumo Deadlifting as another option, for those of you that choose to pull Sumo. Watch this video of Bolton pulling his world record weight of 1,008 lbs and then check out the article from TMuscle.com. The man is a beast!
With the rise of Ultimate as the States’ fastest growing team sport, it’s great to see the development of the UPA Coaching Corps and efforts to develop more women leaders in the sport. In college-level and pro sports, coaches are often divided into two camps, game/sports coaches who focus on strategy and sport-specific drills run on the field, and strength & conditioning (S&C) coaches who may train athletes on the track and in the weight room.
by jontunn
Now, imagine you are the S&C coach for your college Ultimate team. What do you think your #1 job is? You might answer, “to make players stronger and better conditioned”. Well, that’s not a bad start. Perhaps better is “to make athletes more efficient at sports movements”, to crib a random PLU S&C web page. But at the professional level, if you ask a S&C coach what their #1 job is, they might actually say it’s injury prevention.
If you skim Mike Boyle’s Functional Training for Sports or listen to him talk on the StrengthCoach podcast, you’ll hear Coach Boyle come back to this time and again. As S&C coaches, or perhaps more aptly as athletic development coaches as Vern Gambetta would have it, it’s very easy to be seduced by the desire to max out your sets / reps / 1RM lifts or presses, but how much this does really help on the field? How many of you have gotten injured just training for your sport?
In “Strong Athlete, Zero Injuries” (PDF), Coach Boyle reminds us that “undisputed reality is that professional sport uses the avoidance of injury as the measuring stick of success in strength and conditioning. Shouldn’t that tell you something? Pro teams don’t test squats or deadlifts. I don’t know one professional sports team that does 1RM strength testing. That should also tell you something… Success as a strength and conditioning coach at the professional level is measured by keeping the best players playing.”
In retrospect, this is obvious, how many of the best players on your Ultimate team aren’t playing right now due to injury?
“The NFL uses a statistic called “Starter’s Games Missed.” The NHL uses a similar stat called “Man Games Lost to Injury.” Same concept.” Does you or your S&C coach keep track of how many games, tourneys, or even practices you missed? “What gets measured, gets done.” Are you measuring your own (team’s) rates of injury?
“The real key is that strong and healthy aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive… There was a time I believed that everyone should have a sore back for a week after a deadlift workout and that everyone iced their shoulders and took Advil after every pressing workout. I now know that wasn’t true. I want my athletes to have all the benefit that science and experience can provide.”
(For more on injury prevention, also see this injury prevention roundtable and this on ACL injury prevention yo.)
So, given this, how shall we approach our training? A few high-level principles to guide us:
- Train movements, not muscles.
- Strength is a skill.
- Movement quality, not quantity.
If you’re a bodybuilder, you might want to train muscles, not movements, but as a competitive sports athlete, you probably want to try it the other way around, focusing on multi-joint, functional exercises with your feet (foot) on a stable surface. Examples? In the strength sphere: Bodyweight squats and compass (multi-planar) lunges. One-legged squats and single leg deadlifts. Pushups (see Strength by Sara or Eric Cressey on this one!) and Kbell Swings and Get-ups.
[In "Strong Athlete, Zero Injuries", Coach Boyle continues with "8 Ways to (Weight) Train Safely and Effectively", which is targeted toward the T-nation crowd rather than sports athletes, but two bits of advice I like are to try one-legged squats and DB snatches. I actually like bilateral deadlifts (Mike doesn't) based on what Gray Cook has to say on DLs vs squats, and enjoy KB snatches even though they're way more technical than a DB snatch.]
Do these train muscles? Probably, but you should be focusing on training the movement and not the muscle, since fundamentally athleticism is about the ability to move well, brute strength does not suffice.
You also want to be able to move with good linear speed and quickness / agility, and here I will just point you to the excellent Ultimate Fitness DVD featuring Bryan Doo (review forthcoming in another blog post).
“Strength is a skill” is a reminder from Pavel Tsatsouline that strength is not simply about the sarcoplasmic hypertrophy of your muscles, but also about the mind-muscle connection, the techniques of proper breathing, rooting, and alignment. Approach it as practice, not just mindless reps if you would, comrades =) Same goes for how you move! Movement quality, not quantity. Symmetry.
Two more principles before we call it a night.
4. Recovery and Regeneration
5. Find your Weakest Link
I don’t have a cute phrase for this off-hand, but it’s worth reminding ourselves that training is merely a stimulus. Perhaps the most important phase is this one, recovery and regeneration, what happens off the field and outside the gym. Whether you think of this as Supercompensation or Regeneration it matters how you eat, sleep, and hold yourself all those other hours of the day when you’re not in cleats or Frees or VFFs.
Finally, Gray Cook in Athletic Body in Balance reminds us that you need to constantly be looking for your weakest link. As athletes and people, we tend to play to our strengths, which is great, but also holds us back. If you can do a 2x BW DL but not a rock-bottom deep squat, then maybe mobility or flexibility is your weakest link. If you can run for miles with ease but have knee pain after practice, maybe you (after you consult with medical / fitness professionals) need more strength / activation in your posterior chain (get off that treadmill!). Maybe you need soft tissue work–today at a tourney I was in serious TMJ pain which I localized to a trigger point in my SCM, and even though my energy systems were raring to go, you can’t do much when you’re in serious pain & startle (soo unlike these guys!).
Throwing, catching, landing, running, soft tissue restrictions, hip / thoracic / ankle mobility, posterior chain strength / gluteal amnesia, cutting / other sport skills. What’s your weakest link?
Go.
A study published in Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism earlier this year has shed some light on the best way for endurance athletes to recover after exercise. The study pitted fluid replacement (FR) drinks (such as Gatorade), carbohydrate replacement (CR) drinks (such as Endurox), and Mars Refuel (chocolate milk) to see which would help replenish muscle glycogen the fastest after exhaustion for cyclists. Participants were given the recovery drink immediately after and at 2 hours following cycling till exhaustion. The effectiveness was measured by a second bout of exercise 4 hours after the first where time to exhaustion was measured again.
The results showed that those who ingested chocolate milk cycled 51% and 43% longer than those who ingested CR and FR, respectively. They concluded that chocolate milk could be used as an effective means of recovery from prolonged endurance exercise.
Nutrition during tournaments is a big predictor of how long one can last out on the field in top condition. Rapid nutrition replacement can make a big difference in performance for competitive athletes who work out vigorously once or twice a day, says Roberta Anding, a sports dietitian and spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association. For many players, money is also a big issue. What could be a cheaper way to replenish your body than with chocolate milk? Chocolate milk is almost a third of the price of Endurox and has shown to be more effective as a recovery drink.
The effectiveness of chocolate milk as a recovery aid is thought to be due to its carbohydrate to protein ratio (about 4:1, depending on the brand), which is very similar to the pricy Endurox. So how did milk outperform? The differing types of sugar in milk are theorized to be the deciding factor, as well as the higher fat content. In addition, the calcium, sodium, and vitamin D content are an added plus of milk. So ditch those expensive recovery drinks and do what your mother always told you: Drink your (chocolate) milk.
If you’re like millions of other Americans and humans alive today, you’ve probably had lower-back pain at least once in your life. In this blog post I’ll cover some very basic concepts related to lower-back pain (LBP) and how it relates to getting out of pain and eventually getting better as an Ultimate player!
The latest (Fall 2009) issue of UPA’s USA Ultimate magazine has a great article by Dr. Nuwer (of http://injurytimeout.org/ fame) and June Srisethnil PT/DPT titled “Treating Lower Back Pain”, and as we can’t do justice to the entire field of LBP in a single blog post we’ll just review some of the basics covered in the article and give some other perspectives along the way.
MOMA statue, flickr photo from 'ketrin1407'
“Ultimate is a high impact sport that causes significant stress on the spine, particularly the lower back,” Nuwer and Srisethnil write. “Back pain most commonly arises from overtraining, repeated layouts, and weakness of core muscles.”
[Note: "Treating Lower Back Pain" doesn't yet seem to be available at Dr. Nuwer's injurytimeout.org article page at the time of this writing, but let's hope it becomes available soon!]
They then remind us to see health and/or fitness professionals qualified to perform movement screens / assessments, diagnoses, and/or evaluations, noting that any “numbness, tingling, or isolated weakness” should prompt you to see a medical professional. That said, many people suffer from LBP just from sitting all day with poor form (anterior neck carriage, extreme thoracic flexion and inappropriate pelvic tilt), in class or at work, developing tight hip flexors and inactive glutes (we call this gluteal amnesia in the biz, perhaps a reference to Thomas Hanna’s term “sensory-motor amnesia” (SMA).
Dr. Nuwer’s suggestions are five-fold.
- Improve abdominal core strength and endurance
- Maintain flexibility in the hamstrings, quadriceps, and hip flexors
- Practice balance, core control, and coordination
- Maintain proper technique for jumping, landing, and laying out
- Address the warning signs
Great! I won’t drill down to each of these in turn for this short post, but just mention that Dr. Nuwer suggests 3 sets of 60s planks, “dying bug” and “gym ball bridges”, “very slow crunches for 3 sets of 60s”, “Superman” and your garden variety hamstring / quads / and hip flexors stretch. For a different perspective, also see the articles: http://bit.ly/stopcrunching as well as http://bit.ly/nyt-abs — NYTimes article titled “Is Your Ab Workout Hurting Your Back?”
That said, let’s go on and walk through the article’s five bullet points.
Bullet point (1) Core Strength-Endurance: As we covered briefly in “Mobility and Stability, part II” you want lower-back mobility in an unloaded position and lower-back stability under compressive load (gravity, barbell squats, Kettlebell snatches, and so on). Planks are a great way to build the most basic stability, just remember to maintain a long spine, without sagging or arching too much either way. Having a friend hit you gently (?) with a disc or foot as you maintain plank position is a great way to bypass SMA–you’ll see Russian Kettlebell instructors do this all the time, hitting the glutes / rectus abdomnis (“abs”) / TFL (tensor fascia latae) / quads whether you’re in a horizontal plank or hitting vertical plank position at the top of your 24kg Kettlebell swing.
Bullet point (2) Flexibility & Mobility: Flexibility is great, but you may want to mix in some dynamic mobility work as well. See this NYTimes article on dynamics, particularly the video which has some great dynamic mobility drills. I personally like the “Spidey crawl” that opens up your hips and teaches you to control your legs under hip flexion and total body movement. To see the hip flexor stretch in motion, check out my friend Marty Covault, SF-based RKC and Kettlebell instructor, teach a hip flexor stretch on YouTube. Another approach is to focus on contralateral shoulder mobility as in Z-Health, doing coordinated mobility drills to hack your nervous system into letting your hip flexors (the ones you are stretching are connecting to the knee on the ground, PS) open up.
Bullet point (3) Balance and Coordination: You spend much if not most of your time on one foot, so if you aren’t doing much single-leg training you may want to think about mixing things up. A double-body weight bilateral barbell deadlift feels pretty damn good but then again so does dropping down from neutral stance into a rock-bottom single leg squat (heel on the ground comrades!), aka the Russian “pistol”. Whether you are cutting, accelerating or decelerating, much of the force exerting is passing through your anterior and posterior chains through your lumbopelvic complex and leg musculature. If you don’t train the ability to absorb and generate force on a single leg, whether through single-leg deadlifts (see Gray Cook on this one) or single-leg squats (Pistols), or bodyweight step-ups for more novice trainees.
(Just don’t forget the SAID principle when it comes to single-leg balance–your vestibular and nervous systems will thank you 
Bullet point (4) Movement Quality, not Quantity: Proper technique and perfect form? Yes please. For female athletes in particular, check out the ACL prehab PEP protocol mentioned on injurytimeout.org. If you don’t practice jumping & landing, single-leg and double leg, in *all of* the sagittal (front-back), transverse or horizontal plane, and coronal (side-to-side) planes, think about adding this sort of “jump matrix” training to your prehab / dynamics.
No need to get crazy with the plyos just yet comrades, can you simply do little hops & skips forward-back / side-to-side / rotating with perfect form (a) on each leg individually, (b) on both legs simultaneously, (c) in cleats when jumping for a non-stationary disc, (d) in cleats jumping for a moving disc? No worries, just practice a little bit every day, and maybe your proprioception and movement skills will get that much better over time.
Bullet point (5) Address the warning signs. That’s what she said 
–
“Take care of your back as soon as you begin to have symptoms or discomfort. Take at least a week off from Ultimate, running, and lifting… Be mindful of your posture at work and take breaks every 30 minutes to walk around and stretch. Set a time or downloading a desktop stretching reminder.”
Word. I use AntiRSI on OS X and WorkRave elsewhere. If you have chronic lower-back pain and have already seen multiple health / fitness professionals, I highly suggest you buy a copy of Esther Gokhale’s 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back: Natural Posture Solutions for Pain (Remember When It Didn’t Hurt) as I have found this invaluable in my every day life and have personally trained at the Gokhale center here in Palo Alto. For the clinically minded, Dr. Stuart McGill’s Low Back Disorders is brilliant and I have friends who liked his athlete-targeted Ultimate Back Fitness book.
Awesome, thanks for reading, but remember that if your lower-back is hurting, it may or may not be your lower-back that’s at fault. As they say in the physical therapy world, “he who treats the site of pain is lost,” so don’t get too lost on your journey through and past pain! See y’all on the other side of the neuromatrix rabbit-hole theory of pain =)
Next time on UltiTraining.com, superstiffness, Bruce Lee, and applying core “pulsing” jitsus to fixing your backhand hucks. Ja!
This guy is so happy he learned how to levitate before you.
Submitted by @davidrhunt
Range of Motion... ouch.
vbb25isdouche@gmail.com
