Thoughts.

Ironside vs. Chain, Semifinals, '09 Club Nationals. Photo taken by Keegan Uhl.

While the college season is picking up steam, a lot of club players are just getting in gear for the coming tryouts and season.

Ballometrics has been maintaining a fitness list for the past few months (tryouts start soon, if you’re interested in playing competitive mixed out of Boston, drop a line); people are starting to do track workouts now that the land is thawing.

I sent the following to the list about doing pre-season track workouts, which segued into a lot of thoughts on running form. As we still have the luxury of training without the constant performance demand of weekend tournaments and practices, it’s a great time to focus on technique and go into the season not only with a good base of strength and conditioning, but efficient form, as well.
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Check out this this great post on running form by Vern Gambetta.

The money line:

This means that at the end of the stance phase forward pelvic rotation has to be avoided. Abdominal muscles play a crucial role in this.

Train your core to hold your pelvis in proper position. How? You want to train the core to hold your pelvis so that it is tilted upwards more. Tight quads and weak abs leave most with anterior tilt, and it saps power in almost all athletic movements.

Train your core with static holds, use the bird dog exercises described in this article. Whatever you do, don’t cheat. If you want your core to hold your pelvis when you’re running, you need to train your core to hold it when you’re simply holding still. When you do holds, really focus on straightening out your back by tilting your pelvis up towards yourself more (and then hold your core tight and flat as long as you can). This SHOULD be hard. If it isn’t, try harder (or upgrade to using an ab roller–slow at first, starting from your knees). Remember that, while the goal at first is to move the pelvis into the right position, long-term you want to be able to HOLD that. Ideally all day. You can practice this positioning while walking around when you get strong enough–work your way up from stability to mobility to strength to power.

And stretch your quads. Check out the Crossfit warmup for details–do the Samson stretch. As a matter of fact, do the Crossfit warmup before all of your workouts. You’ll see some pretty quick benefits. Tight quads really kill the potential for your core to hold the pelvis.

After one of Carson’s ab workouts last winter, the extra strength I had to hold my pelvis in a good position resulted in some VERY impressive PRs for me in that week’s track workout. It can make a big difference, and perhaps more importantly, it can make a big difference NOW.