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Aldred Performance
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25.01.2022 What do basketball and lacrosse have in common? Whether you’re a basketball player accelerating forward into a sudden deceleration to create separation for a 3 point shot or a lacrosse player split dodging a defender to get your hands free for a shot, you’re simply moving your body into space. The tendencies of players within their sports will differ due to the end result aiming to be achieved but are very similar overall. ... Regardless of how good an athlete may be, you can’t ignore the rules of gravity, despite what some Instagram jumping videos may have you believe. To accelerate in a certain direction or decelerate your moving body, you need to create a ground reaction force (GRF) to redirect your mass and existing momentum. For former MVP & Nets star @jharden13, getting open 3’s is almost automatic with how well he’s able to combine acceleration into a sudden deceleration. This change of pace and abrupt stop comes about because he’s able to use his left leg as a relatively rigid lever to block his body from moving further in that direction. Imagine a pole-vaulter driving their pole into the vault box. Same idea. PLL star & former Yale All American @reeves_ben uses the same movement strategy of creating a large GRF to displace his body and begin accelerating at a different angle to the one he’s already moving in. Reeves is known for having a lighting quick first step with a surprising amount of deception for a larger athlete. By keeping one’s leg stiffer on this contact, they’re able to use both their hips and torso to orientate themselves in their new direction. Their hips can drive force into the ground faster as the leg doesn’t require time to straighten whilst the torso rotates open to the direction they’re moving, sending body mass towards where the athlete is going to move. Different sports, same strategies. See more
24.01.2022 Incorporating drills that require an athlete to move a certain way against/with constraints are excellent for intrinsic learning. Whilst getting stronger, faster and more powerful can improve arguably any athletic quality, movement efficiency is often bypassed by these improvements in said traits. This is, in part, due to the programming and learning of the nervous system’s (NS) learned patterns.... The more we repeat an action, the further it is engrained into our NS. This gives us the ability to repeat this pattern more accurately to how we’ve learned it, reducing variations in technique. This can be both a positive and negative at the same time. Less variation = more consistency in the movement performed. Less variation = reduced ability to vary the movement (at the same quality) unless multiple forms/positions are practiced. In essence, our brain and NS try to prune back neural connections we don’t use while solidifying the ones we do. The more learned a pattern, the deeper and more hard-wired it becomes. So how do we go about changing/modifying techniques after a long training history? We try to induce learning through different variables that add a twist to the regular pattern the athlete has come to know well. Here’s @strongzero_sean performing a band resisted block leg drill. One of the most crucial parts of working on mechanics with throwing sports athletes is getting their hips and legs to all perform their respective jobs and work as a unit. In a right-handed shooter, the front (left) leg acts as a block/brace for the left side of the pelvis to decelerate itself while the right side gets driven forward and around the block by the back (right) leg. This position can be made easier to achieve by adding a resisting band to the block leg side. This forces one to keep more tension in the direction we want the block leg to be working. See more
18.01.2022 If you play a field-based sport, don’t neglect training the ability to move laterally. The athletes with the best cutting and juking ability are often those who are able to control their body in the frontal plane the best. Being able to put large amounts of force into the ground to favourably orientate one’s body weight is crucial to being able to redirect your momentum. ... This is further amplified with the ability to be reactive and have enough ‘give’ across your hip and lower limb to act as a springboard, storing and releasing tension, driving you in the opposite direction. Building up skills like this must be predicated on correct movement and loading patterns. Lining up your joint angles (body counter wound, hip IR, femur adducts, foot pronates) to allow for maximum efficiency can be improved and drilled in upon with lower intensity, higher volume contacts. The triple hop in the movement allows for the sequence to take place in a more reactive and elastic environment whilst also adding extra stretch ability into each lateral projection hop itself. Here’s lacrosse athlete @strongzero_sean performing triple lateral hop, pogo style drill I love that I’ve taken off @r3volutionperformance. Check him out as he’s got a whole array of different plyometric drills and strength movements See more
11.01.2022 Lower limb stiffness is vital to sprinting, running and jumping performance. Imagine going to step and gaining additional spring from your tendons & fascia being stretched and snapping back into position, giving free energy. You would be silly to not train this ability. ... The ability to co-contract a joint and ‘lock’ it requires isometric & eccentric strength and neuromuscular control in regards to timing and joint angles. Some of the best athletes are naturally more inclined to have this stiffness capacity with minimal training due to their genetics. Others may have grown up playing sports & perform vast amounts of reps without ever realising they were training lower limb stiffness. Both of these lead to athletes that can get ‘more’ out of every step, potentially giving them an edge over their less physically inclined peers. @rockyohalloran is performing some front foot elevation hops here. The intent is to minimise ground contact time on each landing whilst also deforming as little as possible. This may sound simple but with proper intent, it can be a challenge for the best athletes. You’ll likely find one of three areas holding you back; 1 - Ankle - you may be unable to keep the ankle complex stiff enough to not deform upon impact, taking time to reset to a jumping position. 2 - Hip - you may be able to keep your ankle stiff enough to resist deformation but struggle to pick it up, put it down, etc. due to a hip strength/control limitation. 3 - Quads/Hams - Least likely but lacking sufficient strength/endurance in the positions this puts you in may limit you by way of excessive knee flexion/extension, taking up extra time before being able to get off the ground again. See more
10.01.2022 When preparing for a return to sport after an off season/absence, conditioning your body’s ability to handle game like positions and forces is critical. It’s important to remember that there is always a trade off when you go too hard in one direction of training. Spent huge amounts of time in the gym lifting and getting juiced? You may struggle moving laterally at speed or being elastic and reactive to a defender in front of you. ... Spend huge amounts of time running and doing skill work for your sport? You may have lessened your force output whilst reducing your tissue tolerance for loading ‘compromised’ position. Finding the middle between these two points is where you want to be. Give enough stimulus to stay on top of the work you need to do whilst being able to devote extra time to improve the areas that will make you a better athlete. Side note - these may not always be your weaknesses. Here’s lacrosse athlete @peterkwas performing some sub-maximal intensity continuous diagonal jumps. These are perfect for a field sport athlete reintroducing some frontal + sagittal plane movement in an elastic manner. See more
02.01.2022 Your training should cover multiple qualities at once. If you’re not a strength sport athlete peaking for a competition, how does needing a month or two of prep time to be able to show your strength/other athletic quality reflect on the resource economy of your training? Don’t get me wrong, different times of the year are going to have different focuses in regards to an athlete's competitive ready state. ... That being said, when an athlete needs multiple weeks of training to be in a position to display a quality shows that they already do/should possess, is their training conducive to being the best they can all year round? This is one of the reasons I like to use a conjugate influenced programming style with my athlete clients. The lift is never the main goal. The adaptation we draw from using it is. Numbers and PB’s can be a good measuring tool but getting too caught up in a single movement’s numbers can be more of a hindrance than a benefit. If going from a 100kg > 110kg bench press hardly assists the adaptation we’re attempting to elicit and only strokes my ego in the process, is it worth spending weeks/months focusing on just this increase? Your strength training work should aim to scale across to different movements. Get stronger at one, get stronger at all. If you’re improving in only one specific lift, you may just be better at performing the skill of the lift itself. Here’s a 100kg x 9 to equal my 100kg rep PB. In 2015, it took 12 weeks of concentrated strength build-up work to achieve this. This time, I haven’t benched 85%+ in over two months but matched an all time PB. I also have better range, mobility, RFD, elastic loading ability as well as feel more primed with day to day readiness. You get to choose which route you want to go down. Rep 9.15 left in for the lols. See more
