One
of the things I am doing with my new 16U team this fall is put all of my
athletes through a functional assessment. I hear you: "What the heck is a
functional assessment?" Let me give you an analogy. When you intend to buy
a used car, before you pay for it, you take it to an independent expert
mechanic for a full inspection to make sure everything is alright. A full
inspection also helps identify what will need to be replaced or fixed in the
near future to keep the car in good condition and running well. A functional
assessment is like a full car inspection but for the body. The aim of a
functional assessment is to identify what needs "fixing" in the body
in order to prevent injuries and optimize performance. It could be muscular
imbalances, faulty muscular recruitment patterns, and tightness in certain
areas, bad posture, or bad alignment.
All
these things can eventually lead to injuries and also hurt your performance
because the body is not as efficient as it could be. I am taking them to see a
team of expert trainers who are going to perform individual functional
assessment on each of them. They will probably diagnosed a lot of different
things that will need work such as strengthening certain stabilizers muscles,
increase flexibility of others, fixing poor posture or alignment, etc. From
there, I will design an individualized corrective exercise program for each one
of my athletes. Athletes are like race cars. You need to fine tune them to get
the most out of them.
Did
you know that many of the exercises that are prescribed to athletes for
correcting these various problems are found in my Dynamic Warm-up for Softball System? We use
dynamic warm-ups not only to prevent injuries for the upcoming game, practice
or workout but also to train the body to be more athletic and prevent long-term
overuse injuries through carefully selected exercises that do fix some of these
common problems. My team goes through the routine that is found in my system
and after only 3 weeks since I started working with them, I am already seeing a
big improvement! They are more stable. They
are more solid. They look more like
athletes when they move. This is pure
pleasure to my eyes. That means that my athletes will sustain a lot less
injuries and will perform a lot better. Imagine after 6 months of doing this…
in addition to the individualization of their corrective exercise programs, I
will have nicely fine-tuned race cars! Just like big storms like Katrina,
Injuries do happen. It's not a matter of if but when. Make sure you are preparing
for it and you might not get hit too hard. Make sure you take preventive
action. Train hard. Play hard.