Are the complex barriers to performance really this simple?

The foundation of the best performance training and sports support services have at their roots up to four building blocks that are necessary to build elite athletes and healthy humans. If you consider that performance relates to withstanding, adapting to, absorbing, transmitting, producing and reusing energy, the performance athlete requires:

1. Good energy;
2. Unblocked energy;
3. Flowing, guided energy;
4. Abundant energy.

The challenge of defining these concepts often leads us to consider the opposite. What barriers prevent robustness?

1. The inability to tolerate, manage and overcome pain, toxins, inflammation, poison – this are bad energy.
2. The inability to detect & transmit local energy and forces along the kinetic chain because of limited mobility – this is blocked energy due to limited inputs.
3. The inability to process energy and forces along the kinetic chain because of structural or functional instability or altered motor control – this is leaked energy.
4. The inability to produce enough energy or force to get in the game or stay in the game. This is seen as deficient energy, reduced outputs, for example inhibition, weakness and fatigue.

We must remember that performance matters, to get into the game and stay in the game. Yet, in many sports, it matters not as much as what happens once in the game – the application of sports-specific skill. As such, we must remember that our role, as performance and support staff, is to give athletes back to their coaches. Our role is not to detract from their ability to spend time practicing the game or sport they are in. That is why adaptability to forces, energy and load, ie durability, matters. An athlete who has to miss or modify training is less likely to achieve performance success. This is supported by long term prospective research in elite athletes [1]. It is clear from this research at the Australian Institute of Sport that the inability to be robust enough to complete more than 80% of planned training program negatively affects the likelihood of performance success. It is also clear from data from UEFA, “from an unnamed club which – over a ten-year period in which it employed four coaches – only won silverware with the bosses who had a lower-than-average number of injuries within their squads. "Is this a coincidence? We don't believe it is.", says Jan Ekstrand, vice-chairman of the UEFA Medical Committee. [2]
 
In light of these clear, long-term, links between durability and performance success, we revisit the earlier statement – “Our role is not to detract from their ability to spend time practicing the game or sport they are in.” Thus we have a fine balance between pushing athlete development and catching those elements that indicate an increased likelihood of future injury – that which limits durability and performance success.
 
Our intent to push athlete development is to be balanced by intent to not be part of the problem that limits them.
 
We thus revisit the barriers to function and robustness, redefining them into simpler, more usable terms.

1. Bad energy = pain, inflammation, toxins, disease, poison.
2. Blocked energy = limitations and asymmetry in mobility.
3. Leaked energy = limitations and asymmetry in stability and motor control.
4. Deficient energy = limitations in force production, absorption and reutilization. This includes, strength, speed, rate of force development, power and endurance.

The first point is the domain of medical and allied health professionals with training, qualifications, licensure and experience in dealing with clinical conditions.

The second point is the domain of the allied health or exercise professional with training, qualifications, licensure and experience in recognizing and dealing with mobility dysfunctions.
 
The third point is the domain of the allied health or exercise professional with training, qualifications, licensure and experience in recognizing and dealing with stability and motor control dysfunctions.
 
The fourth point is the domain of the exercise professional with training, qualifications, licensure and experience in recognizing and dealing with deficiencies in force production, absorption and reutilisation.
 
The second and third points, collectively, relate to movement. Mobility + stability & motor control = movement. Let’s review that – adequate range of motion by itself is not movement.
 
The Mobility, Stability and Motor Control for Rehabilitation, Exercise and Sports Performance course ​ thus aims to provide three things:

1. A practical introduction, review or advancement of strategies to develop a sensory rich environment to detect inputs from the internal and external stimuli;
2. A practical introduction, review or advancement of strategies to stimulate improvements in control of body segments, to the end of expressing mobility;
3. A practical understanding of the links between mobility, stability, motor control and performance through the concept of position, patterns and power.

 
The Mobility, Stability and Motor Control for Rehabilitation, Exercise and Sports Performance course fits within a continuum of health, function and performance. It is an education workshop to explore the three P’s - positions and patterns as they support the expression of power. It is an education course to explore systematic strategies to correct inputs and processing of inputs as they relate to movement outputs. It is an education workshop to introduce strategies to coax the nervous system, especially during the heat of in-season, when performance training aims to blast and develop.

The next course can be found here.

performance, exercise, rehabilitation, sports, injury risk reduction, movement, fitness, health