Performance is a behaviour that can change quickly.

When someone is excellent at performance, but lands like this?

Does it matter?

I know our minds will begin racing about why this individual lands in a way that we would describe as unstable.

Is it related to strength?

If so, where? In the glute med? The VMO? The foot intrinsics? The core?

We have an industry that likes to train body parts to change performance. And we’re in an industry where it is assumed that it takes several weeks to get a change in performance.

But if we change the way we define performance, to include the word behaviour, we can begin to consider that perhaps there are many ways to change behaviour, and quickly.

On this occasion, the athlete was interested to look down at the floor to see how far he had hopped. When he looks down, he initiates spine flexion and that is coupled, as a pattern of movement behaviour, with hip flexion which is coupled with hip adduction and internal rotation.

This destabilises the hip and we see a landing that has a compensation of hip abduction to prevent falling over.

The cue I gave next was to stimulate a change to the entire pattern, but if I could get him to look up, it would reverse the entire collapse pattern, so I told him that when he landed I would throw a ball at his face and he needed to be ready to catch it or it would hit him in the face.

Comments? Questions?