Flexibility Exercises – The Motion Potion
Are you ignoring flexibility training? If that’s the case, you are not the only one. As outlined by experts, flexibility training is a very underrated factor in speed and agility training.You do not need to be an athlete to benefit from better flexibility.
How is flexibility defined?
Flexibility is defined as the full range of motion in the capacity to reposition joints. It is movement from a relaxed pose to a flexed extended stance.The most important training an athlete can perform to prevent injuries is flexibility exercise.It aids athletic execution, aerobic exercises and strength training routines also.The more flexible you are in your strength work out, the more you work the muscle groups you are training.This leads to a more effective and useful regime. A flexible athlete also moves with more ease and enhanced agility. The American College of Sports Medicine advises flexibility exercise in its general exercise recommendations. They recommend stretching exercises for the main muscle groups be practiced two to three days per week.
It is central to the health of your muscles that you warm them up before you extend them.Cold and stiff muscles that don’t yield are said to be a principle source of injury.Ideally, a 5 to 10 minute run should do it.This will improve the relaxation and tightening speeds.This will help raise metabolism, circulation and the temperature in the body.
An athlete does stretching workouts to be able to develop flexibility. Even non-athletes are going to optimize practical movement in everyday life such as bending over to pick something up off the floor. An athlete ought to lightly stretch a little bit more each day so that they can develop flexibility,speed and agility.
Guidelines
The following are guidelines to utilize while stretching.
· Warm up muscle groups prior to a stretch
· Stretch until you’re a little uncomfortable but not to the point you suffer pain.
· The feeling of tautness diminishes as you stretch
· Clutch the stretch for 10-30 seconds
· A set needs to be 2 or 3 exercises before moving on to next one
· Shake out the limbs between stretches
Find more informative articles here on training for speed and agility.
Improve You Speed And Agility With Plyometrics
This article will teach you what the benefits of plyometric training is as far as improving your speed and agility goes. To summarize, you will learn the: what (can plyometrics do for you), the why (you should use this sort of training) and the how (it can benefit you). The relation to speed and agility will also be discussed.
Let’s explore what plyometrics actaully are
Plyometrics are simply a type of exercises whose purpose it is to link strength with speed of movement in order to create a lot of power.The idea is that if you use more of your strength, faster, the power will shoot through the roof.An example of application of plyometrics in a sport that requires a lot of speed and agility is doing a vertical jump for height in basketball.
Plyometric exercises focus on just two things:
– increase your bodies ability to absorb and store force;- teach you how to release that force — creating a movement which has a lot of power behind it.
If your sport of choice involves any throwing, kicking, jumping or lifting, then plyometric training can benefit you. Some examples of sports like these are: soccer, power lifting, basketball, football, baseball etc.
Benefits of Plyometric Training for Speed and Agility
Plyometric drills are meant to train your muscles and tendons to absorb high amounts of force and teach your nervous system how to control and stabilize that force. Speed and agility can be developed very quickly with such practices – the best gains come if you have already strengthened your muscles and tendons.
The conditioning of the nervous system is the reason plyometric training produces very quick results. Because of this pay special attention to these guidelines:
* only perform when rested
* perform with maximum concentration and focus for each rep
train harder not longer (no more than 20 reps REGARDLESS of exercise used)do not perform more than 3 sets per training session (no matter the difficulty of the particular exercise)
Drill this into your head: Train HARDER, not looonger.
Plyometrics also bring improvements in the long run, however these rely more on changes in your body structure (incidently this explains why nutrition plays a big part in the results you get with plyometric training). Plyometric training will change the structure of your muscles and tendons.Plyometrics change your body in the sense that they make your muscles and tendons take on elastic properties.
Nuts and Bolts of a Plyometric Movement:
* first the body absorbs and stabilizes the force from a negative (eccentric) contraction
* as it does this, it loads up your muscles and tendons with force (think of it like a compressing a spring)
* your body releases this energy in the opposite direction
Here’s an example,when you cock back your arm to throw a rock the natural thing you do is to first cock your arm backwards. The effect of this is that the muscles of your arm and shoulder muscles lock, forcing your tendons to stretch thus storing a lot of force in those tendons and essentially turning them into loaded springs. When you throw, the stored force is released, allowing the rock to be accelerated at a rate which is higher than your normal rate of force development.
The reason plyometric training was so big when it came out in the 70 ’s is that it allowed athletes to specifically train their muscles and tendons to be more spring-like. You naturally use plyometric movements but before plyometric training came out there was no clear cut way to train for this. That is why it was thought for so long that jumping for height for example was an innate ability.
As I said before, the more you use this type of training the more you will also develop an inherent springiness in your muscles and tendons. Coupled with an increased nervous system learning on how to corectly perform the movement at higher speeds, you can expect to see massive improvements in your speed and agility.To further support this process you should also learn about:speed and agility training and strength
The question is: how do I adapt the principles of plyometric training to my speed and agility training? The answer is, and you aren’t going to like it, by tailoring your plyometric training to the specific speed and agility requirements of the sport that you are practicing. This is a long discussion and goes way beyond the scope of this article. For more tips click here Speed and Agility Training
This article has discussed:
* what plyometrics are
* how plyometrics work
* the role of plyometrics as part of your speed and agility training
* the benefits you can expect when introducing plyometric drills into yours speed and agility training
Make sure to try this great exercise for speed and agility training improving strength
Learn What The New Field Of Sport Vision Training Can Do For Your Speed And Agility
Speed and agility training has seen a paradigm shift in the past couple of years. Hype is a constant problem in our society, not so the case here. We have to thank a class of people called contrarians for the development of training protocols applicable to previously thought of as untrainable characteristics. This training is now a staple for athletes wanting to enter the NFL Combine (a camp in which professional football teams assess NFL draft candidates). Sports Vision training. It deals with your speed of reaction, your ability to process information on the court, tempo or timing and even goes into things such as depth perception. The training comes from the premise that athletes react to what they can see. The most valuable team mates are those that are all around good. And this training helps you with this.
Reacting inappropriatly is a lot of times due to a lack of this sort of training. In this highly competitive era simple speed and agility training that lead to “just” very fast atletes is no longer sufficient. Exercises that involve the mind: such as span of recognition, game field view and reaction time training are no longer optional. There is a more than ever need for atletes to visually process their surroundings faster. They must improve their reaction times and their reflexes. Without these, they will simply be left behind.
When an athlete undergoes sports vision training, they process information in greater amounts. They react to stimulus faster even when under great stress. While there are no true standards since the field is so new, below are some of the sports vision training topics and what they cover:
* awareness of peripheral surroundings – dealing with seeing the things that are out of focus – out of the corner of the eye in popular lingo
* visual reaction time – is time between when a change or stimulus is seen and when you react to it
* dynamic visual acuity – the number and correctness of the moving objects the athlete can keep an eye out for * eye tracking – the ability to to watch or follow the ball carefully no matter how fast it may be traveling
* eye focusing – the ability to quickly change focus accurately from different distances
* depth perception – leads to the correct placement of objects within our 3D world
* fusing flexibility and stamina – not the best chosen name, but what is does is amazing, it permits your eyes to function at optimum capacity for longer times, this means that players will still be able to process their visual information at optimum parameters – even at the end of a tiring game
Sports vision training is truly one of the biggest discoveries in speed and agility training. One funny thing to remember is that: “keep your eye on the ball” is something that you have the tools to improve now.
To further support this process you should also learn about:speed and agility training and protein
For more tips click here Speed and Agility
Be sure to check this exercise for speed and agility training and preventing injuries.