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Today we're talking about power development, specifically, through plyometrics. How much power can you produce and control? If you can't control that power, you are increasing your risk of injury. Unfortunately, plyometrics is done incorrectly in most gym settings. True plyometrics should be full intensity- EVERY TIME. To work on your plyometrics and to gain better control, we'll start with a few basic plyometric drills. Watch Dr. Jacob walk you through: -Snap Downs -Single Leg Snap Downs -Altitude Drops -Lateral Bound Stick Give these a shot- all out intensity for for 5 or so reps and see how you progress your power/strength and control in the gym. Good luck! At Athletes' Potential we help active adults and athletes in the Atlanta area get back to the workouts and sports they love... without surgery, stopping activities, or relying on pain medicine. Life is too short to avoid doing the things that you love. Reach out to us at: www.athletespotential.com info@athletespotential.com 470-355-2106 Let us help you figure out to live your best active life today! This video piggy backs on our Power Plyometrics Part 1 video. We're covering plyometric power with load once you've learned to control your body. This is a great progression for developing power.
The first exercise is loaded jumping squats. There are two key things to remember here, go 100 percent and stop when you drop down to a 90 percent effort and REST. The weight can be a kettlebell or medicine ball, really whatever you have. Get loaded, jump as high as you can and stop when your effort decreases. This exercise will help you continue to develop power. Good luck! At Athletes' Potential we help active adults and athletes in the Atlanta area get back to the workouts and sports they love... without surgery, stopping activities, or relying on pain medicine. Life is too short to avoid doing the things that you love. Reach out to us at: www.athletespotential.com info@athletespotential.com 470-355-2106 Let us help you figure out to live your best active life today!
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Today we're working on our running mobility issues in our feet and ankles. We all know these can get stiff after miles and miles of running. We're going to work on our big toe, or our first ray. When you toe off in a run position, you have to get about 70 degrees of dorsi-flexion in your big toe. If you do not have that much flexion in your toe, you'll start see problem creep up up stream. To prevent this, grab your favorite lacrosse ball or Yoga Tune Up ball and really warm up your plantar fascia on the bottom of your foot. After that, get into a runners stretch against a wall and focus on stretching your big toe. You can also try toe walking around your house. At Athletes' Potential we help active adults and athletes in the Atlanta area get back to the workouts and sports they love... without surgery, stopping activities, or relying on pain medicine. Life is too short to avoid doing the things that you love. Reach out to us at: www.athletespotential.com info@athletespotential.com 470-355-2106 Let us help you figure out to live your best active life today! Foot strength is super important for runners. Our feet are what propel us forward so in order to generate a lot of power or strength in running, we have to have strong feet. Intrinsic foot strength- simply put, it's the muscles of the foot. Far too often we neglect this part of our body a lot but we need to show it some TLC. To help us gain foot strength, we've got a simple exercise for you to try at home or the office to start building up that strength. It's called the short foot drill. We want to make our foot as short as possible. Go back and forth between squeezing that foot together and relaxing. Do about 15-20 reps at a time. Watch the video for the all tips and get after it. At Athletes' Potential we help active adults and athletes in the Atlanta area get back to the workouts and sports they love... without surgery, stopping activities, or relying on pain medicine. Life is too short to avoid doing the things that you love. Reach out to us at: www.athletespotential.com info@athletespotential.com 470-355-2106 Let us help you figure out to live your best active life today! Today we're covering mobility for foot and ankle issues. If you've been struggling with this or you don't know that you have been, give these exercises a shot.
Massaging and stretching are great but there's one important technique that you might be missing. The first ray needs to be mobile! In order to be an efficient runner, you need about 70% dorsiflexion in your big toe. Any less that that, will cause pain. Try these two foot exercises to improve that mobility. 1) Grab your favorite Yoga Tune Up ball or lacrosse ball and get it under you foot, moving it side to side across your plantar fascia. 2) Do a wall stretch, but lift your heel off the ground to stretch that big toe. 3) Do some toe walks around your house! Hit these for 1-5 minutes. At Athletes' Potential we help active adults and athletes in the Atlanta area get back to the workouts and sports they love... without surgery, stopping activities, or relying on pain medicine. Life is too short to avoid doing the things that you love. Reach out to us at: www.athletespotential.com info@athletespotential.com 470-355-2106 No drills or techniques here! Today, we're going over SLEEP. We highly suggest getting that (ideal!) 8-10 hours of sleep each night, however, we understand that sometimes that isn't possible. There are a couple of things that you can do to help with those sleep deficits.
1. Tactical napping- 20-30 minute nap followed up with a quick hit of caffeine. 2. Sleep Banking- This is ideal when you know you'll be missing out on sleep soon (think time-changes or travel). To combat this, for 6 straight days, bank sleep by getting an extra two hours of sleep each night. Give these two a shot if you are short on sleep or you know you'll be short on sleep and let us know how it goes. At Athletes' Potential we help active adults and athletes in the Atlanta area get back to the workouts and sports they love... without surgery, stopping activities, or relying on pain medicine. Life is too short to avoid doing the things that you love. Reach out to us at: www.athletespotential.com info@athletespotential.com 470-355-2106 Let us help you figure out to live your best active life today! Today we're going over one of our favorite drills to teach spinal neutral when performing a squat. Grab a PVC pipe or broomstick. This will help give you some real-time feedback.
Align the PVC pipe against the back of your body and go into a squat position. Did you lose contact with the bottom of the pipe? If so, you might have tight hips and your back is overcompensating. Give some of our hip opener exercises a try and see if it helps. Again, align the PVC pipe against the back of you body. Does it lose contact in the middle of your spine? (Think arched back). If so, you might need to do some core exercises and engagement. Check out some of our core stability videos. At Athletes' Potential we help active adults and athletes in the Atlanta area get back to the workouts and sports they love... without surgery, stopping activities, or relying on pain medicine. Life is too short to avoid doing the things that you love. Reach out to us at: www.athletespotential.com info@athletespotential.com 470-355-2106 Let us help you figure out to live your best active life today! Today we're working on our foot and ankle strength. These can be done around the house- it's that easy!
The first one- single leg balance. While you're brushing your teeth or standing at your work desk, practice your balancing on each leg. If that gets too easy, progress to balancing only on the ball of your foot. As that gets easy, you can progress to standing on an angled- surface to continue the single leg balance work. Get this done throughout the day and you'll notice that your foot and ankle are stronger! At Athletes' Potential we help active adults and athletes in the Atlanta area get back to the workouts and sports they love... without surgery, stopping activities, or relying on pain medicine. Life is too short to avoid doing the things that you love. Reach out to us at: www.athletespotential.com info@athletespotential.com 470-355-2106 Let us help you figure out to live your best active life today! The shoulder complex is just that… complex! It is a series of incredibly mobile regions stacked on top of each other in such a way that if there is a significant issue in any one of these regions, the whole thing doesn’t work well. What I want to do with this blog post is give you QUICK and EASY assessments you can do on your shoulder to discover what it can do and what it should be able to do!
 This quick and easy assessment gives us an idea of how well your shoulder can go overhead (flexion) and how well it can go behind you (extension). If you’re having difficulty with either of these movements, make note of which is the most challenging and let's move on to the next test.
  Lying down with a towel under your elbow, see how much range you have going backward and forward with your wrist. In total, you should have about 160 to 170 degrees of total motion with the shoulder staying pinned on the table (see how the second image has the patient pinning their shoulder to the table so it doesn’t come up). Typically we see the back of the wrist touching the table when going back and the front side of the wrist nearly getting to the table, for a normal range of motion. If you’re having difficulty with either of these, take note and let's move on to the last assessment.
    Being able to use your shoulder overhead is challenging without the correct musculature in place and ready for action. The “Reach, Roll, Lift” assessment really tests your shoulder’s ability to have good range of motion, as well as good muscle activation to pull your hand off the ground. First, crouch down, then slide your palm across the ground overhead; roll your thumb upward to the sky while keeping your outside of the hand on the ground; finally, pull your thumb and arm to the sky, keeping your arm straight. If this is not possible, make note, and let's move on. After you’ve done these three assessments, you may have found you are lacking certain fundamental movements of your shoulder that are required for healthy functioning of your upper body. At Athletes’ Potential, we specialize in working with correcting these issues regularly and getting our patients back to the activities they love, fast, and without the need for injections or surgery. If you discovered that you are unable to perform any of these three assessments, feel free to reach out to us and schedule a treatment today! Thanks for reading,
Dr. Marcus Rein, PT, DPT, CF-L2  A hot pan - don’t touch it! A wet slippery slope - probably should avoid it. A cactus - definitely avoid it. The experience of pain has taught us these simple rules, and we should be thankful! Burning our hand, slipping on rocks, and getting poked by a cactus’ spines are all three damaging things that we do our best to avoid to ensure our own health. These examples are the easiest way to understand pain, in that it is an alarm system that is designed to protect us from damage by giving us a quick response from which we can learn. Let’s go one level deeper. What happens if you go on a big hike and wake up the next day with your legs in pain? It’s a deep soreness that you haven’t felt before and it’s really bothering your hips and knees. Is this cause for concern? Is this damage? What kind of pain is this? What if you are simply sitting down in the gym after a workout and turn to pick up your water bottle and your back spasms, causing intense discomfort? Is this cause for concern? Is this damage? What kind of pain is this? How about just waking up with shoulder pain for no reason, but it lasts for 10 years? It won’t respond to medication or injections, and resting it just makes it worse. Is this cause for concern? Is this damage? Why the heck is this pain still around? As you can see, the alarm system pain provides is activated in all of these scenarios. This alarm system provides a symphony of sensation that plays its tune and it's up to you (and maybe the assistance of a professional) to decode the symphony. Let me share with you the things I look for in a patient’s presentation to help decode their sensations: 1. Numbness, tingling, or burning? If you are having numbness, tingling, or burning that does not resolve quickly or returns regularly, you likely need an assessment from a professional to determine its root cause. PTs are very skilled in caring for this type of pain! However, if this sensation is with progressive weakness or progressive loss of sensation, you should contact your primary care provider for assessment quickly. If it is rapidly progressive, you should go to the hospital. 2. Pain that's slowly getting better but still around? As long as the pain is getting better overall, healing is occurring. If it's slow, it's still progress, so don’t discount it! If you are frustrated in the pain’s slow speed of improvement, it might be time to come in to see us as we are also very skilled at finding ways to more rapidly accelerate your healing. 3. Pain that is not getting better for over a month? If you’ve been having pain that has not been improving for over a month, it is definitely time to see a professional. PTs are fantastic at diving into the mechanical issues that are causing your pain and improving the painful region’s overall capacity to provide you a higher healing potential. As a final note… there are SO many factors that can affect pain! Here’s a short list of proven secondary factors that have a direct effect on the subjective interpretation of the pain alarm system: Modifiable Factors Proven to Affect Pain*:
Non-modifiable Factors Proven to Affect Pain
As you can see, this complex experience doesn’t just include the local injury but so many other factors! If you would like to read more about the pain experience and its study, I highly recommend "Explain Pain." It is a short read that is well researched and provides a great contextualization of the entirety of the pain experience. So, if you are having pain and want to better understand it, start with contextualizing it as an alarm system that you must learn to interpret. If you’d like to understand your pain further, “Explain Pain” is a great option. And, finally, when you’re ready to have your pain improve, come see us at Athletes’ Potential! Thanks for reading, Dr. Marcus Rein, PT, DPT, CF-L2 * van Hecke O, Torrance N, Smith BH. Chronic pain epidemiology - where do lifestyle factors fit in?. Br J Pain. 2013;7(4):209-217. doi:10.1177/2049463713493264 Breathing! During the stages of your day, breathing can change. Let's dive in. When you're breathing during a workout or run or sport, there are 3 main things affected: Neurological, Physiological and Biomechanical. The responses are very different than say at rest or meditating.
Watch Dr. Marcus walk you through the different types and how these will help you with your performance. As always, let us know if you have any questions. We're here to help. Remember, Movement is Medicine! Reach out to us at info@athletsespotential.com or 470-355-2106. What does icing do and not do? If you have an injury that needs attention, does icing help? Unfortunately, right now, the evidence is very mixed. Some research shows that immediately following an injury and it the affected area is swollen, icing is not the best thing to do. You want blood to flow to that area and begin the natural healing process.
After a few days, icing works great to numb the pain. But the best bang for your buck is to let that area heal naturally! As always, let us know if you have any questions. We're here to help. Remember, Movement is Medicine! Reach out to us at info@athletsespotential.com or 470-355-2106. This lower extremity assessment is great if you're struggling to get into the bottom of a squat or you can't keep your chest up when you're squatting. We'll walk you through this assessment and then give you a great drill to help you depending on the outcome.
As always, reach out to us at 470-355-2106 or info@athletespotential.com if you have questions. We're here for you! Remember, Movement is Medicine! |
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