The spectrum: Powerlifting (extreme Muscle Driven) and Javelin, High Jumping (extreme Elastic, Energy Transfer)
Rewire:
Driving torque from the foot versus rotating from the hips. “Rotating one is gonna rotate the other.”
Muscle & Energy Transfer Paradigm:
“Strength will make you faster, strength will make you a better athlete. But obviously it’s not that simple.”
“If you look at a lot of great athletes jump, you’ll actually notice that their arm swing creates a spinal wave through their movement. And so if you can’t segment your spine, you’re gonna be missing that element.”
Hip IR, spinal segmentation, getting onto the balls of the feet: “That’s when you’re gonna start integrating the fascia into movement.”
“Rhythm is elasticity.”
Rhythm, relaxation, torque: “Those are kind of the drivers of movement. Not necessarily muscle.”
“If you can’t rotate your hip internally, you’re not gonna be able to torque your body in whatever direction you need to rotate it in.”
“There’s no weight room exercise that trains internal rotation or spinal segmentation.”
Hip Internal Rotation: Functional Range Conditioning
Spinal Segmentation: Dr. Tommy John’s Spinal Hygiene & Alternating Supermans, Jefferson Curls, Reverse Sit-Up (one vertebrae at a time)
Feet: Just get onto the balls of the feet. Go barefoot as often as possible. Barefoot jogging on a grassy field. Go slow. Do this often, instead of 5-miles once per week.
“If a braced core was the way to go, I think athletes would be going and getting spinal fusions for performance enhancement.”
Getting out of the Muscle Paradigm:
Start with: Movement Concepts then go into Movement Technique then go into Movement Skills then go into Movement Capacity
Movement Capacity: Feet-Hips-Spine-Fascia. “Can I rotate my hips, can I segment my spine? Do I have strong enough feet to be an elastic athlete?”
“Why are you training generally when you could be training specific adaptations?”
Sport-Specific Training versus Training for a Specific Adaptation (connecting that to the sport itself)
Force Absorption:
“Force only exists in collisions”
“Is the brain telling the muscle to contract? Or is the muscle just reflexively acting to what the tendon is telling it to?”
Basketball players landing from a dunk: “They’re not absorbing force, they’re avoiding force… The way they manipulate their body around the collision.”
Follow Kevin Foster on Instagram.
Read his work on Just Fly Sports.
Email: Javelin.anatomy@gmail.com
