If you’re an athlete training to improve in your sport, you might find that you reach a plateau in your training or performance. To increase your performance and train more effectively, you can combine sport-specific training and massage therapy, specifically fascial release.
Power and strength are often confused. This leads to difficulties when developing your training protocol.
Most sports performance is based on, and improved by, increases in power, not absolute strength. The faster your neurological system can recruit all of those high threshold motor units and create a contraction, the more powerful you are.
Sports such as hockey, dance, and soccer are driven by power. By decreasing fascial restrictions in the musculoskeletal system and decreasing the stress on the network of peripheral nerves, we can increase the number of motor units recruited to activity, and the speed at which they fire to the muscle.
A massage therapist can use techniques like tool-assisted myofascial release (the M2T Blade) and trigger point therapy and put together a functional training approach to rehabilitate your body and improve performance.
While power is a very important goal with specific exercises to lead to improvements, having a stable center from which to tap into your new found power is just as important. The primary function of certain muscles and muscle groups is stabilization. Functional training for those muscles involves training them to be better stabilizers, often by performing simple exercises through small ranges of motion. In many cases, to try to make everything functional, coaches and athletes ended up neglecting the important stabilizing functions of certain muscle groups. The three key groups in need of stability training are:
It’s important to tailor your exercises and stretches to you and your sport needs. We can help you increase your performance, heal more effectively from injury, and play better, longer!
