StrongStrides Co-Activation™
World class core stability training, movement accuracy, and responsiveness for performance driven athletes
Stiffness
The core and surrounding muscles must be activated and rigid. Maintaining a stiff center eliminates micro-movements in the joints that lead to energy leaks.
Motor Control
Adding motion through the movement while maintaining muscles activated and core stiff is the next step. Pay attention to muscle "leaks".
Speed
Moving resistance with a stable platform, proper activation, and motor control translates to increased economy.
The importance of stiffness.
After activating the key regions, the most important thing is stiffness, stiffness, stiffness. Breaking down in a race means a failure to maintain stiffness and resist forces, which muscles do along with creating force when they contract. Muscle stiffness is always allowing one to be stabilizing in all directions. A stable core/platform allows you to fire a cannon. It's hard to fire a cannon out of a canoe due to the instability of the surface. Being stiff ensures that there will be minimal energy leaks as you move. Performance and injury prevention requires stability, and stability results from stiffness.
Motor control avoids leaks in movement.
Once stiffness is engaged, it’s time to focus on finding leaks in the movement. This is best accomplished by using a mirror. What do we mean with movement leaks? This is what occurs when your body does not have the strength, range of motion, or stiffness to follow through on a movement. The body will find ways to “wiggle out” of the proper form of the movement. These are called “leaks”. Check down below for some movement examples and their common “leaks”. Developing the mind-body connection and motor control to avoid these leaks are key.
Combining tension with speed
Once stiffness and quality of movement can be executed, it is time to talk about the tension and speed combo. Developing strength from a movement is useless unless that strength can be utilized to move a weight, quickly. The speed and quality of the movement is what translates to better economy.
