Mark Cameron MScPT
Cuddled up in front of the fire waiting impatiently for the snow to melt to get back out into your spring activities? You are not alone. As the Holiday season rolls around there are few things that can get you more amped up than unwrapping a new driver or a fresh pair of cleats. One thing that is absolutely essential to hit the ground running (or swinging) is preparing your body for that first day out and about by training for it. Golf, football, running, hiking, swimming, soccer, tennis, field hockey, lacrosse, or summer hockey is your game? This is for you.
The name of the game is preparation, and for the Spring season (March/April) that begins now. Building strength, muscle, endurance, and power can vary greatly depending on many factors (age, sex, prior training experience, nutrition, etc.) and it is never too early to start thinking about how to up your game.
This is where a team can come in handy to help with that preparation regardless of where you are in your journey.
Rehabilitation
Before we start any program, we want to make sure that our tissues are ready for it. Regular muscle soreness (delayed onset muscle soreness or DOMS) should be expected, especially with a new program, however we should not be pushing through pain. If you have doubts about what you are feeling, your rehab professional can help you tell the difference. I like to use the paper cut reference (we’ve all been there). If it feels like a paper cut or worse, it’s time to get it looked at. Different tissues take different time and loading strategies to recover so sadly this is not a one size fits all approach. One thing that you can be sure of is your ability to start your preparation journey during rehab as the transition from rehab to strength/power/endurance training should be fairly smooth and look similar from the middle to end stage of rehab to the beginning of specific training programs.
Strength Training
Strength training in my opinion is a must for every single person. The benefits are absolutely uncontested in the literature of what strength training does for you. Not only do you get to flex at the beach, but metabolically, independence, and the cardiorespiratory system to mention just a few show the incredible benefits of building and maintaining muscle. An increase in muscle mass was shown to be a predictor of longevity in older adults (Srikanthan et. al, 2014), but whether that is a correlation or causation is not really clear as there are so many other factors that come into play there. Still, you can’t go wrong being strong. When we are looking at building into a strength training program it can be daunting to say the least. A good place to start would be 2-4 sessions per week of at least 30 minutes of high intensity strength training. We need to be consistent if we want to build muscle. We can start to see changes as soon as a few weeks into training regarding growth of muscle, but we want to set aside 2-3 months before we see bigger, more impactful changes. This is where getting into specifics can be helped with a team around you. Shameless plug: MOST Physical Preparation offers an incredible strength training staff with VALD Performance technology in the form of Force Decks and Force Frame to get good objective measures of strength and power. We also utilize Tindeq innovative equipment and hand dynamometers to assist with these objective measures so that we aren’t guessing at the outputs which comes in handy when recovering and building strength.
Power
Have you ever felt the strongest that you’ve ever felt but it doesn’t translate to your activities? This is where training power comes in handy. You could be the strongest man in existence, but if you can’t produce that strength quickly it loses some of its advantages. Power production utilizes our bodies ability to use different muscle fibers (type 1, type 2A, type 2B or 2X) at different times when they are required. Neurologically this is a big learning curve as we have motor units (sometimes hundreds to thousands per muscle) that communicate with different sets and types of muscle fibers in each muscle. If we try to utilize new muscle strength at the beginning of the season without training those movements, it tends to not be the best performance. This is where a program designed for your activity comes in handy. Measuring power can be challenging. Cue up the VALD Performance Force Decks to help out with seeing rate of force production asymmetry, maximal power outputs, and ground reaction force.
Whether you are rehabbing, building strength, or working on power, now is the time to start if you are looking towards spring. So get out there and get prepping, the spring flowers will be calling sooner than you think!
If you would like some assistance working into any stage of your preparation, visit us at mostphysicalprep.com and drop us a line, we’d love to help you get there!
References:
Srikanthan P, Karlamangla AS. Muscle mass index as a predictor of longevity in older adults. Am J Med. 2014 Jun;127(6):547-53. doi: 10.1016/j.amjmed.2014.02.007. Epub 2014 Feb 18. PMID: 24561114; PMCID: PMC4035379.
