My Thoughts Monday #7: “Footwork”? Maybe?

In the initial meeting with the head coach of this team we are discussing, one of the things that she brought up was the issue the athlete’s have with their feet being outside of their base of support when trying to do specific skills. Now, we can discuss if that is a technique issue that the sport coach should address or if that’s a simple “footwork” problem that we can address in training, but for today, let’s just say I’m taking this on.

Now, before we go forward one thing needs to be addressed. This is the one thing that we are doing that I have absolutely no idea if it will help or not, and I completely despise that. I’m not a fan of doing things to “just do things” as many of you know, but when this issue was brought to my attention, the first thing that came to my mind is what we are doing, and as my mom has always said, “when in doubt go with your gut.” So, this is what we are doing.

When this issue was brought up the first thing I thought of was some stuff Brandon Hourigan did with our football players a while back. Most of it was taken from Mark Verstegen’s “Core Performance” book, but one I think might have been from Brandon himself, because I didn’t see it in the book. We utilized 3 different exercises for this: Hip Base Shift, Lateral Base Shift, and SL Shift. Instead of me trying to write down all of the descriptions and ruin everything, I put together a video of me demoing (if you call this a demo) and talking through the progression here:

So from here, we need to share how we progressed the whole deal. This is what we did, from Day 1 up until this week (obviously we haven’t done the stuff for this week yet because it’s Monday, but this is the plan). We tried to add a new exercise every other day, and/or intensify one that we already have in there. To answer the question about what are the jumping/running exercises. Dr. Verkhosansky covered that in great detail in her presentation “Progressing The Jumping Exercises” from The 2013 Seminar, and the cutting exercises will be covered in The Manual, Vol. 2. So you can find all those there. MTM 7

Next week we will come back and discuss this week’s evaluations, and then dive into the changes in the plan and where the team is going from here.

Verstegen, M., & Williams, P. (2005). Core Performance: the revolutionary workout program to transform your body and your life. S.l.: Rodale.

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