subject: Optimising movement and the importance of performance movement [print this page] Optimising movement and the importance of performance movement
Everyone's interested in optimising their game/performance, whether it's for five-a-side football on a Sunday morning or playing better tennis at your local club. For others, however, it is careers that can be made or broken through performance movement and optimising movement. Making such seemingly small changes can really help an athlete reach their true potential, and help coaches and physiotherapists help athletes to do this (as well as making them stronger, more stable and less prone to injury). So what is performance movement/movement optimisation and how can it help you?
Performance movement looks at a range of categories including:
Stability: Sometimes referred to as functional stability, within the realms of sport/exercise this refers to the body's ability to manage force, and the force of tasks. An athlete needs a level of stability in order to avoid injury when moving, in order to bounce a basketball, for example, if done without stability stress is placed on other parts of the body, which can cause injury. In order to understand stability it is also integral to have a knowledge of stabilisers and mobilisers.
In order to move muscles must work together in co-ordinated sequences. A movement needs a firm foundation and this is provided by a muscle group called the local stabilisers which hold parts of your body in place and prevent you from being damaged while the other set of muscles, the mobilisers (or movers), are moving you. Local stabilisers provide fundamental joint support.
Posture: Often over looked posture is very important when studying performance movement. Many people think good posture is about standing bolt upright but you do not want to be rigid, nothing should be locked or fixed. An ideal posture should make movement easier, and establishing a central axis should allow you to breathe freely.
The most common way to find out more about an athlete's stability levels, posture and performance is to undertake a range of functional assessments, in-depth exercises can be found in various health and fitness books in more details, but this article will give some background on what these entail.
In a functional assessment simple movements are accessed to create a profile of your/the athlete's basic control ability. The assessment looks at: balance control, functional mobility, pelvic stability, trunk stability and scapular ability. By identifying the mobility and stability demands of your sport you can be guided to a specific sports routine to help improve your game.
Examples of possible exercises/test what might be undertaken include: a range of mobility tests (some with the athlete's eyes open, some with them closed), body rotation tests, lunges, exercises using an exercise ball, jumping and landing tests and step exercises. Features that might be monitored in these movements include: symmetry of body ailment, control of pelvic motion, hip bending mobility and control, arm motion and control of spinal angle.
