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Stop blowing off Functional Strength

April 20, 2014 by CoachJay

Simple question: Can you do a one-legged squat?  If you think of running as a series of one-legged hops, then you should be able to squat on one leg.  Why?  For the simple reason that you’re going to land on one leg after taking off in the air from the other leg, i.e. you’re basically hopping from one leg to another when you run, and if you can not handle your body weight on one leg, then you probably need to go back and do some remedial strength work before you consider running a bunch of miles.

There are a number of functional screens out there – Grey Cook’s work and Gary Gray’s work come to mind – that can help an athlete figure out where they are weak, where they are asymmetric, and where they have a higher probability of injury.  But even if you can’t find someone to do the screen, why wouldn’t you start working on functional strength right away?  The Lunge Matrix that I use (which is rooted in Gary Gray’s work) is a great warm-up because it’s getting the body to move in all three planes of motion before a run – which is primarily a sagittal plane activity, with a little bit of transverse plane (hips and shoulders oscillating throughout the gait).  The second thing you should consider is Active Isolated Flexibility (AIF) as a daily practice after your run.  I’ve seen dozens of runners do this work and stay injury free.  With AIF, you gain flexibility, but you also gain strength, and it’s a great way to improve your body’s symmetry.

The bottom line is that staying healthy requires work, but not a tremendous amount.  Functional Strength can help you stay healthy, staying healthy leads to consistency, and consistency leads to a faster runner.

Filed Under: For Everyone Tagged With: Active Isolated Flexibility, AIF, Gary Gray, Grey Cook, lunge matrix, Phil Wharton

Anatomy of Workout 003

March 24, 2009 by CoachJay

The first thing Sara does when she shows up at the track is the Lunge Matrix (LM) and Lateral Lunge (LL) warm-ups. On this day, she then went for a 30 min easy run following the LM and LL. The LM demonstrated here is a watered down version of physical therapist Gary Gray’s work – http://www.grayinstitute.com

Filed Under: For Everyone, Training, Training Videos, Videos Tagged With: Gary Gray, Grayinstitute.com, lateral lunge, LL, LM, lunge matrix, The Machine 1_1 circuit

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