Happy Tuesday everyone, hopefully you are all feeling good after the Bear Complex yesterday! Today is Tips for Performance Tuesday and we are going to be talking about ankle mobility. Just like last week’s IT Band post I will explain a little more about why we have been doing so much ankle mobility work in my classes. I have seen a lot of you making some huge improvements and I hope you are seeing the benefits! Let’s talk about some reasons that your ankle mobility may have degraded over time. The most common and obvious reason for poor ankle mobility is past injuries. Most of us at some point in our lives have probably sprained an ankle or at least rolled it a little too far, some of you have maybe had even more serious injuries. These instances can all lead to a buildup of scar tissue or general tightness in the joint if not properly cared for. Other reasons for mobility restrictions are tight calves or poor posture which can both come from wearing the wrong shoes or poor walking/running technique. There is a theory in the sports medicine community that the body consists of stacks of joints that alternate between requiring mobility and stability. The ankle requires mobility, the knees stability, the hips mobility, and the lumbar spine requires stability. When someone experiences pain in one of these areas experts typically look up and down the “chain” to diagnose the problem. If one of the mobile joints has poor mobility a stable joint will normally have to compensate which will cause wear and tear on that joint. Probably the most important reason to focus on ankle mobility is to prevent knee pain and prevent knee problems down the road. The next reason to increase ankle mobility is performance. Increasing ankle mobility will help the ankle bear more weight in power production (like a spring and the concept of potential energy). The more your ankle can move through its range of motion the more power you will be able to generate from your ankles and the less work your hips and knees will have to do. This will greatly increase your efficiency in running, jumping, and in lifts like the squat, jerk, and clean. We tend to do a lot of rowing in the gym and for all of us there is a point where our heels come off the rower in our forward stroke (this is where your ankle mobility ends). The further forward in the stroke you can go without your heels lifting off the rower the more power you will be able to generate through your heels and legs and you will save time by not losing contact with the rower! Working on your ankle mobility at home can greatly increase your performance in the gym and in life! Not only will your lifts increase but activities like running, walking, hiking, and skiing will become much easier. Below is a video from Dr. Aaron Horschig who runs a great social media account called Squat University. I highly recommend checking his stuff out on Instagram as he puts out some great content regarding injury prevention and performance. Check out this video for some easy ankle mobility work to perform! Thanks for reading everyone, I hope this helps!
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Happy Monday everyone! For today’s motivation Monday post I am going to be writing about one impressive guy named Colin O’Brady. Colin is a famous endurance athlete who has completed some insane feats all around the world. His example is one of passion, grit, and thinking outside the box that I think we can all learn from. Colin is always chasing bigger and bigger challenges and raising the bar for human accomplishment. In small ways we are doing the same thing in our daily lives. I see you guys setting new PR’s for yourselves all the time and it’s so cool to watch. We all grow together by pushing ourselves to achieve new things every day and surrounding ourselves with a great community of people who want to do the same! Colin’s career began in a pretty unconventional manner. While on vacation in Thailand he fell into a fire at the beach resort he was staying at and suffered severe burns, especially on his legs and feet. The doctors that treated him were saying that he was never going to walk again (spoiler alert, he does, and does some amazing things). Through sheer willpower and a little help from his mother when he was feeling down Colin went through an incredibly long rehab process and regained full function in his legs. During his recovery he decided that he was going to complete a triathlon which is what propelled him to keep moving forward and achieve his goal. After 18 months not only did Colin compete in that triathlon he ended up winning the Chicago Triathlon and immediately received sponsorships which launched his racing career. He went on to compete internationally for years! As if this wasn’t enough Colin set an even more ambitious goal. He decided that he was going to try to set the world record for the Explorers Grand Slam. This challenge been completed by less than 50 people in history and it entails summiting the tallest mountains on all seven continents and skiing to both the North and South Poles. Colin completed this challenge in only 139 days, shattering the world record and actually setting another world record for the fastest summit on all seven continents! Guess what, Colin still wasn’t done! He decided to take on a mind blowing challenge, to cross the entire continent of Antarctica, pulling a sled, by himself, completely unsupported! Colin spent 54 days completely alone in Antarctica and traveled over 930 miles! He documented the entire expedition via Instagram and became a global hit. Most recently, he rowed across the Drake Passage which is the body of water between the tip of South America and Antarctica. With one other person in the boat he and his partner rowed for twelve days straight to get across (we could all crush this with how much we row!). Colin appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast to talk about his Antarctica expedition and his training. It is a great listen, I was particularly interested in his training and nutrition which were both pretty crazy, I won’t spoil it on here. Colin is a great example of what we can achieve when we set a goal for ourselves and work hard to achieve it. I hope this story is inspiring to you guys and helps you push just a little harder today! If this story interests you check out the link and video below! Thanks for reading everyone and let’s have a great week! https://www.colinobrady.com/about Sunday is a rest day! Get out and explore today and remember to stay hydrated like Nanook! Spilling is encouraged!
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