To truly rehabilitate your injuries, you must work within a pain-free zone.
This is quite different from training to improve your performance where you may have to endure some degree of muscle pain (not injury pain) to improve strength and endurance.
Principle 2: Develop your Power
Power (within your body) is about the production and transfer of force through your entire body. Power is also a function of how well you can recruit your nervous system to control muscular action. The more efficient your nervous system, the more power you will have. The more power you have, the easier it is to perform your activities and exercises without injury.
Power is not the same as strength; power is about maximum efficiency without effort. (Strength requires a lot of effort and energy.)
The more power you have, the less energy you will need to expend to perform a task, which equates to having more energy available to heal and grow your body.
Power generation is also directly related to the quality of your soft tissues (muscles, ligaments, tendons, etc.). The quality of your soft tissues determine how well you can store and release energy.
Think of your soft tissues as being like cords of elastic rubber (or perhaps a telephone cord). Just like a rubber cord you can stretch (storing energy) and contract them (releasing energy). In a healthy state, your muscles contract and release instantaneously, storing and releasing energy with changes in body motion.
So what happens when a rubber cord gets knots tied in it? The rubber cord’s ability to store and release energy is immediately diminished. The same thing happens to your soft tissues when you build up restrictions and adhesions (from the micro-tears caused by repetitive motion), or scar tissue from injuries. These adhesions and scar tissues are analogous to knots in the cord. Just as the cord’s ability to store and release energy was diminished by knots, so is our body’s ability to store and release energy diminished by these restrictions. Think of these adhesions and restrictions as energy leaks that rob your body of much needed energy for healing.
You will have problems with storing and releasing your own energy if your body is full of tight areas and ropy fibrous restrictions. This is why foam rollers, Massage Therapy, Active Release Techniques, Graston Techniques, and dozens of other soft tissue techniques are so valuable for helping in your healing process. All these procedures act to improve the quality of your soft tissue by releasing or removing the soft tissue restrictions that lie between your tissue layers.
Bottom line, you may need to invest in some soft tissue care to get rid of these restrictions...these restrictions are sapping your energy, causing injuries, and aging you prematurely. Consider getting treatment for these areas. Obtaining care in this area is an investment that will pay countless positive dividends to you for the rest of your life.
Principle 3: Build your Aerobic Base
Yes, rehabilitative care does require you to build a good aerobic base. Your cardiovascular system is responsible for transporting oxygen and nutrients to all your cells, and for carrying away toxins and waste products.
These are essential processes for any kind of recovery from injuries, and even more essential if you plan to take up athletic endeavours. See the following topics for more information about the importance of Aerobic warm-ups:
Benefits of Cardiovascular Exercises - page 40
So what is a good warm-up? - page 43
Working within your Aerobic Zone - page 44
Athletic or Performance Care Routines
The Release Your Kinetic Chain series of books focuses on helping you resolve your injuries and preparing your body for performance level training.
If your primary objective is to resolve an injury and you have no interest in athletic or performance care, then you can move directly to the next chapter.
For the rest of you, there are several factors you should consider once you have attained a level of fitness where your body is ready to begin performance training.
Athletic performance training is all about speed, power, and strength, which in turn are based on the development of superb neuromuscular control. Great neuromuscular control (the training of your nervous system to perform a task) is what defines the world’s best athletes – not strength or muscle size. There are some similarities (as well as some huge differences) in the objectives of rehabilitative exercise and athletic or performance training. In both, the development of neuromuscular control remains critical.
Athletic or Performance training has greater risks than rehabilitation training. Athletic training often involves riding the fence between overloading the body (to increase strength and power) and reaching the point of tissue failure (injury). With Performance training, there is always a greater chance of injury.
Athletic or Performance training differs from rehabilitative training in its:
Increased risk of injury.
Need to work through muscle pain.
Need to increase resistance to the point of overloading the muscles.
Requiring speed training.
Development of the anaerobic system.
Before Beginning Athletic Training
The following are a few fundamental principles that you should keep in mind before you start the Athletic or Performance training routines:
Principle 1: Athletic Development is Not the Same as Body-Building! - page 8
Principle 2: Good Tissue Quality = Good Performance - page 9
Principle 3: Some Muscle Pain is Okay - page 10
Principle 4: Develop Your Aerobic Zone Before Working on Your Anaerobic Zone - page 11
Principle 1: Athletic Development is Not the Same as Body-Building!
Exercise programs that focus only on increasing muscle size serve to meet body-building objectives of increasing size and definition and have very little to do with improved