March in South Africa is the month when many of the big endurance events occur nationally as well as many of the school sports festivals. There is the Cape Town Cycle Tour, the Cape Epic and the Two Oceans Ultra Marathon and then of course, the Easter Rugby festivals.
One of my clients/athletes competed in the master’s category of the Cape Epic Cycle and much of his strength and mobility work was done incorporating the Power Plate. In terms of flexibility and strength imbalances, what he initially presented with was typical of cyclists: kyphosis; weak glutes and hamstrings. He lacked flexibility through his posterior kinetic chain and his balance and proprioception was not good at all. (This is problematic for a mountain biker in very technical terrain.)
I changed his program so that all of the workout preparation was done on the Power Plate- stretching, balance and potentiation of the exercises we were going to do that day. Once the specific strength work was done, I put him back on the PP to recover.
He finished the race yesterday and said that his off the bike conditioning played a massive role in his performance. (Loves the PP, by the way).
I also introduced some 13 year old boys to the recover component on the PP- hamstring flexibility at this age is shocking to say the least. Besides the ‘novelty’ of being on a ‘fancy’ piece of equipment, they were amazed at the rapid improvement in flexibility.
The cherry on top of this month’s events was the opportunity to attend the ‘RUN INJURY FREE’ workshop by Dr Emily Splichal. This incorporated PP and Naboso Barefoot Technology. To say that this workshop was impressive would be an understatement and all the delegates, myself included, rated this as one of the best they had attended.
The beauty of it was that it showed yet again how PP can be integrated into all aspects of training and that the technology is aligned with other systems, like Naboso. Keep watching the Power Plate media platforms to see when Dr Emily will be back.