Which needs to be stronger, your foot or your footwear?

Barefoot training is one of the biggest mindset shifts happening in the training world today.

We’re finding out that people are having a very hard time getting rid of foot pain.  What do people do when their foot hurts?  They stay off it and put on a tougher shoe, which further weakens their foot and deadens their proprioceptive abilities.

What’s really weird is that in places where people don’t wear shoes, they don’t have any of the foot and arch problems we have in America!

Go to a drug store in the US and there is a whole aisle dedicated to pads, supports, and orthotics to get rid of foot pain.  I posit that all of this support and padding is just making things worse!

In my volleyball athletes, much of our training is directed towards putting force through the feet and into the court.  (You don’t actually “jump.”  You shove against the Earth and according to Newton’s Law of Equal and Opposite Reactions, the Earth “shoves you back” just as hard and propels you into the air.)

The ability to put force into the ground and move your body through space is ultimately reliant on the strength and your control of your feet.

It’s a big problem that we never train our feet and that they just get weaker and worse as we get older.

If your hands are weak, it will limit your strength and skill in upper body exercises.  The same is true for your feet and training your legs.

Now, how does a weak foot link up with ankle braces and knee injuries?

Simple

In my exercise seminars, I teach people the “Stack of Joints” theory.

The stack of joints theory is that your body is a bunch of joints stacked on top of each other, and we look at it from the ground up.

Some of your joints need to be stable, and some need to be mobile.  They alternate with each other:

Ankle – Mobile

Knee – Stable

Hip – Mobile

Low Back – Stable

Upper Back – Mobile

Shoulder – Stable

If a joint is messed up, a good physical therapist will look at the joints above and below it.

As an example, if your low back hurts, it is probably because of a lack of mobility in your hips and upper back, and your low back has to take on their work loads.

That’s why if you have low back pain, we do a lot of HIP exercises.  By fixing the joints sandwiching your pained areas, we can fix the cause of the problem.

Now, a weak foot and a locked up ankle CAN’T be mobile.  I mean, if the ankle is in a SPLINT, it obviously can’t move.

This splinting of the ankle forces the knee the take on all the mobility that was meant for the ankle.

A study that was released last month looked at non-contact ACL tears in female athletes:

Koga H, Nakamae A, Shima Y, Iwasa J, Myklebust G, Engebretsen L, Bahr R, Krosshaug T. (2010). Mechanisms for noncontact anterior cruciate ligament injuries: knee joint kinematics in 10 injury situations from female team handball and basketball. Am J Sports Med. 2010 Nov;38(11):2218-25. Epub 2010 Jul 1.

The researchers found that the mechanism for injury was rotation at the tibia:

(click picture to enlarge)

So instead of the ankle and hip taking on the rotation, the knee took it and “popped” the Anterior Cruciate Ligament.

This happens more often when the ankle is locked in a splint.  A weak foot and stiff ankle may sustain some injuries from a quick twist, but as a strength and conditioning coach, I’d much rather deal with a sprained ankle than a torn ACL.  If you’re confused why, here’s some simple math:

Sprained Ankle: Two weeks off, Can tape up and play if it’s a big game

Torn ACL: 6 months to two years off, might never be the same again, $50,00 surgery

The study I mentioned above also had these points:

- Non-contact knee injuries happen during cutting or one-leg landings

- At foot contact the knee pointed in (valgus)

- The tibia rotated internally then externally

Here are some ways to prevent non-contact knee injuries:

1.  Do all non-volleyball court training barefoot or in “barefoot shoes.” This lets your foot and ankle strengthen.

2.  Avoid splint-type ankle braces. Go with a softer lace up brace.  It might not protect the ankle as much as a splint, but a softer brace protects the knee much more.

3. Focus on prevention. Prepare physically for the demands of your sport.  A strength and conditioning program can take as little as an hour a week (in season).

4.  Train the around the joints as dictated by the mobility/stability continuum (stack of joints theory). Knees should be trained for stability, ankles and hips for mobility.

5.  Learn proper technique. Jumping is a skill, and it should be trained with as much detail as any other sports skill.

6.  Deceleration training. The knee injuries in the study above occurred during landing and cutting movements.  Training the ability to stop with perfect technique and strength would have prevented ACL injury.

7.  Nutrition nutrition nutrition. There are two keys to nutrition, the first is obvious:  Any extra weight in the form of fat will increase the force through the knee joint and will precipitate injury.  The second key is that a diet high in inflammatory foods such as grains, sugar, and dairy will diminish the integrity of your joints.

8.  Don’t try to substitute energy and enthusiasm for preparation and technique. An athlete throwing themselves around the court will break their body.  If you want to perform at a higher level, train at a higher level.

9.  Posterior Chain Training. The hamstrings, butt, and low back are all key areas that need to be strengthened in any athlete.  Sadly, these muscles are often totally neglected in training.  Simply firing up your butt muscles with the humble glute bridge during your warmup will help.

10.  Keep your eyes on your goal. It may feel weird and awkward and scary to exercise without ankle splints, especially if you’ve been wearing them for years.  Soon the discomfort will pass and you’ll be a stronger, better, healthier athlete.

Thank you so much for reading.  Let me know if you have any questions in the comment box below.

~ Luke Wold

Carson City Personal Trainer

Last week I teamed up with Dr. Brian Russell to do a presentation on keeping young athletes healthy and performing at the top of their game. We did four seminars for the parents at Capital City Volleyball Club (Where I’m the strength and conditioning coach)

One of the questions we received was “What do you think of crossfit for my volleyball player?”

Well, as I’ve said before, I don’t like Crossfit for ANYTHING.  (But if you’re a consenting adult, you’re welcome to make your own bad decisions

But it’s time to point out a few of the problems with Crossfit that are SPECIFIC to volleyball players.

1) Volleyball isn’t an endurance sport.

Any volleyball player who trains by running anything more than 50 or 60 meter sprints is not only wasting their time, they’re ruining their volleyball performance.

I don’t know who said it first, but it’s well known by top strength and conditioning coaches that distance running “turns jumpers into joggers.”

Volleyball is a strength and power sport, NOT an aerobic sport.  Honestly, if your daughter is in shape enough to text her friends, she’s in good enough AEROBIC condition to play volleyball.

Here’s an example of a crossfit workout that would sap a volleyball player’s strength and power:

“Jerry”
For time:
Run 1 mile
Row 2K
Run 1 mile

Not only would this be a waste of time for anyone serious about volleyball, it would destroy hard-won fast twitch muscle fibers, promote fat storage, increase carbohydrate cravings, beat up joints, take inches off your vertical jump, promote illness, mess up hormones, shorten joint range of motion, and reduce explosiveness.

2) Crossfit is more random than a Pauly Shore movie.

No matter what you think about “muscle confusion” and “being ready for anything,” volleyball is a SPECIFIC sport and needs a specific workout.

Volleyball players get sport-specific injuries and asymmetries that can only be fixed with a SPECIFIC training program.

When a player comes in to see Dr. Russell because she has a glenohumeral internal rotation deficit, scapular dysfunctions, lack of stability, kyphosis, and a severe knee valgus, the last thing she should even think about doing is something like this:

Five rounds for time of:

• 5 Muscle-ups
• 135 pound Power clean, 10 reps
• Run 220 meters

Or:

• 35 Double-unders
• 95 pound Thrusters, 25 reps
• 15 Pull-ups

One of the core principles of success in anything is the idea of SPECIFICITY.

Crossfit is a mishmash of a bunch of systems.  To quote the legendary Charles Poliquin (on Crossfit): “Looked like a bunch of cachexic fitness-model wannabes searching for their souls in the weight room.”

Or, to paraphrase my Grandpa, you can’t ride two motorcycles when you only have one butt.

To get better at volleyball, you need a volleyball training program – not an epileptic writing fit of someone who has never actually trained anyone.

3) “Fatigue makes cowards of us all”

I have a rule about doing things RIGHT before you try to do them a lot.

If a volleyball player has a crappy serve, practicing that serve will just ingrain bad habits even more leading to injury and ineffective performance.

Lots of crossfit workouts have athletes doing complicated weighted exercises for a certain number of reps and trying for their lowest time.  Two bad things with this: 1) It encourages poor form and shortcuts 2) as they get tired, injury risk goes WAYYY up.

Poor exercise technique is bad for anyone, but volleyball players are even more injury prone than other athletes.  One in five competitive female athletes will suffer an ACL-based knee injury this season, 68% of female volleyball players will have some sort of shoulder injury this season.  The injury rate goes up when you factor in everything else that will go wrong too!  Thumbs, wrists, etc.

The goal with a volleyball strength and conditioning program is to 1) keep the girls on the court 2) improve performance.  In that order.

Racing to see who can get the most power cleans done is a sure recipe for injury.  Even more when you remember that we’re dealing with tired athletes who just want their workout over so they can get back to checking their facebook pages.

4) Leaving out the important stuff.

For the moment let’s forget that crossfit is totally inappropriate in exercise selection, loading, and volume – just focus on the fact that crossfit workouts leave out important injury prevention movements for volleyball players.

Volleyball players need a lot of hip mobility, thoracic spine mobility, scapular stability, anti-rotational core stability, anti-extension core strength, and lumbar stability.

If you waste all your time screwing around with nonsensical crossfit workouts, you won’t have any time, energy, or motivation left to pay attention to this stuff.

5) Volleyball shoulders aren’t normal shoulders.

Ok, when I was in college I actually dissected shoulders and spent a lot of time learning how everything works.  So believe me when I say that I’m VERY concerned when I hear about volleyball players doing crossfit.

It’s almost a cliche that after an experienced volleyball player serves, she grabs her shoulder.  Dr. Russell realigns shoulders daily at his practice.

Heck, I know a school bus full of 16 year-old volleyball players who have already gotten cortisol shots just to be able to finish playing the season.  It shouldn’t be like that way.

Here are some of the notes we made while talking about volleyball players and shoulders:  “Most have significant shoulder and full body laxity (aquired, congenital, and monthly hormonal), diminished rotator cuff strength in serving shoulder (especially with no rest all year), abnormal labral features, supraspinatus tears, inactive serratus anterior, jacked up scapular upward rotation, retroversion, and impingements.”

Basically, it goes back to the title of this section: Volleyball shoulders are nothing like regular shoulders.

Add in an imbalanced training program, poor posture, and improper form and I’m surprised that the number of shoulder injuries isn’t higher than 68%.

When scholarships are on the line, any coach who recommended crossfit for shoulders with all of these problems should be beaten to death with a folded-up ballcart.

With all 5 of these problems with crossfit in mind, I recommend that anyone looking to improve their volleyball performance find a REAL strength and conditioning coach, not just someone who paid $1000 bucks for a weekend seminar in destroying athletes.

As most of you know, in addition to running Wold Fitness Body Transformations, I am a youth sports performance specialist.

I work mainly with Carson City Volleyball Club as their head strength and conditioning coach, but consult with various schools districts and sports clubs as well.

Carson City asked me to develop a 5 minute Warm Up for all of the players to do before they even touch a volleyball.

Here’s what we came up with:

Carson City Volleyball Championship Warm Up

• Seal Jacks x 20 (40 sec) Temp Raise, chest stretch
• Mountain Climbers x 40 (80 sec) Temp Raise, hip loosener, core activation
• Fire Hydrants x 10/leg (110 sec) Glute activation, hip loosener
• Hindu Pushups x 10 (140 sec) Full body strength, posterior chain stretch
• Hip flexor stretch x 20sec/leg (180 sec) Releases the “brakes” on hip extension
• Glute bridges x 15 (210 sec) Glute activation/strength
• Piriformis Stretch x 20sec/leg (250 sec) Releases the “brakes” on jump & squat
• Tuck Jump x 10 (280 sec) Neural activation and explosiveness
• Bicycle Crunch x 20 (300 sec) Temp raise, core strength

(The time on the side is a running clock towards the 5 minutes)

Here are videos of each exercise:

Seal Jacks

Mountain Climbers (Volleyball Players do these without the sliders)

Fire Hydrants (first exercise in series)

Hindu Pushups

Hip Flexor Stretch

Glute Bridges

Piriformis Stretch

Tuck Jump

Bicycle Crunch

Short and sweet: This is the summer volleyball weightlifting program for Carson City Volleyball Club, where I’m the head strength and conditioning coach.

There are 3 different “days” in this program, A, B, & C.  If you workout on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, it would would look this:

• Mon: Day A
• Wed: Day B
• Fri: Day C
• Mon: Day A (add weight, reps, time, etc)
• Wed: Day B (add weight, reps, time, etc)
• And so on for 6 weeks

Day A:

A1: Rack Pulls 5×5 (45 seconds rest)

A2: Swiss Ball Mountain Climbers 5×30 (45 seconds rest)

B: Barbell Step Back Lunge Off Box 3×8 (30 seconds rest)

C1: 45 degree back raise with 5 sec hold at top 3×10 (0 seconds rest)

C2: Sprinter Sit Ups 3×20 (0 seconds rest)

C3: Rope Face Pull 3×12 (30 seconds rest)