What’s best practice for your gymnasts?
How do we prevent overuse pain later in the career?
Question: Should we use light ankle weights on young gymnasts for conditioning?
Answer:
Adding very light weights to gymnasts while conditioning is an excellent idea. At my gym coaches have made sand-filled bicycle tire tubes that can be wrapped around the waist or body.
Be cautious with using wrist or ankle weights, though. The resistance is greatly increased by being at the end of the lever of the limb. The risk, of course, is possible damage to growth plates. The bike tire tubes are safer.
Question: best methods for improving shoulder / upper back flexibility?
1) Increase passive flexibility.
My favourite passive stretch is bridge with feet elevated, pushing the shoulders away from the wall. Advanced kids are allowed to progress on to walkover drills starting with at least one foot elevated.
The lower back is “rigid” and not in full extension. (The “flatter”, the better.)
2) Increase active flexibility.
Use surgical tube or skipping rope to “bounce” to full range.
Note that measuring shoulder / upper back flexibility is difficult. If you allow the gymnast to use flexibility in the lower back (e.g. bridge test) to get a higher score, they will. Yet that’s not what we want (later) on Yurchenko, Tkachev, swing on Rings, etc.
Question: stretch at the beginning or end of a practice?
This one is easy. Improving flexibility in a muscle is best done when it is fatigued. Therefore, do flexibility improvement at the end of practice.
On the other hand, if you need flexibility during the workout (and you normally do) then you need to stretch at the beginning of the workout too. Or, perhaps better, at each apparatus as you arrive. Many beam coaches have a specific complex for stretching they do on arrival at that event.
Good coaching!
7 comments ↓
Stretching after a run (immediately after) will give huge flexability gains for splits.
I love doing a heavy stretching complex right after a plyometric workout. It seems to get the kids going lower than usual and eventually, the “usual” becomes a whole lot better.
That’s what I’m talking about. Seriously, I made immense gains in flexability from this. Try doing splits right after a run. Right after. You will go lower and the gains will help flexability even before that kind of lubrication.
Lubrication! Sounds narty.
When I did track, our two-lap warm-up was never enough for me. I soon found out that myself and other ex-gymnasts would need to not only take an extra lap, but we also had to stretch longer than the other kids in order to prevent injury. Now I know the mechanics of WHY, but I wish I hadn’t pulled my quad twice in order to figure that out as a teenager
I don’t think that fatigue has anything to do with stretching. Performing stretching at the end of the workout is more effective because of the increased blood flow to the area for waste removal and nutrient transport and the fact that temperature alone makes the muscles and associated connective tissue structures more pliable.
I could be wrong on this, so if you can find a credible source that refutes such, please let me know.
Secondly, the shoulder isn’t made to be flexible. The shoulder (glenohumeral) joint consists of a big head of the humerus that fits into the glenoid cavity. Unfortunately, this fit is not perfect and the humeral head is quite larger than the cavity. It’s been described as a golf ball sitting on a golf tee. The labrum and a few other ligaments as well as the rotators help to maintain some degree of stability. But, overall the shoulder is the most unstable joint in the body.
What we should really be working on is strengthening the rotator cuff, serratus anterior, lower and middle traps, and the rhomboids to pull the scapula into proper position and help to stabilize it. This will help increase shoulder range-of-motion and also offset the possibility of future shoulder impingement. In addition to this, more focus should be spent on upper thoracic spine mobility exercises and any stretching should be latissimus dorsi-specific as well as pectoralis major/minor specific as these are usually the offending muscles that limit shoulder ROM.
I’ll write a little more on this later when I have some time.
The reason it is more effective is that you will go down further. Seriously. Run at least a mile (or a full run) and then stretch immediately after. You will be amazed at how much more flexible you are. It’s like magic.
The rationale behind fatigue and increase potential for acute flexibility gains is that after intense exertive training like gymnastics trainings, the stretch-reflex is delayed or suppressed, which directly effects the muscle ability to elongate. However the catch is that with fatigue comes an increased perception of pain (this is supported by patients with CFB), and because flexibility improvements are strongly correlated with pain tolerance during warmdown the winning and moaning increased exponentially. However to my knowledge i dont think the specific effects of fatigue on flexibility (acute) gains has ever been studied. However the rationale for it seems logical.
The reason why you would get great acute benefits from stretching after a nice long run, is because not so much due to fatigue (peripheral) but because as Chris said, due to the increased core muscle temperature and blood flow. Its not that running is some magical solution its just a great way to increase the core temperature of the muscles in the legs. increased temperature allows the muscle to lengthen more. The good old example is the muscle is like a chewing gum. when its warm it stretched without snapping, but when its cold and you pull it can easily snap. Same effects can be achieved with Cycling, or rowing or whatever, any aerobic sport. Hence why the warm-ups for any sport involve aerobic activity (like running, skipping etc..)
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