I have found that proprioception for some athletes is easy, yet next to impossible for others. Interestingly enough, for the poor proprioceptive athletes in the weight room doesn’t transfer to a poor athlete on the field. In the weight room, the lifts may be so foreign to the athlete that understanding what their body is actually doing or most often not doing, is difficult. Our education for the past two weeks has been performing lifts, coaching and observing. Being a great strength coach is not just having the ability to coach. It involves being athletic and proficient in the movements prescribed and coached to the athletes. Understanding what to look for during each exercise is crucial. Two athletes lifting side by side may look to have similar squat patterns but feel the exercise in two different muscles. Issues can arise when an exercise looks great but is actually deceivingly activating the wrong muscles and resorting to compensatory patterns.
The shuffle is one of these most basics forms of locomotive skill yet it is often performed terribly wrong. Look at your athletes next time they shuffle for a warm up or lateral speed drill. Where is their weight distribution and how close do their feet come together? First, what you often will see are athletes that will pull themselves in the direction they are going rather than pushing off the leg of the back foot to facilitate the movement. Second, after the initial push, or often improper pull of the lead foot, you will see the feet come incredibly close, or even touch between strides. Stand up and place your feet together and see how fast you can change direction verse an athletic stance of feet shoulder width apart. The difference is incomparable. Look for these two faults when your athletes are training next time and learn how to coach them to push off the loaded leg in the opposite direction.
Another fault that is prevalent amongst most everyone is the inability to understand neutrality. Neutrality is important among many aspects of lifting, pelvis and neck ranking high on this list. I am discussing in this instance, neutrality in where weight is distributed on the foot. Over our lifetime as human beings, injuries occur, poor footwear is worn (practically every shoot is terrible, but this is a topic of discussion for another time), and compensatory patterns are created. Through these compensatory patterns stem the inability or loss of consciousness of where mid-foot is. By rocking from the toe to the heel, an understanding for weight distribution in the middle of the foot is created. During exercises such as the single leg deadlift, finding mid-foot is incredibly important to feel glute activation instead of a pull on the hamstrings. Placing bodyweight primarily into an athlete’s heel tends to create a hamstring pulling effect, causing the question of “where do you feel that” to result in an obvious answer of “my hamstring.” By “simply” positioning the athlete’s weight in their mid-foot, the creation of glute activation is presented and the lights from the heavens shine through. The feeling of glute activation is often a rare occasion for those who are hamstring driven, which seems to be a lot of athletes. Understanding weight distribution will go a long way. Teaching weight shifting day one is a technique Sarah Cahill uses here with all of her athletes and has been extremely useful.
Now go take these two common faults and see if you or your athletes have them.