With summer over, you are probably getting ready to hit the winter slopes. Our resident postural correction specialist and snowboard enthusiast, Tommo Littlewood, has put together a series of articles to get yourself fit and healthy for the new snow season. From pre-season training to stretches you can perform in your chalet before hitting the slopes, shredding the park or going for a pow run deep in the back country, we’ve got you covered.
Whether you’re a top class performer or occasional boarder, we’re going to show you top level training techniques that will really make an impact on the way you snowboard. We will help you to:
- Understand the relationship of posture to performance and injury.
- Learn which muscles are involved in stabilising the spine.
- How to avoid wasted time in the gym with specific conditioning tips.
- Learn how to do ‘Big Bang’ exercises.
- Improve agility, power, coordination and balance.
Understanding the relationship of posture to performance and injury.
For those of you who think that your posture is not something you need to consider when training for the season ahead, think again. Posture is where your movement starts and finishes. If you have poor posture and learning a new trick, chances are you’re learning that trick in a position that’s a potential source of injury.
Many factors contribute to posture. Physiological, emotional and hormonal imbalances, nutrition and even responses from your internal organs can affect the way we sit, stand and subsequently move. There’s a guy called Schmidt who’s a whiz on motor learning and performance and suggested that it can take 300-500 repetitions to develop a motor program (good or bad) and up to 5000 repetitions to break a bad or faulty programme.
This applies to everyone, whether you’re an international half pipe champ or someone who’s sat at a desk for eight hours a day and boarding or skiing once a year. Muscular dysfunction affects us all. Conditions such as forward head posture, rounded shoulders, curvature of the spine, tilted pelvis and rotated knees are rife in both the inactive and elite level athletes and these all contribute to injury hotspots.
So what is good posture? As a rough guideline, your posture from the side should align perfectly from your ankle to knee, through the hip joint, middle of the trunk and finally the shoulder joint and ear. It’s quite hard to assess yourself, so if you’re unsure, let someone like a CHEK practitioner or postural specialist take a look.
In the next in this series of articles, find out which of those bad boy muscles stabilise the spine and how to strengthen them and improve your performance on the slopes. Later dudes.
Image credit – Shay Haas, from Flickr.
This article originally appeared on Snowboard Club UK.
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