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More mobility isn’t always good. Passive range of motion without active control is a disaster waiting to happen. There’s also a second way mobility work hurts athletes that most trainers never think about, and it has nothing to do with muscle.
Many trainers use “knees out” without knowing what physical response they’re looking for. They’re using cues they’ve heard before. If you don’t know what you want to achieve mechanically with your athlete, and why, you can’t possibly know how to best cue them. The first step to effective coaching is knowing what you’re dealing with physically.
The ‘knees out’ cue can actually screw people up, depending on their joints. Hypermobile athletes will push their knees way outside their feet because they can, and that’s not an effective power-producing position. Getting your knees way outside the base of support increases shear stress on the knees and weakens the squat. Cues are context dependent.
Find the weak point and fix it. The entire world of sports performance training can be summed up in those words. The trap most coaches fall into is confusing what they enjoy training with what the athlete actually needs.
Challenging our biases as coaches, testing our views of the training world, is as uncomfortable as it is essential. Humans naturally seek out things they agree with and shun things they dislike. Coaches who don’t reflect on what they believe, and why, will eventually become obsolete. The challenge to think deeply is what’s important.
A major Army study found that any acute lower leg injury raises a soldier’s risk of back pain by 70 percent within a year. Lower back pain is one of the top three reasons for lost duty days in the Army. Training to be fit without coaching proper movement is a very good way to get injured. Athleticism is a skill, not a test result.
Firefighters in this study who got direct movement coaching improved both performance and injury resistance. The fitness-only group, who got exercises and reps without coaching, actually moved worse and were more injury-prone after three months. One-size-fits-all training can make people significantly worse. Athleticism is a skill, not just a test result.
