MOVE better PLAY better LIVE better

When I ask someone if they work out, a common response I hear is “Yes, I run three times a week”, or “yes, I play hockey twice a week and go skiing on weekends”, or “I play ultimate four times a week”. The list of options that people provide after the “yes” is endless, but more often than not, it does not include actual working out.

Participating in sports is good for you on so many levels: physically, socially, intellectually, and even emotionally. But can playing sports be deemed working out? Can you play sports to get in shape?

I would say that a better question is this:

Should you play sports to get in shape, or should you be in shape to play sports?

The answer to this important question is no, you shouldn’t play sports to get in shape; you should be in shape to play sports.

Why workout?

Working out is what you should do to prepare for the life you lead. For some people, that means preparing their body to be able to walk to and from work; to play with the kids at the park without back pain; or to sit at a desk all day without neck pain. For the athletes among us, it also means preparing your body to be able to jump, run, turn, stop, kick, and throw as well as possible without injury.

My philosophy about training is that we train for our activities so that we can enjoy them more and with fewer injuries. Yes working out does improve performance, but I believe that is merely a fringe benefit. Understanding that injury risk reduction is the primary goal of training is important because most weekend warriors and recreational athletes play sports for fun, and they do not work out outside of playing because running faster or jumping higher is not a priority; they just want to be out there every week.

But then I see the number of these athletes hobbling around with hamstring strains, IT band syndrome, shin splints and back pain, and I wonder if they see the correlation to working out. In fact, anyone who has ever suffered an injury is 19 times more likely to suffer another injury! Wow.

What are the other major risk factors for injury? Asymmetry in range of motion or strength. There are others of course – body mass index, playing surface are also factors.

I believe there is a significant link between asymmetries and previous injury as risk factors. When people return to play from an injury it is usually after being told by their doctor or physical therapist that they are “as strong as they were before they got injured”. But unless the injury was a contact injury, that initial injury occurred because there was a weakness or asymmetry somewhere, so getting back to pre-injury level is not enough.

How do you find out if you are ready to play?

The best system available for assessing and correcting asymmetries is the Functional Movement Screen (FMS). The FMS is a process administered by a strength and conditioning specialist or therapist who will score you through the performance of 7 basic movements, including an overhead squat, a lunge, a hurdle step, shoulder mobility, active straight leg raise, push up and rotary stability test. You will be assigned a score for each test based on your ability to perform these tests, and the compensatory patterns you demonstrate to do them. The practitioner will identify the two tests for which you are exhibit the most dysfunction, and will prescribe corrective exercises to help you regain proper movement.

How effective is the FMS for identifying injury risk? A study of NFL players published in the North American Journal of Sports Physical Therapy (Aug 2007, vol. 2, Number 3) concluded that NFL players who scored 14 or lower (out of 21) on the FMS were 11 times more likely to suffer injury than those who scored higher than 14.

Not surprisingly, the FMS has been used by many professional sports franchises, including the Anaheim Ducks, Carolina Hurricanes, Montreal Canadiens, Atlanta Falcons, Baltimore Ravens, Green Bay Packers, New York Jets, Cleveland Indians, and Toronto Blue Jays.

And it is not just athletes who have reaped the benefits of the FMS. A separate study was done with firefighters in California. Firefighters who took part in an FMS-directed workout program to improve strength and flexibility had a 62% reduction in lost time due to injury over a one year period (Journal of Occupational Medicine and Toxicology).

For athletes, there are some other great assessment tools that complement the FMS, including core endurance, single leg squat, side-lying abduction, and the Hop and Stop (for acceleration and deceleration). The Hop and Stop test is something you can have a trainer put you through, but you can probably also try it at home on your own – instructions are available on the Athletes by Design website.

It is important to note that it is not the assessment tools that reduce injury risk; it is working out using the strength and conditioning program tailored to your needs that reduces injury risk. That program should contain corrective exercises to address your specific movement dysfunction, as well as strength and mobility work that relates to the activities you will be performing. The main goal of your workout is to get you fit enough to enjoy your sport, but it comes with a great side benefit of also making you “faster, stronger, higher”.

In answer to the initial question, if you play your sport to train for your sport, you are probably not ready to play your sport – or at least not safely. So if you want to continue to enjoy your favourite activities well into old age, it’s probably time to start working out.

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For more ideas about training for skiing, check out the interview I did for the Ultraskier.com podcast.

Raise your hand if this sounds like you:

You book a great week-long ski vacation somewhere out west. Maybe Heavenly? Lake Louise? Whistler? You can’t stop thinking about knee deep powder, and 3,000+ vertical feet, and runs that take half an hour to ski down. Then you start thinking about that, and you remember the last ski vacation you took:

• Your legs were tired by lunchtime on the first day;
• You woke up on day 2 and they felt like cement pillars but you pushed through.
• Day 3 was more of the same, and
• by day 4 you decided that you needed a break so you spent the day in the village.
• Day 5 was better although you didn’t really feel up to the long runs but you realize vacation was nearly over so you pushed yourself, and somehow survived.
• Then you woke up on day 6 and you were just exhausted, so you opt to check out the local town again, which is not so bad as most ski resorts are surrounded by great shops and interesting towns, but if you wanted to spend your vacation shopping, you probably would have picked a sunnier village. You enjoy your last day but can’t help thinking to yourself that next year you’ll get in shape so that you can really enjoy the week and take advantage of the six-day pass you paid for in advance.

The good thing is that there is a solution. And a pretty enjoyable one. Enjoyable if you like to work out that is. Even if you don’t, working out doesn’t need to be that bad. Get yourself an mp3 player or a friend to workout with and it might turn into a nice escape.

Now the real question: what do you do to prepare for a ski trip – or for ski season for those that hit the slopes locally? Most people who work out use machine-based exercises that isolate certain muscles and then do “cardio” by sitting on a bike or jogging on a treadmill at the same pace for 30-40 minutes.

You could do that to prepare for the trip, and you would be better off than if you had done nothing. But there are much better ways. There are a few problems with the machine approach to training. For one thing, machines isolate muscles, but when you ski, your muscles work together to generate movements. To train your body to be ready for what the mountain has to offer, you need to strengthen the movements. This is not possible on machines. Thankfully, this is possible with cables or bands, dumbbells and in some cases just your own bodyweight.

Traditional cardio involves working at the same effort for an extended period of time – it is aerobic. Skiing, on the other hand, involved intermittent bursts of energy for shorter durations – it is anaerobic. Very few people ski for more than a couple of minutes consecutively. This makes intervals a much better approach. Research very clearly shows that intervals are a much more effective way of conditioning your body for anaerobic work. In fact, the research also shows that interval training can even improve your aerobic conditioning more than steady-state cardio!

So now you know what not to do, but what should you do?

For starters, you should work on mobility. Ever experience low back pain after a day of skiing? If so, it may actually be due to a lack of mobility in your hips or thoracic spine (or t-spine – the area between your shoulder blades). This is because when your hips and t-spine don’t work well, your low back has to pick up the slack. You’ll also notice that you turn better when your hips work well. Ideally your warm-up will also address specific corrective exercises to address any imbalances you have accumulated.

Short of a custom dynamic warm-up, Michael Boyle’s “Essential Eight” is a nice alternative, and includes exercises for the hip, the t-spine, and ankles as well as activation exercises for your glutes.

After that, think about a program that works on strength and power.

• For power work, think about medicine pall chest passes against a wall and lateral and medial hurdle hops (that is one leg hops in both direction). Make sure you work on sticking the landing between hops and then you can progress to hopping for speed, distance and height. Keep the volume low with power exercises.

• For strength think about pulling something (rows or chin-ups), pushing something (bench press or push ups), doing something with your hips (Romanian deadlifts or stability ball leg curls) and something with your knees (some form of squat), and don’t forget to go for the core. When you are talking core, make sure you stay away from flexion and that you address the front (planks or stability ball rollouts), the back (glute bridges or bird dogs), and the side (side planks or cable anti-rotation press). That’s a lot of exercises, but it becomes manageable if you split it into a 2 day program.

Once you’ve done the strength work, it’s time for the intervals!

One of the beautiful features of intervals is that you can get more benefit out of 15 minutes of high intensity intervals than you can from 40 minutes of steady-state cardio. There are many options to try with intervals. Think about a 1:2 or 1:3 work to rest ratio (1:3 would be 30 seconds hard then 90s easy).

One final part of the equation is soft-tissue work. Massage is great, and should be something you do regularly, but you probably can’t afford it every day. Buy yourself a foam roll, though and you can get a daily fix of self-myofascial release.

Questions about training or nutrition? Submit it through the Ask the Trainer page.