The Omniathlete Blog

Recovery is often discussed in terms of individual modalities, and less often in terms of the principles that determine whether a modality is likely to be useful. This article presents models and principles that can be applied with limited technology, together with the audit process we use to decide what to do with a patient or an athlete.

Over the last ten years elastic bands have become one of the most common tools in strength and conditioning. We see them in the weight room, in rehabilitation, in speed sessions, in warm-ups and jump training, and in almost every kind of team-sport preparation. It is not hard to see why. Bands are cheap, portable and quick to set up, and they make it possible to change resistance without any other equipment.

Sports rehabilitation and performance practice have changed considerably over the past decades, with new measurement technology, a different vocabulary and a larger number of professionals involved in the care of each athlete. This article presents the ideas I consider most useful from that period and the way they shape our work with players in professional baseball.

Air travel is a regular part of the calendar of professional sports teams, and its effects on health and performance have usually been considered in terms of jet lag. This article describes the work we have done to understand what flying does to the body, what the causes of jet lag are, and how to counter both.

Plantar fasciitis in athletes is often managed as a local problem of the plantar fascia. The athlete reports heel pain that is worst on the first steps after rest, the diagnosis follows from the history, and treatment is directed at the painful tissue: stretching, soft-tissue work, orthoses, and in some cases an injection. This approach rests on an implicit assumption, namely that the fascia is both the site of the symptom and the origin of the problem.

Shockwave is a plug-in modality with a growing evidence base across a range of treatment types, including Achilles and patellar tendinopathy. It is thought to stimulate healing responses in tendon, bone and muscle, and focused shockwave in particular has been shown experimentally to influence stem cell activity, an important point because satellite cells form the basis of our understanding of muscle repair.

In sport performance, considerable attention is devoted to how force is generated, transmitted and expressed. Coaches and practitioners discuss hip extension, tendon stiffness, ground reaction forces, projection angles and elastic energy storage. One of the structures most directly involved in transmitting force to the ground, the hallux or big toe, is discussed less often, and it is usually considered in the context of gait mechanics, injury prevention or clinical rehabilita

The physical profile of professional football has changed substantially over the past decade, and so have the parameters practitioners track most closely. Where coaches once focused primarily on total distance covered per match — typically 10 to 13 kilometers for outfield players — attention has shifted toward high-intensity running.

Knowing what stiffness is does not indicate what a particular athlete requires, because the appropriate value depends on the mechanical problem being solved. Sprinting and deceleration place demands on the same structures, yet the mechanical objectives are close to opposite, and this is where most of the confusion originates.

Stiffness has become one of the more frequently used terms in applied sport science, and also one of the more loosely defined. It appears in conversations about sprinting, plyometrics, tendon health and movement quality, often as a general descriptor of how an athlete looks or feels rather than as something with a specific meaning.

In sports performance and injury prevention, two types of errors recur more than any others. The first is treating symptoms without understanding their origin. The second is assessing individual body segments without accounting for the system they belong to. Both errors stem from the same conceptual gap: the body is not a collection of independent parts, and understanding it as such produces assessments and interventions that are incomplete at best and counterproductive at wo

The case for sprint-shaped isometrics is built on a single appealing variable, joint angle, and on the assumption that matching it converts a general adaptation into a specific one. The evidence does not support that conversion.