JC's Musings

Motor Control

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I’ve posted on this topic before, the gist being that we should provide the athlete movement variability, as a means of injury resistance. For example, perhaps the perfect squat technique may not be the best option for a player and rather we introduce multiplanar squats, unilateral squat derivations, perturb the athlete whilst squatting, etc., to better prepare players for the many movement challenges encountered in their sport.

I just read an article from Karl Trounson where he was using this concept of movement variability from a motor control perspective. The premise for the study was that field based athlete’s running patterns are often challenged due to the dynamic perturbations provided by pitch, equipment and other players. It is desirable to train the athlete to adapt to such perturbations, by exposing them to different tasks – task and movement variability. So Karl and his team had a look at how wearable resistance loading altered co-ordination and induced movement variability during running.

The article is open access, in short, it took heavier loads (5% BM) to disrupt co-ordination at the hip-knee joint pair and this was only in some athletes i.e. individuals reacted differently.