Y Water?!!

You're having the best game of your life!! Halfway through, you lose steam. By the end ya don't know if you're gonna make it at all!!! What went wrong? It could be dehydration.

It's common for an athlete's body, during performance, to lose up to 10 cups of water. If you come to your game with a water deficiency, it can decrease your stamina by 25%.

One problem is our sense of thirst. It fires up only when our body is already dehydrated. For optimal athletic performance and stamina, this is too late.

Besides stamina, water regulates body temperature, helps lubricate our joints and flushes lactic acid from our muscles (that burning sensation you get when the muscle performs to it's max).

If you don't drink water for any other reason, and there are many good reasons to drink water, do it to perform at your best and maintain stamina throughout your game.

Bottoms up!!!

Running Mechanics

Xcelerated Performance is excited about bringing functional core training to the Roanoke Valley. Our holistic approach for training exphasizes movement patterns rather than muscle isolation.

Physical therapist Gary Grey introduced his chain reaction courses in the 90's. These courses viewed muscle function through interrelated groups of muscles and joints working together to perform movements rather than isolated flexion, extension, abduction and adduction.

Let's look at this concept using your Quads. They are the knee extensors. But, in the landing phase of running, they work eccentrically to prevent knee flexion. In fact, each time your foot strikes the ground, the quads, glutes and hamstring act together to stop the ankle, knee and hip from bending to prevent you from falling to the ground. Milliseconds later these same muscles work again as a unit to initiate extension at the ankle, knee and hip. They decelerate movement eccentrically and work concentrically to create movement.

The time between the eccentric and concentric movement is amortization, and the shorter this amortization time the faster you run.

Xcelerated Performance may use isolated exercises to develop a particular muscle quickly but along with isolation is integration, using ground-based exercises to set up appropriate neuro-muscular motor patterns used in running.

Injury Prevention

All athletes train for better performance. They want to run faster, jump higher, increase stamina and do it all with less knee and ankle injuries. Unfortunately, injuries will happen.

In the past an injury to the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), could terminate an athlete's career. Today, with advanced sports medicine it's about a one year test of patience, but, most non-contact ACL injuries can be prevented through proper training.

The body knows nothing of muscle, only movement. When we train movements we train hundreds of muscles at once. All movement begins in the body's core. It's important that stabilization is performed in a ramping fashion starting with the Transverse Abdominus (TVA), Hips and lower Abs.

The TVA is especially important and when working properly communicates upper body extremity movements with lower body movements.

Training for ACL injury prevention focuses on progressional concepts to increase single leg strength (to start and restart movement), eccentric strength (to put on the brakes), and proprioceptive development (to create a stable landing). These are key componets in ACL injury prevention, especially for female athletes who have a 30% greater chance of injury.

At Xcelerated Performance we use functional core training, jump training, and total body power moves to help prevent injury and increase power production.