Clean Run - February 2016 - 55

FUNCTIONAL FITNESS APPLIED TO
AGILITY MOVES: You Are All Athletes

CARDIO

STRENGTH

MIND

FLEXIBILITY

FUNCTIONAL

By Antoine Alston and Eileen Duane

RUNDOWN 1: The Deﬁnition of "Athlete"
According to Webster's dictionary, an athlete is "A person
who is trained or skilled in exercises, sports, or games requiring physical strength, agility, or stamina." This thought process
alone will start to make it much clearer why agility enthusiasts
need to be functionally fit.
Your body was designed to move flexibly, with all the parts
working together seamlessly. But asymmetry in the body prevents that. How does that happen? Over the years, trauma,
injury, overuse, and occupational or sport hazards can upset
your body's design. The functional movement screen was designed to find your weakest link, your asymmetry. Why do we
look at your weakest link? Because that is the root cause in
the chain of effortless and seamless movement.

RUNDOWN 2: Mobility/Stability
We found your weakest link; now let's work on your mobility.
Then we'll get you stable and finally we'll get you running-
dynamic mobility!
1. Basic body mobility: This stage helps you regain the full
range of motion your body was designed to have.
2. Stability: In this stage, we turn your range of motion into
movement and help you gain the control and stability
which support full body connectivity.
3. Dynamic mobility: Want to go about your daily life and be
flexible to life's challenges-all without pain or discomfort?
In this stage, you'll achieve whole body connectivity that
lets you perform daily activities with ease, without pain and
without injury.

RUNDOWN 3: Economy of the Body
Very little matters without a fully functioning body. The communication and integration of the human body is essential
February 16 | Clean Run

for adaptation to your surroundings and, more importantly,
survival. Agility, just as any other sport, takes every bit of the
body to be communicating and integrating at a fast pace; now
add the necessity of being extremely attentive to your canine
partner, keeping track of the course, and shutting out your
surroundings.
In 2014, The New York Times Magazine ran an amazing article on
Stanford's football team. In the span of four years, 2006-2010,
Stanford players suffered many season-ending and post-season
surgical repairs by operating out of the old paradigm of strength
training that espoused working the body hard and believing it
would make one a bigger, faster, and a stronger athlete. Instead,
it actually created a team that suffered a very high injury rate.
After naming Shannon Turley as the Director of Football Sports
Performance, the team's training regimen was reconfigured to
emphasize balance and flexibility over brute strength.
Turley looked at how functional his athletes actually were and
discovered that the best players on the team spent the most
time on the field; this, in turn, resulted in the most collisions
and resulted in the highest rates of injury.
Turley's first priority quickly became how to keep his best
players on the field without injury; he accomplished this by
training his players smarter, not harder, thereby establishing
the correlation between an athlete's availability and ability.
Instead of strength building, the focus became building on an
athlete's weakest link.
In order to create symmetry, the last thing you would do is
go to the gym and start using the weight machines, leg press,
chest press, or run your heart out on the treadmill. In the old
paradigm, for example, the leg press machine is used to build
powerful thighs while lying on your back. This exercise isn't
functional because you are never on your back lifting anything
in real life. It is also not economical because you will never
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Clean Run - February 2016