COACH’S CORNER WITH CHRIS DORMAN: DOWNHILL STRENGTH PREPARATION ECCENTRIC OVERLOAD STRATEGIES TO SAVE OUR QUADS
Chris Dorman, MEx.Sci(StrgthCondg), BSci(SpSci), Grad.Dip.App.Sp.Ex.Nut.
STRENGTH, CONDITIONING, NUTRITION & PERFORMANCE COACH
Chris Dorman is a team sport strength and conditioning professional turned trail and ultra enthusiast and coach. Admiring the ability to endure, and with love of running through greenery and undulation, he now dedicates his pursuits towards immersing himself in the industry and preparing others for ultra adventures.
DOWNHILL STRENGTH PREPARATION ECCENTRIC OVERLOAD STRATEGIES TO SAVE OUR QUADS
RUNNING DOWNHILL TRASHES YOUR QUADS, TRUE THAT! But it’s not just the downhill, the quadriceps resist gravity, and the vertical forces associated with ground contact, on each and every step, thus creating extreme amounts of muscle damage across the course on an event, and for many days after. As a preparation coach, I want to prepare you for this agony! Recent, technology is becoming more accessible to help us prepare for these specific muscle contractions, damage and can go a long way to easing the pain that this muscle group may elicit.
Specificity, a key principle of exercise programming and adaptation, indicates that the more the specific the activity is to that in which you want to perform, the better off you are. So run more hills and downhill. What if we can’t? If you don’t live near undulating trails, addressing another principle of exercise, overload, which states if we overload muscles and movements progressively over time, we will create a training effect.
In terms of strength preparation, when descending, we are subjected to eccentric muscle contractions where the muscle is lengthening under tension. At high speed and force, these contractions create a lot of muscular damage. There are many strategies to overload the eccentric phase of movement, but here, I am providing what I consider the optimal strategy, to target not just the quads, the whole lower limb.
Flywheel technology allows us to perform normal strength training movements, tethered to a flywheel, that specifically targets and increases the force demands of the eccentric phase of the exercise, more so than that of traditional barbell or dumbbell lifts. Watching flywheel exercises, it doesn’t really look like anything different is happening, until you feel it! The feel is totally different than in traditional lifting. You lift with all your intent, then the flywheel reverses direction and then aggressively pulls you down, thus increasing the demand of the muscles.
Flywheel Lower Body Strength Training
For runners, Flywheel Training, the benefits are twofold, 1) the eccentric overload it creates, (as well as greater force and power output) and 2) for runners performing high mileage and or intensity, it creates this overload without a jump/land mechanism, of which is usually necessary to create eccentric overload. Jumping and landing creates additional stress on the musculoskeletal system. However, it is a specialty piece of equipment, that is reserved or limited to availability and or budget. Stay tuned in future issues for alternative and inexpensive strategies.
The practical implementation of Flywheel Training is important. With all strength training, the movement you wish to load must first be competent and have developed some capacity. Specific strategies such as the above, need to be developed on top of and in the context of general strength development. Then the trick is, inserting the strength dose into the running program, that doesn’t detract from running output. But once in the program, your quads, legs and mind will thank you!
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