How can MAP help Athletes improve sport performance - PART 2
Everything is connected - Variation is key
Movement gets the hydration out of the tissues so that our fascia can glide BUT this movement needs to be varied. In other words not just the movements themselves need to vary but there also needs to be variation in the TEMPO of movement.
Movement in the same planes and in the same way puts you at greater risk of joint erosion (osteoarthiritis) and on top of that you are also dehydrating the fasia or moulding the fascia in a particular pattern, thus setting you up for the brittle tissue that injuries love so much.
If you were wearing a jersey you will find that when you tug on one end of your sleeve, you see the tug travel the long distance to the other ends of your jersey.
Your fascia in the same way is connecting different parts of your body together. This means you just plain can't have something happen to one "part" of your body and not have it affect every "other" part of your body..even if it is in varying degrees of intensity. For athletes, this brings the dreaded domino effect into perspective.
Many of us have experienced something like where your neck gets injured in a minor whiplash in that tiny little car accident when you were 17 years old. But you were 17 so no stress. You ignore it and it gets better. But once you get to varsity suddenly you have this nagging shoulder pain with all the additional typing, sitting and studying. As the years roll by you start thinking of yourself as the "tight shouldered person" and sometimes you have a pinching pain when you lift your arm. The years step on and now you are not only a "tight shoulder person" but you also suffer from low back spasms every now and then and you've developed plantar fasciitis which you think must be because you're a RUNNER. I could go on, but this is just a quick picture of the type of domino effect out of infinite possibilities. You get the idea.
The thing this person is experiencing is actually the long, slow drain of an unaddressed compensatory pattern on a body, but in our culture we call it, "just getting old" or "it's an old injury".
The best way to avoid the domino effect when you are an athlete is to keep your fascia healthy through MAP Movement so that nothing gets jumbled up in the knit of your jersey and you are therefore at much lower risk for developing a compensatory pattern which, by its very nature, is always going to be global and all inclusive. In a MAP class we hydrate our fascia by varying our movements, using our MAP Movement massage tools, breathing diaphragmatically, adding bounce/ plyometrics to some of our exercises and then we do strengthening exercises through own body weight and resistance training. Most importantly breathing creates movement which is also our basis and safety mechanism that prevents us from re-injurying ourselves.
