Understanding Movement

Understanding movement is very important for coaches to deliver better sessions and for athletes to be able to provide better movement. Before anything else, strength and conditioning coaches are movement coaches. Their role is to help athletes better utilize their bodies so that they can move better and achieve objectives within various constraints in their training or their sport. But in order to move better, we need to understand what movement really is and how it is achieved. As we better understand movement, we can better solve movement problems, limitations, or difficulties that we may have within our movements through interventions and training. As we start to move more efficiently, we will be better able to reach our goals. Improving movement can be achieved in two ways, either through improving our physical capacities (i.e. strength, flexibility, speed, etc.) or through improving the actual skill (for example the snatch, clean and jerk, running, jumping, etc).

Our goal when planning a training session should always be to improve movement quality. This needs some critical thinking put into it and training sessions should be based on solid scientific research. Everything added to the training program should develop movement skills. A lot of strength and conditioning coaches and athletes often devote considerable time to developing physical capacities when the problem could be skill-related.

In future blogs, we will explore in more depth how we can improve movement by working on skills and capacities.

Thanks for reading, and as always stay fit!

Coach Darren