500 Words a Week - Training Deceleration
Joey Guarascio in a recent blog post on simplifaster provided a wonderful insight into why we should pay more attention to training deceleration. Statements such as during maximal horizontal deceleration athletes experience 5.9xBM worth of force, compared to 2.2xBM in maximal horizontal acceleration. The ability to brake and decelerate well is a precursor to effective change of direction. Another wonderful point made centres around creating a breaking reserve. We have all heard of creating a speed reserve, in that by increasing our athletes max speed, all submax efforts becoming less taxing to the athlete. This can also be applied with decelerating. If we can increase our athlete’s ability to decelerate and tolerate larger forces, all submax efforts will be less taxing for our athletes. Also highlighted was that rapid horizontal decelerations during defensive pressing actions are one of the major patterns commonly associated with major lower limb injuries such as ACL rupture. Even further reason why we should look to train this quality with greater detail for our athletes.
Below are three ideas on target deceleration in the gym:
1, Strength
After ensuring our athletes are hitting the big rocks for strength development. We can get slightly more specific if deceleration is a quality we are targeting. We can do this by performing split squats with a negative shin angle. In decelerating on-field, we will see sharp negative shin angles as athletes need to place their foot in front of their centre of mass to create the force needed to slow themselves down. Hence why we can target this with the split squat variation below:
https://youtube.com/shorts/xAjc4J9LXrM
2, Speed
We can perform quick drops into different positions that our athletes might find themselves in on-field while decelerating. Then can they rebound out of this quick drop. The video below is an example of dropping into a split position:
https://youtube.com/shorts/w9r5nG515Rs
3, Force
As mentioned above, we should look to create a braking/ deceleration force reserve. To do this we need to progressively expose our athletes to large forces. The video below provides a continuum of what this might look like in a split pattern:
https://youtube.com/shorts/vQQhlYK0lPY
On top of this, as with all things, nothing replaces or can efficiently replicate doing the thing we are trying to improve. Training deceleration on-field should be a major focus during physical development session. It can be a lovely way to begin change of direction work once athletes are sufficient warm and ready.
