At the Athlete’s Zone, we approach the development of our athletes as an ongoing process, the work never stops. We know that the higher up the sports ladder you want to climb as an athlete, the more focused you have to be with all efforts relating to your development.
1. – Testing and Performance
Evaluation
Evaluation
With a Functional Movement Screen and a Performance Evaluation, we can stop the guess work about what an athlete needs to work on. The objective results we get from this testing gives us the opportunity to direct an athlete’s training towards what they need to work on most to make their developmental dreams a reality. No more guess work, no more one-size-fits-all training program. It’s individualaized and athletes understand exactly what they have to focus on to be better.
2. – Structured Warm-up, Mobility &
Activation Exercises
Activation Exercises
Starting your workout off on the right foot is incredibly important, and the warm-up is such an effective way to ensure you have a productive training session that the Athlete’s Zone has built a structured warm up, mobility and activation process into their training sessions. Many of the corrective changes to address an athlete’s developmental needs are first dealt with during this part of the training session, lending even more importance to it’s completion each day.
3. – Movements Skills &
Power Development
Power Development
Athlete’s need to practice and refine the skills that makes them athletic.
Deceleration, lateral cross-overs, first-step acceleration, single leg balance, outside edge stability, rotational power and so many more; the required profile of athletic skills is very extensive.
Many times, these individual skills have never been learned, or are extremely raw with technique itself anything but perfect, so having the opportunity to isolate and repeatedly perform and refine these movement skills in a training situation translates into huge gains in performance.
4. – Usable Whole Body Strength
Development
Development
Athlete’s need to focus their strength development in a manner that allows them to highlight and enhance performance, not isolate muscle groups and focus on only one part of the body.
Athletic strength development ties the different parts of the body together and creates sequential force development in each movement.
It is important too for athletes to recognize each part of their body needs to be strong, they cannot make the mistake of focusing their energy on only one exercise or area of their body at the expense of others.
5. – Age Specific Exercise
Choices
Choices
And strength development for the youth athlete is not to be ignored either. Strength isn’t measured by weight or load. All exercises at Athlete’s Zone are limited by technical failure, so when an athlete can no longer maintain good technique, the exercise is completed or adjusted to better suit proper execution. Most refer to strength by a different name: Stability.
By creating strength for the youth athlete, you are really creating predictability and control. The focus is not on how much can you do, it is how well can you do it. This translates back to the performance environment very well for these young athletes as they spend less time falling down, less effort performing the same tasks and have more movement skills available to them as they try to perform in each play.
6. – Conditioning & Workload
Tolerance
Tolerance
There is no question, fatigue kills skill. So, if you want to maintain your performance level throughout a game or throughout a busy week of play, you need to be in shape. But long, distance-based training is not the best or fastest way to build your workload tolerance as a team-sport athlete. That means soccer, hockey, basketball, baseball and football athletes do not need to train like cross-country or endurance based athletes. Many times, these volume based approaches negatively affect the most explosive athletes, robbing them of power and speed that they need to be effective in their game. Instead, here at the Athlete’s Zone, conditioning methods are implemented in a very specific way, both based on the position and sport of the athlete so that the energy they direct into this work gives them the best return on this investment.
