Matthew Ibrahim - Building the Brakes

Matthew Ibrahim talks about the importance of building the foundations of movement control and deceleration before pushing our athletes to become stronger, faster and more powerful.

Transcript:

If we can help build the brakes, teach some sound deceleration, slowing down mechanics, landing mechanics and help strengthen and isolate these problematic areas especially when it comes to sports performance, sprinting, running, changing direction with respect to the lower body and sites of injury. I think we can do a really good job in terms of helping our athletes becoming more resilient and really honing on long term athletic development as opposed to what we are doing now, for the most part, and we are expediting the process of developing our athletes. We should slow it down and take our time here.

So if you look at some of the best athletes in the world, what do they possess? You look at someone like Lebron, you look at someone whether a professional hockey player, you look at someone in professional soccer, whether it is Ronaldo or Messi, you look at someone in the NFL, some of the best receivers out there… You look at what they can do with their bodies, their ability to just control their body in space, possess the ability to stop on a dime, decelerate, change direction really quickly, with no issue. From a viewer standpoint it looks really elegant but a lot of hard work and obviously skills and abilities go into that.

If you really breakdown these processes you’ll find that landing properly really is a crucial component, it’s a skill. Decelerating and being able to control your body and slow down is really a skill. So if we can teach these skills in training it can have a really good impact on our athletes for the long term in their development prior to teaching force production, how high you can jump and all those parameters.