When I was throwing thousands of dollars away (some call this getting a Masters Degree), I had to take a faux exercise physiology class. I owned classes like this during my undergraduate class, but it was a poor rehash. Apparently Physical Education teachers don’t really need to know how the body functions. The state certification office [...]
When I was throwing thousands of dollars away (some call this getting a Masters Degree), I had to take a faux exercise physiology class. I owned classes like this during my undergraduate class, but it was a poor rehash. Apparently Physical Education teachers don’t really need to know how the body functions. The state certification office would rather see checks, not competent teachers.
The class was lucky enough to visit the professor’s lab for a few classes. He was a geeky fellow, just shy of six feet with mannerisms teetering on the edge of homosexuality–your typical exercise “expert” that spends too much time doing aerobic exercise and not enough time lifting heavy things, fork included.
One of his graduate assistants was working on her thesis about muscle imbalance between the quadriceps and the hamstrings among female collegiate soccer players through testing leg curl strength vs. leg extension strength on a Kin-Kom machine— a gigantic netherworld space machine that regulates movement speed.
But I wondered: how can we assess strength or injury potential with a contraption that controls our speed of movement and uses muscles in isolation when neither of these occur in, what I like to call, reality?
How valuable can these machines and readings really be?
And how is the ratio chosen? And what measurement are compared? Maximal strength vs. maximal strength? Why? The hamstrings are structurally differently than the quadriceps, and we know the intermingling of structure and function. Maybe a certain amount of explosive strength in the hamstrings needs to be correlated with isometric strength in the quadriceps? Maybe starting strength, speed-strength, strength-speed, or eccentric strength (I’m stopping here, but the list continues) values should be compared.
Let’s not forget about:
1) Were males compared to females?
2) Were these single sport athletes, or multi-sport athletes?
3) What was their training history?
4) What age did they get into sports?
5) What age did they mature?
6) Can bone structure predispose injury?
7) (This list could keep going.)
Philosophical questioning aside, here is what the first and second brick layers of my argument:
1) Aren’t imbalances caused from the body adapting as a protective mechanism?
2) Doesn't the body only adapt if it feels a need to?
I’ll let you think about that while my fingers work on Part II.