Decelerate Before you Accelerate?
SLOW DOWN is the message often missed when rehabilitating an athlete back to full function.
So much time is spent developing an athlete’s power and acceleration, with the crucial step of learning to decelerate often missed, leading to increased injury risk. Deceleration is a persistent deficit seen post knee surgery.
When an athlete changes direction, they are required to accelerate in one direction, decelerate quickly, turn and accelerate all over again in another direction. Learning how to decelerate properly will actually make you faster – yes you heard that right, you will be become more efficient at changing direction. Decelerating properly will enable you to keep your joint angles in a more optimal position for re-acceleration. Absorbing force properly translates to producing force more efficiently on the other end.
Deceleration is also crucial for injury prevention. If you do not know how to absorb force during sprinting and jumping, then you are more likely to be in a poor biomechanical position when you need to accelerate again, placing increased stress on your muscles and joints. The most common problem we see is increased knee valgus when changing direction. Your hip, knee and ankle should all be in a relatively straight line when jumping and landing. Increased knee valgus is one of the largest risk factors for an ACL injury, so start slowing down and do your body a favour!
Although we have spent a lot of time talking about change of direction, running also involves constant acceleration and deceleration. As you swing your leg through from the back to the front and land, you need to be able to absorb force and decelerate, loading through your ankle, knee and hip. Quickly you change to re-accelerate off that leg during the stance phase as you push off. Alignment is crucial to avoid overuse injuries.
Training deceleration needs to provide stimuli from multiple movement planes and with a variety of loading mediums as well as overload.
Here are some of our favourite deceleration drills in the rehabilitation arena. The full videos can be found on our You Tube Channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClOQlN9SZ6sIJX4qSubtqzA).
Tall to Short variations
Altitude landings
Vertical Jump with landing emphasis
Lateral Deceleration lunge with Dumbbell
Rotational Hops with Landing emphasis
Drop lunge with Uneven Weight
Medicine ball with Rotational Lateral Bound
Bosch Step Through with Weight
Box Jump with Deceleration Landing
Box Jump into Hurdle Jump
Although acceleration plays an important role in any rehabilitation, there is not enough emphasis placed on teaching an athlete to decelerate and to decelerate properly. Deceleration is a learned skill, it must be practised, it must be mastered to keep you on the park, track, field or road!
Written by Lauren Cain – Director and APA Sports Physiotherapist