How to be Sporty and Not Fuck Up your Joints By Peter Baker

We need to talk about your joints. They’re getting the shit kicked out of them on the rink floor. You keep playing because you want to, because you need to, and because your team needs you.Despite the increasing pain, you still manage to shine.
This won’t last long. As is the way with contact sports, you will get injured. Either in training, or something else.
While you can’t stop an injury completely, you can prepare for it (and speed up your recovery time).
Let’s start at the beginning—one possible beginning anyway.

Your legs move me (and you)
Your legs are big. They entail some of the biggest muscles in your body. The obvious big movers are your thighs, hamstrings, and butt. But there’s a little bit more to them. You have your shins and your ankles too. Thinking of your legs in that light will give you a lot more options in your training as far as your joint health goes.
That said, let’s take a look at how they can move.

Hip motions
So if you’re standing tall and neutral, imagine a line dividing you in two halves, one left, and one right. That’s your midline. Your legs can move away from the midline, or towards the midline. That’s called hip abduction, and hip adduction.
If you were to knee someone in the gut, that would be hip flexion.
Kick the person standing behind you and that is hip extension.
Standing like a duck (toes out) and we have hip external rotation.
Standing pigeon toed and we have hip internal rotation.
Make circular motions and we have circumduction. Simple, right? It gets more useful as time goes on.

Knee motions
Unless you do standing calf raises all the time, your tibia/fibula bones probably don’t get much thought. But they can move in four ways.
To knee someone in the gut, you have to bend the knee. That’s knee flexion.
Point the foot out to outright kick someone in the gut and you have knee extension.
But you can also rotate your knee (when it’s flexed, that is).
Like the hips, you have internal and external rotation.

External tib/fib rotation

Internal tib/fib rotation

Ankle Motions
Your feet are part of your legs too. And while they are capable of many motions because of the toes, I will bypass that for brevity. Suffice it to say, you can strengthen your toes and the results are worthwhile.
At any rate, your ankles can Dorsiflex and Plantarflex.
The ankles can also move into inversion and eversion.

Inversion

           This is where the fun stuff happens.

Eversion

Dorsiflexion

Plantarflexion

Specific Motions
In life and in sport you move. In both, you move in a specific way. In Supertraining Mel Siff defined sports as a limited set of motions. This goes for all sports. No sport has every movement capable by humans in it.
Some sports have a lot of movements. Derby, MMA, Gymnastics. Some have far, far less. Olympic weightlifting, Powerlifting, Baseball, Volleyball.
Regarding derby, take a look at some common injuries. Torn knee ligaments, bad hips, and ankles are common. We can therefore see how the limited set of motions plays into the most common injuries.

Photo by Walter

Take a look at the photograph. Mull it over a bit and you can see Laryn Kill engaging in a few of these motions mentioned.
It should come as no surprise that there are a fuck load of motions you’re not doing in Derby or in the Gym.
So what the hell is one to do in the gym?


The Specificity Spectrum
My coach my coach, Frankie Faires coined this. He also refers to it as the movement model. Either way, it is a sweet little way to inform your training if you’re a derby athlete.
It goes as follows:

Specific training

1. Roller derby practice

• Ideally, this will consist of more than just aimless scrimmaging. In a perfect training session, you’ll run a jam or two, and the coach will look for problem spots and weak points. After the jams are over, you drill those specific weak points until they are no longer weak. Then you jam again to reassess.

Component Specific Training

1. Your individual practice on the skate floor or in the gym.

• This will be what you do to improve your specific skills so you can kick ass when game time comes around. If you have a limitation keeping you from getting your 27 laps in five minutes, this is where you hone that specific technique to get better at skating. In short, component specific training is training the parts of the whole.

Contraspecific Training

1. This is the opposite of a given motion. If hip abduction is the specific motion, the contraspecific motion is hip adduction. Skating around the track the opposite way would also be contraspecific.

•  Area is where an athlete will spend most of their time. After going through the specific sports motions for so long, the need to keep doing them lessens. This is what’s called motor learning. This is why it doesn’t take long to bounce back after a lay off. Your tissue transforms for the game that you have spent a fuck load of time playing. Since the need for specificity is lessened, you will find yourself doing many oppositional motions. Think hard about your derby practice. You can see how many different options in this arena you have and how many different ways you can break it down. As an example, you spend so much time leaning left (Left hip adduction and right hip abduction) you’ll eventually need to work those oppositional movements in a similar way, at some point.

Non-Specific Training

1. Self Explanatory

• Think of this as your end game. Examples of non specific derby practices include swimming, playing basketball, hip hop dance, or anything fun and completely different like that. With this comes those exact motions you are not doing in your sport. These are the practices that will keep you moving well and playing well in the years to come.

Starting points
By now, you want to rush out and do a bunch of cool shit. You want to skate around the track going right instead of left, but I am going to suggest you not do that, at first.
Limits expand starting within them, first. So start with where you are. Now, I can make many assumptions about where you are, but I won’t. I want you to analyze your own performance in the context of motions and go from there.

So first, look at all the motions you do. These will be dependent on the positions you play most often.

Start there, and branch out. Remember the movement model above. Use it, and grow stronger in your sport. At the same time, depending on how far you go with it, you can start to ease your physical pain.

In addition to being a fan of music and heavy metal, I am an avid player of table top RPGs, and I am a personal trainer in Tampa, FL as well as a graduate of the prestigious University of South Florida. I am available for fat loss and pain relief consultations as well as any talk on the subject of Game of Thrones, D&D, or Star Wars. I can be found at www.peterdbaker.com and on Facebook.