Hocevar Performance

When I talk about “bulletproofing” the body, I am talking about conditioning the body in a way that minimizes it’s chances of injury. People deal with nagging injuries their whole life and just chop it up as part of getting older or being an athlete and training. This shouldn’t be the case as it is possible to make your body bulletproof and improve your quality of life, athletic career, save on medical costs (for all of you just treating the symptoms without addressing the cause) and maybe even improve romance in a relationship  (no one feels like being romantic when their back is killing them). For us to be able to do that we have to have an understanding of how the body operates. Let’s focus on the responsibilites of the joints in the lower body.

Starting with the foot/ankle complex we can see that it has three degress of freedom, which tells us that it is a mobile joint. The knee on the other hand is a hinge joint as it has very little frontal and rotational mobility, making it a stable joint. Moving on up we come to the hip, which is a ball and socket joint and also has three planes of motion, making it a mobile joint just like the foot/ankle. One thing that is important to bring up is that even though the foot/ankle and hip joints are mobile joints, we have to look at this as controlled mobility. Controlled mobility means that they have to also be stable with the range of motion that they can provide. No joint is strictly mobile or stable.

The reason that I have explained this joint by joint approach for the lower body is to understand what happens in a single leg squat (a movement we use everyday, whether sitting down, training, playing sports…..and we are choosing the single leg squat to demonstrate the function of the joints ). It is the responsibility of the foot/ankle and hip to put the knee in the proper position, as they can both move in three planes of motion, while the knee has more or less just one. Guess what happens when we have mobility restrictions in the foot/ankle or hip (many times both)? Then the rotational forces/stress get passed on to the knee, which was not designed to handle that, predisposing it to a high chance of injury.

Let’s look at a good single leg squat:

Single leg squat of a box

The be able to execute this movement the person has to have enough dorsiflexion in the ankle (mobility) so that his/her heels stays on the ground. If the heel come of the ground then the majority of the weight is placed on the knee which predisposes it to patellar/femoral issues. The foot also has to control pronation (rotation of the tibia) and the hip has to control internal rotation (of the femur) as they both predispose the knee to meniscal and ligamnet damage. The lack of mobility in the hips can also mean that the lumbar spine (low back) will start flexing, creating back issues (back issues and their cause will receive a whole article).

If the movement patterns are not correct then we have to look at them and find the cause and fix/correct it. This is the art of bulletproofing. The more the movement is biomechanically sound, the more you maintain a balanced postuire - the less injuries you will have! Another thing to remember if it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t mean that it’s good for you.

Creating a bulletproof body has other components such as balance in training, strength, muscle activation, recovery, etc……Look for a post on these in the near future…..

Here are a couple of mobility exercises for the foot/ankle and hip that you can use right away:

Ankle Mobility

Leg Swings for hip mobility

 For everyone that has ever had knee issues and for those that want to avoid them I will be talking about ways to bulletproof your knees tommorow. Throw away your crutches and I’ll see you then…..