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Drills Report: Pass Protection Medleyby: Roy IstvanAssistant Head Coach & Offensive Line Coach • University of Rhode Island © More from this issue As you watch your athletes week to week at various positions, it’s obvious that certain players can cover ground more rapidly than others during multi-movement assignments. Not only multi-movements but change-of-pace and burst capacity. Some players are capable of these characteristics, but most are not. Recognizing the athletes who have transition speed skills is doable but teaching these skills is even better. Every player on your team can increase their transition speed skills drastically. Technical movement applications is the method that can be taught to every player on the team. As coaches, you would like to see all of your players move rapidly. As a group, it won’t happen naturally. They don’t have the physicality or the skill-set to pull it off. It has to be put into your system as a team training priority. Every position has specific movement requirements that are different from one another. To begin, you must establish a premise, one that indicates human movement is a mechanical skill to be learned. We are naturally wired to function accordingly to the stimulus presented to us while we’re moving. Movement requires balance and counter-reaction control which stabilizes innate motor movements that spontaneously occur. Innate instinctive reactions are built into each of us. They respond as a safeguard mechanism when balance is challenged at high speeds. Conscious mental override must be the governing function. Simply said, the athlete must focus on body position and limb control during transition changes. Understanding the foundation of how a human moves technically is critical for designing and developing transition speed skills. We must start from the ground up. Force is applied to the ground, which, in turn, redirects force back to the torso. This begins at the point of contact with the surface. Consequently, this force production moves the body. The greater the force applied from the leg cycle phase, the greater the velocity potential. That is, providing all other things are stable. When this force is altered, the power derived is diminished. Remember, loss of force means less velocity. The velocity that’s lost takes place the moment change begins. Now we’re dealing with transition of forces. Results will be either efficient or inefficient, the latter creating a loss in speed. Running lineally, (straight forward line), also has its velocity loss issues due to changing force applications step-to-step. However, they are a far less problem than direction changes. At the initial moment momentum shifts to a new direction, mechanical execution must be accurately controlled. This phase of activity is what I term as “transitional momentum displacement phase.” Displacing momentum regularly is typical of football speed. The phases of movement changes are responsible for the difference between football speed and lineal sprint speed. Countering Speed Loss As discussed earlier, innate limb movement patterns will respond oddly according to balance issues due to momentum displacement. To counter this phenomenon, one must be aware of the footstrike placement relation to center of body mass. As a step is coming to the ground to strike, the placement needs to be just slightly in front of the vertically-erected torso. Reaching too far outside this center body position will affect the control of the weight displacement while moving toward the next step to be taken. Footstrike placement to center mass is the first priority of movement control. Drills To Improve Transition Speed SPRINT WEAVE DRILL STRAIGHT - LATERAL COMBO LATERAL - BURST COMBO |
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