"Balance of power” is the perfect term to describe a vital key to athletic performance.
In team sports, the coach wants every member of the team to be able to obtain optimal performance. This means we strive to make poor athletes good, good athletes great, and great athletes even better. This formula is especially effective at the high school leve. Every school has a few great athletes on any team, so success is determined by how well the coach can improve the abilities of the less gifted players. This is why efficient and effective training is so important.
Although there are many components of optimal performance, among the most commonly cited by coaches and sport scientists alike are speed, power, quickness, agility and stability. Most of the attention in strength and conditioning programs is focused on the first four of these components, which is a mistake. Without stability, you do not have the ability to display the other components.
Let’s say you have the strength to perform a parallel squat with 300 pounds. If you were to spin yourself around several times to make yourself dizzy and then try to squat, you might be able to squat only 100 pounds. Why? You don’t have balance and control, and this does not allow you to display your strength.
Well, if we’re talking about walking from your
bed to the kitchen to make breakfast in the morning, only a small amount of stability is necessary to keep you from falling down. But if we’re talking about a basketball player trying to fake and drive to the basket or a fullback trying to bust a defensive line, we’re talking about a much higher stability requirement. Those requirements become greater as a high school athlete progresses to college and professional levels. In other words, as an athlete moves to higher levels of competition, their balance and control also need to be improving to higher levels. If they are not improving, or even worse, if they are regressing, that raises a red flag and we need to figure out the cause.
This is why BFS has teamed with Dr. Peter G. Gorman, president of Microgate USA, the company that created OptoJump™.