Now, the program to help you and your family get fit and stay fit with a biblical foundation
without a one-size-fits-all plan.
It's Faith Family Fitness with your host, full armor sports and national champion coach,
Jason Lupo.
This is Faith Family Fitness on 100.7 The Word.
Today we are talking about proprioception, kinesthetic awareness, we're talking about
body mapping, and the ability to move our bodies the way that we want to.
So we're going to talk a little bit about the science behind it and some applicable
tools as to how we can use that information to better help our athletes and ourselves
when it comes to technique changes and improvement.
And we talked about this a little bit a couple weeks ago, but we're just going to touch on
it a little bit more, spend a little bit more time on it, and talk about some of the real
life applications that we've seen in the last couple weeks, given some changes that we've
made to our program and trying to increase this body mapping and body awareness and this
mind muscle connection.
And so we're going to talk about that.
Hopefully we'll leave you with some helpful tools that you can incorporate into your training
program and that you can also teach your kids that they can better understand how to move
their bodies as well.
And we're going to talk about how we got to this point in this country that we end up
having this reduced level of proprioception as well as sport.
And so we're going to talk about all that stuff when we return after this brief 60 second
timeout.
Thanks for listening to Faith Family Fitness, a presentation of full armor sports teams.
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The faith-based approach to making sports fun and productive are a great choice for
your kids at full armor sports teams.
Learn more at fullarmorsportsteams.com.
Welcome back to Faith Family Fitness on 100.7 the Word.
We should be no surprise to us the degree to which this country and our kids have slowly
started to lack this body awareness, this ability to move their body how they want,
this mind muscle connection.
We become far more sedentary in our lifestyle.
So we're not moving as much.
And then all the playground equipment that built this proprioception, this understanding
of where the body is in space has by and large been pulled off the playgrounds because they're
unsafe quote unquote unsafe.
And we've replaced a lot of the sand and a lot of these things in the playground because
it was too hard to keep up with with other synthetic materials that doesn't have the
same type of response or tactility that allows our kids to to truly grow in this idea of
body mapping and body awareness.
And so first when we when we talk about proprioception and we talk about this this body awareness,
I want you all these all my listeners here to understand kind of what I'm talking about.
And if you're driving right now, please don't do this.
But you're going to start what I want you to do is I just want you to close your eyes.
I want you to close your eyes and I want you to imagine the silhouette of your body in
your head.
And then I want you to start moving your arms.
And if you've got your eyes closed and you start moving that arm and you've created this
silhouette image of yourself in your head, you'll see that that arm starts moving.
Right.
You know exactly where that arm is in space at all times.
It's a unique feature that humans have as opposed to a lot of the rest of the mammals
and animal kingdom.
We have this unique sense of proprioception is what we call that.
This body awareness is a body mapping.
Now what happens is if we get injured, sometimes we shadow some of that body mapping.
We don't have as clear understanding as where that body is in space.
And so that becomes an issue.
And the other thing is, is over the course of time with sport, you know, sport is as
healthy as it is in healthy, unhealthy.
And I say this all the time and people, you know, some people kind of get upset, but sport
by and large, there's a huge component of it that is not healthy.
You know, we talk about muscle imbalance a lot of times in the medical field and, you
know, you'll hear chiropractors and physical therapists talking about, you know, muscular
balance and we're not talking about like balancing on board.
We're talking about the difference between like your quads and your hamstrings, right.
A dominant muscle group and a muscle group that's not being utilized or used as well.
Now in sport, we require to a certain degree imbalance in the body.
We require imbalance in the body because that's what the sport demands and we have to meet
the demand of which sport we are competing in.
So if you look at shoulders, you see that rounded shoulder posture where the pectoral
muscles and the lats are way overutilized, okay.
And some other muscles, the back and the shoulders don't get used as much.
And so you tend to see this posture change in swimmers.
Now if we were to 100% correct that we're 100% to balance out the body.
That swimmer would not be as fast in the water.
Now that doesn't mean that we can ignore the opposite muscles.
It doesn't mean that we can ignore the back in a swimmer and let the chest get all sorts
of tight and still be without problems because eventually it will lead to problems if you
have absolutely no idea as to how to fire the other opposing muscle groups.
And we see this in cyclists, right.
Cyclists.
The body angles on a bike are unnatural to most other sports.
We see this really tight hip flexors to a large extent and these really strong quads
in cyclists.
Now you start building up the quads strong enough and the femur starts to move forward
and the acetabulum which is that socket that we think of when we think of a ball and socket
joint.
The acetabulum.
So that femur starts to sit forward, it starts to move forward, it starts to change positioning
if we are not engaging the glutes and hamstrings at all.
And so yes, sport requires muscle imbalance.
No we are not trying to 100% fix the muscle imbalance.
We are trying to be, I guess the right word in today's society would be equitable.
We want to create some sort of equality between the muscle groups.
Now it doesn't mean that we are going to try and specifically overwork those opposing muscles
but we have to at least understand number one how to fire them or how to contract them
and number two we have to create some sort of tension and strength.
In order to keep joints moving the way that they should.
And so there is a clear difference.
I'm not suggesting that you look at every sport and go well this is the imbalance that
it creates and specifically aim to go fix that imbalance.
That's not what we are trying to do.
We are trying to create stability in the joints while still allowing for force production.
So sometimes the body positions that we have to get into to apply force create that inequality
that we see in those opposing muscle groups.
So talking about that, when we have removed some of this equipment from playgrounds, our
kids are sedentary, they are sitting behind a computer screen, they are sitting behind
video games, they are no longer getting the experience of moving their body outside of
organized activity.
And so we have created and we have great organized activities in this country and our youth sports
programs keep getting better and better and better to a large extent.
But if all the kids are doing is that one specific sport, we haven't gained awareness
on how to truly move the body outside of that sport.
And so number one, it makes it harder for the coaches inside that sport to work with
your kids and get them to understand how to move their bodies.
But number two, it leads to some of the imbalance we just talked about.
And so we have to have a fine, I mean I won't even say fine balance.
We need to get our kids outside playing more so that they gain that body awareness, so
that they're able to perform the tasks that are asked of them inside of the sport that
they're playing.
And so I don't like to beat up on single sport athletes and to a large degree, I disagree
with a chunk of the science and a chunk of the literature trying to direct people off
of single sport for their kids.
They should play multiple sports.
And so I've got a roundabout answer to that.
And the answer is yes, they should play multiple sports.
But no, let's not demonize the single sport athlete.
Instead, what we need to do is figure out within these sports programs that require
more commitment to a given sport.
The ones that come to mind in my head are gymnastics, swimming, ballet, a lot of these
individual sports that require a lot of training to stay at an elite level.
There are kids that choose that track for themselves.
That's fine.
When you're talking about basketball and baseball and football, the boys three, that for decades
and centuries in this country have been the big three for boys, right?
Baseball, basketball, football.
And you see a lot of crossover between the three and a lot of athletes play multiple
of those sports.
It's a different game.
And I think if we want to truly look from an outsider's perspective in with no judgment
in our brains about single sport or multi-sport athletes or whatever, or sports specialization
as we'd call it, and we're looking in, we should be able to see the differences.
And one of the things that's not 100% addressed in some of these literature and books is the
fact that we aren't looking at the differences.
We aren't looking at the differences in terms of energy systems and what's required.
And so no, I do not believe that a baseball pitcher at 10 years old should be throwing
ridiculous amounts of balls and going to private lessons and practice and throwing games on
the weekend.
You don't even see professional pitchers throwing as many pitches as some of these kids do.
And so luckily, Little League and those places have drastically cut down how many pitches
a kid can throw.
But that also doesn't stop or change what's happening outside of what goes on in Little
League or what goes on inside a tournament weekend, right?
So we're still not counting pitches 100%.
But there's a difference.
There's a difference between a swimmer and a cyclist and a baseball player in terms of
sport demand and in terms of how we're building awareness in the body and what the sport requires.
Swimming requires a lot of work within energy systems become more efficient.
And it requires training and training and training and training and training.
Baseball in terms of the energy systems utilized is not the primary focus in training.
It's skill and technique development.
There's a lot of what we do in baseball, a lot of what we do in basketball.
All right.
So the sports are different.
We can't look at them the same.
But like we do in our swim program and what I encourage all of these single sport athletes
to do is to be an athlete first and foremost and then be a swimmer.
We want them to be athletic.
We want them to know how to move their body.
We want them to have that body awareness.
And then they're a swimmer second.
Now it's a mindset thing and it's a mindset thing in the eyes of our coaches.
And it's the mindset thing in the eyes of myself in terms of looking at how we go about
doing training.
But they're swimmers.
They know that they're swimmers.
We still need them to be athletics, athletic.
We need them to be athletes in this process.
So we need them to know how to move their body.
We need them to grow strength, gain power, all of that stuff.
And I know some of the stuff seems like it's kind of on a rant and maybe it is a lot of
what I do is ranting.
But this is what we got to do for our athletes.
So if we have athletes playing multiple sports, great.
I encourage it.
I hope that a lot of our athletes play multiple sports, but we do have single sport athletes.
I don't want to continue to demonize them in terms of saying your kids should never
just specialize in one sport.
And there's plenty of other things that go into that conversation.
But in terms of body awareness, kinesthetic awareness, some sports require more training.
Sorry.
We have to now figure out how to gain what that child is missing in a sport like swimming
because they're not playing other sports because of the demand of swimming.
But it doesn't mean that we can skip that aspect of development in their athletic career.
We still have to gain appropriate reception, body awareness, body mapping.
So because we have sports specialization, because we no longer have kids going outside
to play on a regular basis because we've changed the landscape of our parks and recreation
departments to make them more safe, whatever, blah, blah, blah, get rid of the equipment
that's dangerous that actually gains kinesthetic awareness in children.
We have this problem.
We have this problem, this lack of our kids knowing how to fire their bodies, their muscles.
So what we've done and we've done some experiments because I always experiment on my athletes
classes.
If you've listened to the show plenty of times, you understand this.
I do a lot of experimenting.
We've done some experimenting.
We've done some experimenting in the gym in terms of trying to get our kids to understand
how to fire muscles and how to position some of their joints in different various movement
patterns to try to get them to understand how to move their body better.
So one of the biggest things that we've done is we've just asked kids to flex muscles.
So I've got a kid, I said, you know, flex your quads, muscles on the front part of your
legs connect between your hip and your knee.
Yeah, that's a layman's term, you know, way of explaining it, but the quads.
So I asked him to fire his quads, I asked him to flex his quads and he couldn't do so.
And I said, okay, your job is to continually try to fire these things until you can get
them to work.
Right.
And so we tried to cue different things in terms of like how to fire it and then try
to give him the feeling, the tactile feeling of actual touch touches quads as they're firing.
So we had him do a hack squat, kind of like a squat machine, right?
Hop on there.
Said, okay, I want you to go down really slowly.
I want you to feel your quads contracting as they go down.
And he put his hands there and he felt his quads becoming harder and harder as he went
lower and lower, signifying the tension that's created in the quadricep muscle during that
movement.
And then I said, okay, explode back up and then try to contract your quads at the top.
And he struggled at first, but now we're two weeks into this experiment and 100% the other
day I said, contract your quads and boom, kicked it out and his quads are now huge and
very defined and he knows now how to fire them.
Okay.
And so we started this experiment because I can get rather frustrated sometimes if kids
aren't changing what I'm asking them to change.
And sometimes it has nothing to do with them not being able.
Let me, let me rephrase them.
Sometimes they're trying to make a change, but they don't actually know how to make the
change because they don't have that body awareness that we're looking for.
Sometimes they're trying to make the change, but they can't make the change because they
don't know where their body is in space.
So they don't know if they've made the change.
And so I always tell my athletes, I wrote it on the board the other day.
I said, if it doesn't feel any different, you probably haven't changed anything.
Right?
Cause it's true.
If it doesn't feel any different, if the movement doesn't feel any different, you haven't changed
any different.
So we need this mind body connection of understanding when we make a change, what it should feel
like so that we can reinforce it at another time.
So that's one example, quadriceps firing.
It's one of my power lifters and swimmers.
And then I said, okay, we're going to try to learn how to fire every other muscle in
the body.
Right?
And I said, okay, we're going to try to hit just general bodybuilding poses for, you know,
10 rounds of six seconds every day.
And so I said, okay, let's do this.
So we kind of worked on some of it, figuring out how to contract some of the muscles.
And I said, okay, this is your job.
Go home, try to contract these muscles 10 times for six seconds every single day.
Get an idea of how to contract these muscles.
Has done it and immediately we've seen the results across sports, across swimming and
across power lifting.
I have seen this kid remarkably be able to fire the muscles.
I'm asking him to fire, make the changes I'm asking him to make and make those technical
adjustments because now he has a better idea of number one, how to fire the muscles.
And number two, where his body is in space, just by activating the nervous system.
So it's pretty incredible.
Some of this stuff that we can do on our end, even though we're in this like single sport
mentality, even though he's a power lifter and a swimmer, this, this, this mentality
of single sport athletes.
If I did that with all my swimmers, how much more kinesthetic awareness and proprioception
could I get out of them so that they can actually make the changes I'm asking them to make.
And so we're going to, we're going to run this experiment for a while on our swim team
and see what happens.
When we come back, we're going to take a brief timeout.
When we come back, I'm going to talk one more example of some of this stuff and then we're
going to wrap it up for this weekend's edition.
So hang with us for 60 seconds.
Thanks for listening to Faith Family Fitness, a presentation of full armor sports teams.
Work is at the core of any successful organization.
At full armor sports led by national champion coach, Jason Lupo, a Christ centered approach
to sports fundamentals and fitness has earned his company, the respect of athletes and their
parents.
Full armor sports is committed to helping youth in our community experience growth through
sports and to strive for improvement and excellence.
Further, youth compete as individuals coming together with a sense of teamwork, camaraderie
and support for one another.
At full armor sports, the reality is achievements, failures, wins and losses eventually fade
away, but the bonds team members form through competition evolve into relationships lasting
forever.
Learn more at fullarmorsports.com.
Welcome back to Faith Family Fitness.
Today's topic conversation has been proprioception, mind body connection, body mapping, all of
that fun stuff that we talk about on a regular basis with our athletes in terms of being
in check and tuned with their bodies.
Now you may be asking the question, why does this matter to me?
I'm not an athlete.
I'm not trying to, you know, win a medal, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It matters to all of us because we still need our bodies to work for us day in, day out,
every day of the week.
And so as we grow older, as we accrue more injuries, we have less and less body awareness.
We reduce proprioception and we can no longer move as well.
And if we reduce proprioception to a large extent, we will find ourselves in positions
that we can no longer overcome with our bodies.
So when we end up on unstable surfaces or we end up planting our foot to turn, if we
don't have that proprioception, if we don't know how to fire those muscles, if our body
knows no longer knows how to respond, we set ourselves up for injuries.
So all of this information is just as useful for the lay person that's not an athlete,
maybe a weekend warrior as it is for my athletes.
We have to understand where our body is in space in order to make the changes that we
need to make, especially when we talk about posture and sitting at a desk for long periods
of time, making sure that we understand where our body is so we can adjust our joint positions
so we can get into an ideal posture to live life pain free.
Thank you for joining us this Saturday.
We are here every Saturday morning at 9 a.m. on Faith Family Fitness.
Don't forget to check out FullArmorSportsTeams.com in order to find some youth sports programs
for your kids to enroll in.
Thank you for joining us.
See you next week.
This has been Faith Family Fitness with Coach Jason Lupo of Full Armor Sports Teams of Colorado
Springs.
Join him at the same time next week for Faith Family Fitness on the Word 100.7.