October Chapel Hill News Article - Better Sports through better alignment with David Hansey
Better Sports through Better Alignment
David Hansey
NASM Certified Performance Enhancement Specialist
NASM Certified Sports Fitness Specialist
NASM Certified Personal Trainer
Do you enjoy watching professional sports? Who doesn’t! They make it look so easy. Whether it is wondering how someone can even hit a baseball going that fast, never mind make it an accurate hit or whether it is hitting a golf ball with such grace that it just sails in the air and goes 300+ yards. Have you ever noticed how EASY it looks for professionals? How do they do that? Is it their raw talent? Their professional training? Well, those both help but there is something much simpler that they all have too. It is something that improves your game and prevents you from getting hurt. It is something called perfect alignment.
Perfect alignment is what allows professional golfers to be so graceful. Their alignment is transferring the power from their legs through their torso to their arms to the club head. Professional golfers are not necessarily stronger than you. They are just conditioned to use alignment to ensure the maximum amount of force is transferred through their body. And that force transfer is not limited to golf. You see it in any sport that involves hitting, throwing, kicking, etc. So that would be almost all sports. Do you play soccer? That force transfer is how you get the power from your hip to your foot (without destroying your knee). Do you play tennis? Force transfer is what gets the power from your hips and torso to your racquet.
Is there a way to check your alignment? You bet! A board certified personal trainer has the skills to do what is called a posture and movement assessment. This assessment will show all of the tight or weak muscles that are throwing your body out of alignment. There are a few indicators that you have alignment issues. Have you ever experienced tennis elbow, golf elbow, knee pain, lower back pain when golfing or any joint pain during or after sports? Then, it is almost guaranteed that your alignment is off. Still not sure? Well try this part of the movement assessment yourself and see. Stand with both feet on the floor facing forward. Bend at the knees into a simple squat. Do your knees turn out, turn in? Do you lift your heels, bend at your waist? Do your feet turn out or in? These are all signs of imperfect alignment. Basically your body is making an adjustment for a weak or tight muscle somewhere and by doing so it is affecting your alignment.
So maybe by this point you say who cares. Poor alignment leads to not only poor performance but a dramatic increase in the chance of injury. So if you don’t care about getting better at your game and you don’t mind getting hurt, then don’t worry about it. For everyone else, there are ways to correct it. Focus your strength training and stretching routine on correcting the items that are affecting you. This means an individualized training program specific for you. So if your feet turn out and put pressure on your knee, you do stretches to lengthen the tight muscles that make you do that and you strengthen the weak muscles that support your knee that are allowing you to fall out of alignment.
Once you focus your strength and stretching program to correct your imbalances, you will see improvement in your game. You will also be preventing injuries from overuse and poor mechanics. I have seen golfers who find the “key” by improving their alignment and not only add 50+ yards to their drive, but improve their accuracy. And they end up leaving the golf course without the achy lower back and sore knees that they used to have.
