Improve Athleticism

I hope you’re having a fantastic week.

This week, I’m going to show you something to do at the office that will make you a better athlete.

One of the things that we talk a ton about in Z-Health are our high payoff drills.

People always ask me, “Hey, Doc, I don’t have that much time to train, I have a real life, I have kids, I have work obligation etc., so what’s something I can do regularly that will make me a better athlete?” I go, “Well, I have a million different things.”

Improve Athleticism – Upper Body/Lower Body Differentiation

What I want to show you today is one little exercise taken from our S-Phase curriculum, which is called Upper Body/Lower Body Differentiation. Now, complicated name, but it’s pretty simple. When you look at real-world movement, very often what we’re required to do is stabilize something in one hand while we’re doing something with the other hand. The other thing that we often have to do, especially when we see elite athletes, is, we see them moving their upper body when their lower body is doing something different as well.

We have a cool little drill that you can work on to help your brain start to sort out the difference, because one of the primary things that we look at, let’s say someone says, “Hey, Doc, will you come look at this athlete with me?”, and I know nothing about them, the very first thing that I’m going to look at in watching them move, is, does their body move as a unit and in kind of a big block fashion, or, is there smoothness of transition and does it look like they have control over the lower body versus the upper body.

Improve Athleticism – First Version

With that in mind, here’s the exercise, you can do it at work, you can do it at your house, doesn’t matter, really cool, really easy to do, I’m going to show you a couple different variations to get you started.

You going to come and face your doorway, and you get into a little bit of an athletic stance, and you have one hand on one side, one hand on the other side. Once you’re here, what I want you to do is you get nice and tall, you want to make sure that you’ve got good control over your spine so you’re lengthening here. If you’re one of those people that needs to tuck your pelvis a little bit, whatever puts you in a good position, I want you to do that. People also need to pull the head and neck back. Good, tall, spine position, shoulders, everything are good, arms are on the wall.

Now, here’s what you’re going to do: you’re going to pick a direction with your upper body and you’re going to push. Right now, I’m going to push toward the camera so I can talk to you. I’m going to push this way, so my right side’s pushing, I could also use my left hand, so I’m really rotating against the resistance with my upper body. Now, here, what I want to do, is maintain this pressure while I just practice, first of all, just lifting my feet, so, right now, I’m pressing and marching in place. It looks stupid, I get it, it looks a little bit weird but if you can do 15-20 repetitions of that, you’re going to really start to feel it.

First thing, hold, or hold and march, and it really starts to make you figure out, “Wow, I’m really connected maybe more than I need to be.” Very often we see this, we go, “OK, press march.”, and they can’t figure out how to do it. If that’s the case for you, start pressing lightly, and you can actually start to move. You’re going to govern how much pressure you’re putting into the wall, based on how level you can be with your lower legs.

Improve Athleticism – Second Version

That is number one, number two is, you want to start working on turning the lower body, so, I’m going to press into the wall, and I’m going to turn the lower body back and forth, so, you can see I’m doing this little step pattern, right?

Not super complicated, but I’m facing the wall and I want to turn my my body to the left, so I step with my left foot to the left, right foot, and then I reverse it.

The whole time, I’m concentrating on my posture, and then keeping pressure on the wall so, fifteen seconds, fifteen seconds, so you’re pressing right, pressing left, just changing your foot direction.

Those are the two basic exercises to get you started.

Improve Athleticism – Get Started Today!

Later on, we’ll talk about beginning to shift joint-to-joint in that process, but this is the regression that you can do anywhere, and I promise you, if you start to do it, it will start to progress in your everyday activities; it will make you stronger, it will make you more agile, and it will allow you to do things more athletically with a very small investment in time.

There you have it, hope you enjoy it, if you have any questions, let us know.

Thanks.