The Inhuman League » Derby Fitness

Derby exercises for small spaces

Bollock Obama — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 13:00:10 +0000

Originally posted on The Inhuman League.

Ah, early spring. The flowers are a-blossom, the birds a-chirp, and—because it’s still February, mind—the drizzle a-pissing. What a time for growth. If you’re like me, the slight upturn in temperature and evening light leaves you fidgety for outdoor skating but stuck in by cold rain. So, in anticipation of those two weeks in April or May when we can actually skate outside, I present a series of derby exercises that you can do on non-practice days without leaving the comfort of your living room. These late-winter nights in front of the telly are perfect for strengthening core muscles and improving balance, two essential areas that we often neglect. Some of these exercises are familiar—planks and pushups, for example—and others a little more exotic. All these derby exercises are highly adaptable. Enjoy!

First, the classic pushup (or pressup, if you’re British). Pushups are like Marmite—they’re brown and salty, and a bugger to get off a knife. Oh, wait, no—they’re like Marmite because some people really like them, some people really hate them, and they majority of people don’t have any opinion either way, because they don’t often encounter them. It’s time to change that. Pushups are great for derby. Let me say that again. PUSHUPS ARE GREAT FOR DERBY! Derby includes a lot of shoulder contact, especially in pushing and hitting. If you have strong shoulders, your hits and pushes will stay strong at the moment of contact. If you have weak shoulders, your hits and pushes will lose power when, at the moment of contact, your shoulder flexes and you waste power. In addition, pushups are great for your arms, chest, and core, and are endlessly variable.

There are a few key things to remember about the pushup. First, keep your back straight. Keeping your back straight forces you to engage your core muscles. This is especially true if you’re doing your pushups on your knees. Bending at the waist is a waste of time. Second, change things up. Your body will get used to doing one kind of pushup, and eventually you’ll get so good at it that you’ll stop benefiting from it. Move your hands in close to one another, or far apart, or out in front of your head, or down by your sides. Keep your elbows in, or out like chicken wings. Look ahead or look down. A good pushup involves lots of layers of muscles, and changing how you do it forces the layers to respond in different ways.

A final note on these—don’t get discouraged if you suck at them. Whether or not you’re good at these has as much to do with your musculature as it does with your fitness. Someone with short arms and a deep chest will have a much easier time with pushups no matter how unfit they are. Someone with a shallow chest and long arms will be at a disadvantage. Don’t sweat it. Do more pushups, however you can.

Second, the trusty plank. Everyone’s done planks at some point, as they’re great for core muscles. Balance yourself on your elbows and toes, and keep your back straight. This is a classic static, or isometric, exercise; your muscles get the workout from maintaining tension. Don’t bend at the waist, either up or down, as this takes your body out of tension. You should feel this in your stomach, lower back, and arse, the core of your torso. Do more of these than you are.

Once you’re bored of the standard plank, shake things up a bit. Have a child stand on your lower back, which obviously makes things harder. Or, do side planks, balanced on one elbow. (I find these particularly difficult.) While in a standard plank, raise one leg to work your arse and back even more (remember to alternate). Or, do mountain climbers, in which you try to touch your right knee to your right elbow, while balancing on your elbows and left leg, and then alternate. These are great for your oblique muscles (the muscles in the sides of your torso). Finally, have a go at the plank-to-pushup manoeuvre. Starting from a plank, raise yourself up one arm at a time into a pushup, and then lower yourself back down. Repeat to failure. This one is great for your shoulders and arms as well as for the core muscles.

Third, the skydiver. These are great fun for your lower back, arse, and hamstrings. Doing more of these will improve your ability to take hits and push people around Lie on your stomach with your hands clasped behind your back, like the Prince of Wales on an official visit to your carpet. (Not a euphemism, that.) Lift your knees and chest off the carpet. Hold it for ten seconds. Ease back down. Repeat. Carry on. Once you’ve gotten tired of this, you can shake things up by grabbing your feet behind you and pulling. Try to pull your heels to your head. (This will require you to balance on your crotch. Good luck with that.) Or, start in the standard skydiver position but with your feet under the couch. Arch your back until your navel is off the ground. Wait for a ten count, and then relax. Repeat. As long as you stop before you pull a muscle, you really can’t do too many of these. They’ll improve your posture, balance, and core strength.

Fourth, the ‘Russian Get-Up (sic)’. I have to confess, I may have been using the wrong name all along for this. My recent google search suggested that a Russian Get Up may be something else entirely. That said, until someone corrects me, I’m going to carry on.

So, to do a Russian Get-Up (sic), sit down cross-legged on the floor. Then stand up, without using your knees or hands. (You may find it helpful to swing your arms down and back to build momentum). Then sit down again. Repeat. Repeat. Carry on like this for two minutes, and take a break. Not using your knees or hands requires you to power yourself upward using your hips, arse, and thighs, and it’s a great exercise for building core and leg stability. It’s important to swap legs occasionally—I tend to cross my left leg over my right, which means that my right leg is doing more of the work. To avoid this, I cross my legs the opposite way. As with all of these exercises, you can make this more difficult. Try doing it on one leg or in skates, both of which require more strength than the standard version. Or, try it without crossing your legs. Pull your heels in as close as you can to your crotch and spread your knees as far as you can (hey!). Then stand up as normal. My six-year-old daughter can do this. I can’t. Good luck.

Fifth, the ‘Indian Get-Up’ or ‘Knee Jump.’ This is a great exercise for building explosive strength, because it requires you to use your back and arse to jump. Start on your knees. Without using your hands, jump to your feet into a squatting position. To do this, you’ll have to swing your arms up and forward. Try to jump as far as you can forward. If your feet land ahead of your knees, you’ve done well. Chances are, you won’t need to make this more difficult, but if you do, Youtube offers a range of videos detailing this exercise. Don’t be tempted by the prospect of doing it with weights. Get a hobby that’s better on the knees.

Sixth, and finally, the One-Legged Stand-Around. The whole of this exercise is summed up in the title. Stand on one leg. That’s it. The trick is to get so good at this that you can do it while doing something else. Start by standing on one leg while doing the washing up. Remember to (a) bend your knee a bit, and (b) switch legs occasionally. You can also do this while shaving, washing your face, or giving a presentation on this quarter’s sales to your board of directors. When you’ve gotten good at this, make things more difficult by moving your other leg around. Stick it out in front of you, then swing it behind your standing leg. Touch your knee to your nose (preferably not while shaving), or grab your free foot and try to straighten your leg (ballet, anyone?). This exercise develops your sense of proprioception—the way the brain interprets signals about where you are in relation to gravity, and makes adjustments accordingly. You’ll find that as you get better at this, the constant movements necessary to keep your weight over your foot get smaller and more natural, and you have to pay less attention to remaining upright. That’s proprioception at work. You’ll also find that your balance on skates is more assured, your crossovers stronger, and your transitions smoother. Once you’re comfortable on one foot, everything else comes more naturally.

Also, once you’ve gotten confident standing on one foot, you can shake things up by adding some movement to the mix. Stand on one foot with your weight on your toes, and try to scuttle sideways by swivelling your foot, first on the toes, then on the heel. Go both ways with both feet. As you get better at this, you’ll find that your ability to remain upright on skates while off balance will also improve. Often, skaters fall down because they’ve overbalanced forward or backwards whilst trying to hit, dodge, or spin. More comfort moving on one foot equals more comfort moving on one skate.

So there’s my big six exercises. Obviously, there are hundreds more you could do—the situp family gets noticeably short shrift here—but I think these should sort you out nicely over the holiday season. And remember, you needn’t reserve these for your living room. These can be done whenever you’re trapped in a small space with nothing much to do. No derby in prison? No problem.

Onward Springtime!

For more content like this, head right on over to The Inhuman League. Or get more from this author: Bollock Obama

Plyometrics: A Derby Guide to Jumping about Like an Idiot (Derby fitness Part 2)

Bollock Obama — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:25:04 +0000

Originally posted on The Inhuman League.

Well then, how’s the training going? If you’ve had a go at intervals, or are otherwise in pretty good shape, it might be time for you to get the hop on the competition with some new exercises: plyometrics. These easy-to-learn, do-almost-anywhere jumping exercises will have the twin benefits of massively improving your explosive strength and making you look a bit of a fool in your local park. However, there’s a caveat here–if you’re not in good shape already, you run the real risk of injury with plyometrics. So, if you’ve not been derby training regularly, start now (maybe with my earlier post on intervals) and come back to this later. Likewise, if you’ve recently been injured, take it easy on the plyos. However, if you have been training, add plyos in, and soon you’ll be like a kangaroo on roller skates, but in a good way, ‘cause you’ll be less awkward.

Before you can start to torture yourself with plyometrics, we need to talk a bit about science, particularly about the science of muscle contraction. There’s a lot of biochemistry here, of which I understand very little, but what it boils down to is this: as you use a muscle (say, to move a limb), it undergoes two types of contractions, concentric and eccentric. Concentric contractions take place when a muscle is shortening–think curling your arm to pick up a heavy suitcase, or to show off your guns. Eccentric contractions take place when a muscle is lengthening–think putting down a heavy suitcase gently, or lowering yourself from a pull up. From the outside of your body (which is where you should be looking, generally), these two contractions look pretty much the same, but they’re not.

A plyometric exercise capitalizes on the transition from one of these phases to the other. The faster you transition from eccentric contraction to concentric contraction, the harder your muscles have to work, and the stronger you get. Generally, this takes place with the assistance of gravity. The basic principle is pretty simple. You jump off of an object, and jump back up as soon as you land. The higher the object, the further you fall; the further you fall, the harder you land; the harder you land, the more energy is required to spring back up. Also, the faster you spring back up, the faster your muscles have to respond. So, by combining a big drop with a fast return, you get stronger and more explosive.

You can start with the following exercises:

Box Jumps. Find a box, ledge, step, planter, or sturdy rock about knee high. Stand in front of it in a derby stance, knees bent, feet shoulder width apart, arms out in front. Jump up onto the box. Land in a derby stance. Pause. Jump off the box, and as soon as you hit the ground, spring back up onto the box. Repeat this exercise for a minute, then take a minute break. Carry on for a few minutes. To get the most out of this exercise, you’ll want to ensure that you don’t wait on the ground–if your heels hit the ground, you’ve been there too long, and if you bounce more than once on the ground, you’ve been there too long. The exercise’s benefit comes from the speed of the bounce. The best sprinters in the world will spend no more than a tenth of a second on the ground. They’ll also do this onto hip-high boxes. Good luck with that.

Pop-up Box Jumps. Use the same box and start in the same way that you did for box jumps. Once you land on the box, jump immediately straight up into the air as high as you can. (It’s okay to abandon the derby stance for this bit). Land safely somewhere, and repeat the process. Carry on doing this for a minute, and then have a rest. Repeat a bunch of times.

Depth Jumps. These are awesome–they’re probably the single best exercise for strengthening your quads and bum, and they’re really simple. Start on the box, facing the ground. Step forward off the box, as though you were falling feet first into a pool. Land with both feet together on the ground, and as soon as you hit the ground jump up and forward. The faster you do this, the better off you are. Do this for a minute, then rest and repeat. However, there’s a caveat here. While there’s no better exercise for your quads than this, there’s also no better way to wreck your knees. Be careful – if your knees start to hurt, stop.

Sideways Jumps. You’ll probably have figured out what this is all about by now, huh? Find an object about half the size of your depth jump box–say a large curb or small planter. Stand side-on to it. Jump sideways up onto it, and then off; spring back up as soon as you hit the ground. Carry on like this for a minute, and then take a break. Switch sides, and get on with it. These are particularly unpleasant. Good luck.

Object Flinging. This is not a plyometric per se, but it wants mentioning anyway, as it’s just so useful. First, find an object that weighs between five and ten pounds, and which you can throw without damaging. I like medicine balls for this, but I’ve also used shot-putts, bags of sand, medium sized rocks, and docile chickens. Also, find a place in which you can throw said object safely. Place the object on the ground in front of you, and lean over and put your hands on it. Bend your knees just a little. In one smooth motion, fling the object with both hands up and away behind you, over your head. You should feel this in your hamstrings and bum, and especially in your lower back. (If your lower back hurts in an unpleasant way, though, stop). Go find whatever you threw, and repeat.

Rope Skipping. Long the domain of boxers and seven year old girls, skipping rope is a great plyometric excercise, as it’s basically a series of little jumps. Get a rope or something like it (I use a piece of coaxial cable), and start jumping. Vary your steps–do a bunch of double jumps, hitting the ground twice between rope passes, and then a bunch of pogos, hitting the ground once between rope passes, and then some one-footed jumps or boxer shuffles (one foot, then the other). Skipping rope makes for a particularly great warmup for a longer plyometric workout. Ten minutes of rope skipping followed by half an hour of plyos will sort you out nicely.

If you add in one forty-minute plyo session per week, you’ll start to see massive benefts in terms of explosive strength and speed. Be prepared to hurt, though; make sure you don’t have anything demanding to do the next day. Also, as with interval training, there are endless variations on this theme, all designed to benefit different muscles. The exercises I’ve outlined above all work on the posterior chain, the series of muscles starting in the calf, and working through the hamstring and bum into the lower back. Along with the quads, these are the muscles we use in derby, and these are the ones that should hurt when you finish a plyo workout. By strengthening these muscles, you can make yourself sprint like a hotrod and hit like fury. Best get hopping.

For more content like this, head right on over to The Inhuman League. Or get more from this author: Bollock Obama

Derby Fitness – Now you have no excuse. Part 1.

Bollock Obama — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 16:37:56 +0000

Originally posted on The Inhuman League.

Good news, folks–championship season is upon us! And do you know what else that means? As the clouds, the mercury, and the sun all sink, our thoughts turn to those cozy evenings on the couch with a cup of coffee or a pint of cheap gin, cuddled up with our favourite rollergirl, boy, or cat, watching webcasts of teams we aspire to beat. But you know what else that means? It means that when we’re on our couches, we’re not out training. Cold, damp nights and cozy couches are the enemy of fitness, and the inspiration we’re taking from all that video won’t get us anywhere when we’re sweating and gasping in the center of the track like a bird flu victim in a steam room.

So, in the interest of physical fitness, I propose a basic training session, that you can do on your own time, anywhere you like, without any specialist equipment or knowledge beyond feet and a timekeeping device of some sort. This is tailored for derby, and will give you the kind of cardiovascular fitness that will help you in a bout.

Interval Training. Most of you, I suspect, will have heard of intervals before, and those of you who haven’t can probably figure it out from the name. Basically, an interval is any kind of exercise you do for a bit, and then stop and rest, and then do for a bit more. The benefit from interval training comes from the contrast between working hard and resting, which fits in with the basic requirements of derby, where a skater works hard for up to two minutes, and then gets a bit of a break. In fact, one school of exercise physiology says that fitness isn’t really a matter of how long you can exercise for or how hard you can go, but how quickly you recover after exerting yourself. Interval training can build you a body that responds quickly and at a high level for a few minutes, and then gets ready to repeat that shortly afterwards.

However, there’s lots of science surrounding intervals, and lots of money that’s made out of specialist training programs, and this can make finding an appropriate program a bit daunting. Here’s the basics:

1. Warm up. Go exercise for about ten minutes, until you’re good and sweaty and your heart is racing. It doesn’t really matter what exercise you do, so long as it’s a cardio-based one (e.g., not weight training or stretchy yoga; these are definitely also useful, but aren’t going to get your heart racing in the same way). I prefer to run, but if you’d rather swim, bike, skate, skip rope, fight, or breakdance, feel free.

2. Catch your breath. Take a minute, maybe two, and make sure nothing hurts in an alarming way and your shoes and shorts are tied appropriately.

3. Run (or whatever) flat out for 90 seconds. Go as hard as you can, right to the point at which you think you’re going to die. If you don’t feel like you’re going to die, you’re not going hard enough. The goal here is to push your body beyond the point at which it can get enough oxygen by breathing, thereby forcing it to power muscles anaerobically. (Anaerobic activity is what makes your muscles hurt while you’re jamming. It’s also what’s making you feel like you’re going to die here.)

4. Rest for 45 seconds, or until your heart rate returns to roughly normal. This will take a different duration for everyone, depending on fitness level, so don’t sweat the numbers just yet. You’ll probably pant heavily and your heart will be beating like a drum roll. Make sure to stand near children at this point, ideally whilst wearing a dirty overcoat.

5. Make sure that you don’t rest for longer than you ran, and make sure that you don’t get lazy and stand around a bit extra. As soon as you’ve stopped panting, run like hell again, for 90 more seconds. Then rest again. Repeat this cycle between six and twelve times, depending on how much you can take.

6. Cool down. Exercise for seven more minutes, casually, until you’re comfortable and your heartbeat has slowed down.

7. Get a drink. Go home.

There are lots of variations on this basic theme, and they’re all pretty useful. After a while, you’ll want to switch things up, so feel free to change the timings as you like, but try to adhere to the basic requirements of derby. You’ll never have to skate hard for more than two minutes at a go, so three minutes is a good maximum duration. Thirty seconds is probably a good minimum duration. Otherwise, if you’re bored, up the intensity. Try doing whatever you’re doing uphill, or up some stairs, or carrying a child on your back. Or a sheep!

Even more importantly, the rest phase is equally as important as the exercise phase, so don’t skimp here. Make sure you take a rest phase that allows your heart to settle. If you exercise continuously, skipping the rest, you’ll gradually lose intensity, and your body will drop out of the anaerobic zone. You’ll still be exercising, but your body will be getting enough oxygen, and the kind of fitness you’ll build won’t be derby-specific. It’ll be more marathon-specific. Long runs are nice, but I reckon I could knock Paula Radcliffe right off the track.

If you train on skates twice a week, and you do this twice a week, you’ll find that when springtime comes, and the great glowing eye returns to the skies, you’ll be the one on the track, racking up points, while your opponent vomits in the corner. Good luck. Oh, and if you see Paula Radcliffe around, tell her she’s in for it.

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