Athletic Body in Balance - Gray Cook

Athletic Body in Balance

by Gray Cook

NEW, 232 pages

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About Athletic Body in Balance

Great athletes make difficult moves look effortless with a combination of skill, strength, and balance. Traditional conditioning builds a fitness base, but modern sports training takes into account athletic movement patterns. Athletic Body in Balance is the first guide of its kind to show you how to train for smooth, fluid movement and prevent muscle imbalances, mobility restrictions, stability problems, and injuries.

Physical therapist and sports conditioning expert Gray Cook has proven the effectiveness of his approach through the performances of athletes in the NFL, NBA, NHL, WNBA, and Reebok® University’s sports training system. Cook’s methods will help you identify functional weaknesses; correct imbalances; explore your potential; and refine sport-specific movement skills such as jumping, kicking, cutting, and turning. You will see where conditioning is breaking down and how to get your body back on track.

Whereas other books concentrate on maximizing your strengths, Athletic Body in Balance focuses on exposing and overcoming your weaknesses to form a foundation for long-term training gains. Learn how to maintain what you gain and build on your improvements. Make this comprehensive assessment tool your training guide. Prepare and repair your body for ultimate athletic performance with Athletic Body in Balance.

About Gray Cook

Gray Cook is a physical therapist, board certified in orthopedics. He also is a certified strength coach with experience in several sports at the youth, college, and professional levels. Cook is a nationally recognized lecturer and consultant to the NFL, NBA, NHL, and WNBA as well as numerous college sports medicine and conditioning facilities. His innovative research and applied work are found in many rehabilitation and conditioning publications.

Cook is the director of orthopedic and sports physical therapy at Dunn, Cook & Associates. He also serves as the creative director of sport-specific training for Reebok® and is Reebok's® first master coach.

Gray Cook received his graduate degree in physical therapy education at the University of Miami School of Medicine with a focus on orthopedics and sports rehabilitation and research in motor learning. Cook is a faculty member of the North American Sports Medicine Institute and is the codeveloper of the course titled Functional Exercise Training and Rehabilitation. He lives in his hometown of Danville, Virginia.

About Strength Training

Strength training is the use of resistance to muscular contraction to build the strength, anaerobic endurance, and size of skeletal muscles. There are many different methods of strength training, the most common being the use of gravity or elastic/hydraulic forces to oppose muscle contraction. See the resistance training article for information about elastic/hydraulic training, but note that the terms "strength training" and "resistance training" are often used interchangeably.

When properly performed, strength training can provide significant functional benefits and improvement in overall health and well-being, including increased bone, muscle, tendon and ligament strength and toughness, improved joint function, reduced potential for injury, increased bone density, a temporary increase in metabolism, improved cardiac function, and elevated HDL (good) cholesterol. Training commonly uses the technique of progressively increasing the force output of the muscle through incremental increases of weight, elastic tension or other resistance, and uses a variety of exercises and types of equipment to target specific muscle groups. Strength training is primarily an anaerobic activity, although some proponents have adapted it to provide the benefits of aerobic exercise through circuit training.

Strength training differs from bodybuilding, weightlifting, powerlifting, and strongman, which are sports rather than forms of exercise, although training for them is inherently interconnected with strength training, as it is for shotput, discus, and Highland games. Many other sports use strength training as part of their training regimen, notably football, rugby, lacrosse, basketball, hockey, and track and field

The basic principles of strength training involve a manipulation of the number of repetitions (reps), sets, tempo, exercises and force to cause desired changes in strength, endurance, size or shape by overloading of a group of muscles. The specific combinations of reps, sets, exercises, resistance and force depend on the purpose of the individual performing the exercise: sets with fewer reps can be performed using more force, but have a reduced impact on endurance.

Strength training also requires the use of 'good form', performing the movements with the appropriate muscle group(s), and not transferring the weight to different body parts in order to move greater weight/resistance (called 'cheating'). Typically failure to use good form during a training set can result in injury or an inability to meet training goals - since the desired muscle group is not challenged sufficiently, the threshold of overload is never reached and the muscle does not gain in strength. There are cases when cheating is beneficial, as is the case where weaker groups become the weak link in the chain and the target muscles are never fully exercised as a result.

The benefits of strength training include increased muscle, tendon and ligament strength, bone density, flexibility, tone, metabolic rate and postural support.

Athletic Body in Balance