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Athletic Strength for Women - David Oliver and Dana Healy
Athletic Strength for Women
by David Oliver and Dana Healy
NEW, 248 pages
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About Athletic Strength for Women
With women’s sport performance at an all-time high and continuing to rise, you need to be faster, stronger, and more agile in order to compete. Yet, until now, no training manual has specifically addressed female athletes’ physiological, biomechanical, and anatomical needs.
Athletic Strength for Women presents effective exercise prescriptions to help you build a strength base and then convert that strength to speed and power in competition. The result is not only better performance but also fewer injuries. For example, exercises and programs for the lower body will improve hamstring and quadriceps strength ratios, providing enhanced takeoff power and landing strength and better protection for the knee. More than 120 targeted exercises and drills are provided to improve
- throwing, striking, swinging, and other upper-body skills;
- starting, stopping, jumping, cutting, turning, pivoting, and other lower-body maneuvers; and
- overall power and speed.
Written by David Oliver, former strength and conditioning coach for the U.S. women’s soccer and basketball teams, and Dana Healy, department head for strength and conditioning at the United States Olympic Committee, Athletic Strength for Women contains general fitness and sport-specific performance tests. These tests are accompanied by normative tables that enable athletes to gauge strengths and weaknesses against those of their peers and set improvement goals.
The book also includes in-season, off-season, and preseason programs for all the major participation sports, including soccer, volleyball, basketball, field hockey, lacrosse, swimming, and track and field. No matter what your sport, prepare your body to perform at full potential. The programs in Athletic Strength for Women will help you achieve a new level of athleticism.
About David Oliver
David Oliver is the president and founder of Oliver Sports Performance. He has worked at the high school, collegiate, professional, and Olympic levels as a coach and athletic trainer for over 15 years. He has worked as the conditioning coach for the U.S. women's national soccer team and served as strength and conditioning consultant to the U.S. women's national basketball team. He has served as an athletic trainer on medical teams assembled for major events like the U.S. National Skating Championships, the World Triathlon Championships, the Citrus Bowl, and the NBA All-Star Game.
Oliver also spent seven years with the NBA's Orlando Magic basketball team as the strength and conditioning coach and assistant athletic trainer. Oliver is a certified member of the National Athletic Trainers' Association (NATA), the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA), and the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM). He is also certified as a U.S. Weightlifting Federation club coach (USWF). He speaks nationally at camps, clinics, and seminars and is well regarded for his innovative training techniques.
Oliver is the coauthor of Conditioning the NBA Way and NBA Power Conditioning and has written articles for Men's Health, Men's Journal, Women's Health and Fitness, and numerous other publications. He has also been featured in Women's Sports Illustrated and Conditioning for Women's Basketball.
He lives with his wife, Shelly, and sons, Zachary and Ryan, in Orlando, Florida.
About Dana Healy
Dana Healy is the department head for strength and conditioning at the United States Olympic Committee (USOC). In this position she oversees the strength and conditioning programs at three Olympic Training Centers (OTCs) and consults with teams that do not reside at the OTCs. She has been with the USOC since 1997 and has trained numerous Olympic and world medalists.
Before joining the OTC, Healy worked as the assistant strength coach at Brown University. She is a certified member of the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA), the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), and U.S.A. Weightlifting (USAW) and has been a contributor to Men's Health, Outside Magazine, Sports Illustrated for Women, and Performance Conditioning.
Healy lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
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 Strength for Women
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