Fitness at the core

Mark Whitley has seen his share of injuries.

As owner of Inland Physical Therapy and Sports Rehab, Whitley has helped countless athletes, would-be athletes and nonathletes recover from injury or surgery.

For many years he’s volunteered his time and expertise to help athletes at Central Valley High School recover.

Now he’s implementing a new program that may help keep athletes from needing his services later on.

“We have a fitness program called The Explosion Academy,” Whitley said “We spend a series of four weeks or six weeks trying to help the kids get quicker, faster, stronger, improve their vertical jump and try to improve their core strength.”

The term “core strength” is a term currently enjoying popular use in the world of physical fitness, but it has a range of meanings.

For Whitley, the term refers to strengthening an athlete’s core: the full range of abdominal, back and hip muscles – basically the muscles that keep a human standing erect.

“Athletically, those are all the muscles that you need to use to transfer the energy you build in your legs to your upper body,” he said.

Picture a football player firing out of a three-point stance, or a volleyball player leaping straight up to spike or block. For that matter, picture every stride a cross country runner takes.

Traditionally, athletes were instructed to do sit-ups, crunches and back extensions as part of a weightlifting program to get stronger.

But those exercises don’t always transfer to a strong, toned core, Whitley said.

“When you do a sit-up, you’re not working the entire abdominal muscle,” he explained. “In fact, we rarely work that entire muscle.

“Athletically speaking, it’s not that productive either, because if you stop and think about it, we rarely move from a prone position directly to a sitting up position unless we’re getting out of bed. Athletically, it almost always involves some kind of rotation and that’s where the idea of core strengthening comes in.”

Whitley uses medicine balls and rubber bands to strengthen the full range of core muscles by combining rotation to more traditional exercises.

Central Valley’s football team saw first-hand the benefits of a core-fitness program like Whitley’s when it was lambasted by Sandpoint in a nonleague game a few seasons ago.

“Sandpoint High School has been doing a lot of this stuff now for about six years,” Whitley said. “We saw it in full effect a couple years ago when they just ran over CV.”

This season, Whitley opened the Explosion Academy, expecting maybe 50 or 60 athletes from the school’s various programs to attend.

“We had 125 kids show up,” he said. “We had a good response from the kids and we’re looking for, what we’re hoping for, is to see fewer injuries and muscle pulls during all of the sports seasons.

The goal is two-fold, Whitley said. First, they want to help each athlete improve his or her performance on the field by improving explosiveness (such as a vertical jump), quickness and agility. Second, by improving their baseline fitness level each athlete will be less likely to sustain a nagging or season-ending injury.

Specifically, Whitley goes beyond the simple sit-up/back extension routine to fully strengthen an athlete’s middle.

“What I’m talking about with core fitness are the abdominal muscles, including the deep abdominal muscles that connect to the connective tissue that crosses the spine,” he explained. “When you contract that muscle, it tightens that connective tissue – it’s basically like having an internal belt on. It’s like one of those leather lifting belts that people wear, only it’s working from the inside out.

“We’re talking about abdominal muscles as well as the back muscles that connect and stabilize the spine and keep us vertical. And, to a certain extent, we’re also talking about some of the upper hip muscles – especially the ones that are used when you’re walking, standing or running.”

Even in athletes who look to be in great physical shape can have problems, Whitley said.

“Sometimes you’ll see a huge muscle imbalance between the quadriceps muscles and the hip flexors, the butt muscles and the hamstrings,” he said. “In fact, I recently had a big, strong kid who is going on a full-ride scholarship to play ball in college. He was a real physical specimen with big, strong legs, but we found muscle weakness in his hip flexors. We both chuckled over it. He’s working to correct that now.”

Whitley finished his program last week, testing each athlete to determine what progress was made during the academy. Each athlete tested had improved between 5 and 25 percent over the series.

Central Valley football coach Rick Giampietri was one of the first coaches to embrace the program and wants to see it incorporated into his players’ off-season workout program in addition to the traditional, Olympic-style weightlifting program.

“The biggest thing we’re looking for will be in not seeing the groin pulls and other nagging injuries that always occur during the start of a season,” Whitley said. “Better balance, better quickness, better performance and fewer injuries.”