The adductors are one of the most misunderstood and inappropriately trained muscle groups. While they do bring the thighs together, they are mostly used in flexion and extension of the hips in everyday movement. How many muscle groups can you name that both flex and extend a joint?

This makes it all the more important to strengthen the adductors to perform stronger, faster hip flexion and extension. Running, jumping, agility, squatting, and lunging all improve when the adductors are better at flexing and extending the hips.

A Misplaced Emphasis

The fact is, we rarely if ever squeeze our legs together against resistance in life. Perhaps riding bareback on a horse or in jiu-jitsu class you’d want to squeeze your legs together against resistance. But there’s not a lot of other application to squeezing the legs together.

Adductors contribute to flexing the hips in the open chain phase of movement, when the foot is moving up off the ground. They are also key to squatting, where they help pull the body down into a better position, versus passively descending into a squat. They also help extend the hips coming up from a squat, and help drive the legs down and back when sprinting. While they aren’t the big prime movers everyone thinks of for these movements, you’re stronger and faster when your adductors are in the game instead of just along for the ride.

Despite their predominant role as flexors and extensors, the way most people target them is by squeezing the thighs together against resistance. The problem here is that when the resistance is positioned against the inside of the thighs, shins, or feet, this oblique force does not travel up though the body and skeleton (up the kinetic chain), the way forces do when directed through the bottoms of the feet. It’s akin to performing only chest flies to get better at bench pressing. And if you do too much adductor squeezing from the side, you’ll actually increase the likelihood of groin pulls, while not gaining transferrable strength or power.

If There Are No Trees to Climb

The key to getting the most from your adductors is engaging them with the force driving through the bottoms of your feet. For this, you need something other than a 2D ground environment. The only way to specifically target the adductors is to have something between your feet that enables you to drive the soles of your feet toward the center line beneath you.

Long ago, our distant ancestors used to shimmy up trees. There are still remote pockets of primitive cultures that do this regularly today. For those of us living in the concrete jungle, we need a better solution for developing the functional role of the adductors. It’s called Compression Strength Training using the BOSU Elite.

Before I continue, please note the intention of this article is not a sales pitch for BOSU balls; it’s to inform you of the best way to train and get the most out of your adductors. The BOSU’s dome shape and elastic quality is perfectly suited for training the adductors (along with the glutes, pecs, and lats). The shape enables you to drive your feet together toward the midline, with all of the force reactively transmitting up the kinetic chain through the soles of your feet.

You do this to your limit, until you can’t compress it in any further. This is where the magic happens. Elastic resistance has an acceleration factor that is much faster than gravity. The harder you compress the dome, the higher the resistance gets, and the speed of the resistance stimulates the nervous system to recruit the largest motor units and maximum amount of fast twitch muscle fibers.

When you set up the correct foot position (see the video below), squeeze with the correct parts of your feet, match your spine and shin angles throughout the exercise, and compress into the dome as hard as you possibly can, you experience an immediate carryover effect in your adductors: moving and squatting better on the ground.

The Competitive Edge

In athletics, new advantages eventually become necessities. Because it is now possible to tap into the adductors in such a way so as to immediately enhance both strength and speed, the list of institutions and trainers using this new method of training is growing every day.

Cal Poly, under the leadership of Coach Chris Holder, was the first college institution to use Compression Strength Training to train every athlete in every sport. One of the first things Coach Chris White did when he arrived at LSU this year was to incorporate the same system.

My advice to everyone in the fitness and sports training industry is stop squeezing the life out of your adductors with oblique force from the side on that gynecological machine in the gym. It’s doing little or nothing to enhance your function, and likely increases the odds of injury. Instead, try your damnedest to pop the BOSU Elite between the soles of your feet, exactly as shown in the video, and enjoy the benefits to all of your power and athletic movements.

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1. Align your head over one foot and contract that same side lat to side-bend and counter-rotate your core. The combination of these movements is called coiling.
2. Keep your lat contracted for the remainder of the exercise, with the intention to bring your shoulder down and back, and same side hip up and forward.
3. The side that you have coiled will be your front foot. With your weight on the ball of that foot, match the angle of your spine with an aggressive forward angle of your shin, and send the other foot behind you so that you are in a partial lunge.
4. Don’t worry about keeping your knee behind your toes, because the coiling action of your core and matching spine and shin angles puts no stress (or sensation of work) in your quads or knees.
5. Press up out of the lunge to a tall standing position on your other leg. Then lunge forward to any depth you want, keeping your lat contracted and core coiled with maximum intent.

The glutes and upper hamstrings power these lunges with ease, and the overall movement feels effortless when you align your head over your foot and engage your lat.

Watch the video below to see exactly how to perform these lunges:

Perform 8-10 lunges across the room on one side, then switch your coiling side and lunging leg to come back for another 8-10 lunges. You can repeat as many times as you like, or make these lunges as dynamic as you want. Try powering up fast from the lunge position, and adding a skipping step with your lunging foot before you get to tall standing on your other leg.

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When people train in the gym, especially lifting weights (e.g. squats, deadlifts, cleans, rows) they tend to follow the same basic rules, such as “brace your core,” and “keep your spine straight or neutral.” This is the correct way to safely and effectively approach these exercises. However, in the real world you rarely, if ever, keep your spine (and core) neutral when you move.

If you’re an athlete, you don’t brace your core in neutral to run, swing, throw, punch, climb, swim, or cycle. The “brace your core tight” dogma found in the gym doesn’t allow for the dynamic nature of these athletic movements. If you want to move like an athlete and get “farm boy strong” so you can apply your strength to everything, including lifting heavier weights, you need to learn how to coil your core.

The Coiling Core and Athletic Power

Coiling is how your core actually moves and creates power in real life and in athletics. The spine can only rotate powerfully and safely when side-bending (frontal plane) and counter rotation (transverse plane) are combined. Isolate either of these actions without the other, and you have bending or twisting that are weak and overly stressful to the spine.

Try this: Stand up right now and perform an overhand throwing motion. Did you notice how your shoulders changed levels as you rotated your core? You naturally tilt your throwing shoulder down as you rotate back, and then reverse this action as you rotate forward and throw. Now, if you try a throwing motion without letting your shoulders tilt at all, you will realize instantly that you need to side bend in order to rotate with power.

While all of the muscles in your trunk come into play when you rotate your core, the focus of Coiling Core Training is exclusively on the lats. Focusing on one side of the body and then the other, also known as ipsilateral training (one side at a time), is the key to maximizing rotational power.

The lats are your largest core muscles. They physically bridge and connect the hips and shoulders unlike any other muscles in the body. Each lat has muscle fibers that run horizontally, vertically, and 45°.  They are connected and tied in from multiple origin points throughout your back, including the thoracolumbar fascia. This means the lats aren’t only for pull ups and rows; they are for everything the core does.

The basic formula for Coiling Core Training is to contract one lat at a time to bring your shoulder down and back, and the same side hip up and forward. The better you get at this simple strategy, the stronger you can rotate to perform any athletic movement, including bracing your core in neutral. This is because this approach creates the most biomechanically sound way to rotate the spine. The more intense the contraction, the deeper you are able to recruit the muscle fibers of the lat down into the thoracolumbar fascia. The result is increased force generation, range of motion, and coordination, which allows you to build rotational power and express maximum strength in movement.

How to Train Your Core to Coil

You’ll have to watch the video below to understand exactly how to perform coiling core with resistance exercise, but here are the main points:

The Stance: Stagger your stance so that the front foot is externally rotated 90° in relationship to your rear foot (at 45° if you cannot reach 90°).

The Shoulders: Rotate your shoulders to the side that your front foot is externally rotated to, so that your shoulders are parallel with the centerline of your rear foot.

The Squeeze: Drive your rear shoulder down, and pull the elastic band down toward your back pocket and up with your opposite hand.

Check out the video below for a deeper dive into the exercise:

Many strength coaches, including Chris Holder at Cal Poly and Chris White at LSU have implemented the WeckMethod Coiling Core exercise into their programming to improve athletic performance.

Knowledge is power. Stay tuned for more of the information you need to maximize your ability to develop greater degrees of functional strength and utilize it in totality for anything you want to do.

The post What the Coiling Core Can Do for Your Strength appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

But think about it. You use your feet to stand, walk, run, and balance. They serve as your foundation and are responsible for transferring all the force from your body to the ground. When your feet are weak, the rest of your body must compensate for the job your feet can’t do.

The stronger your feet, the stronger your foundation is for everything. Not to mention, strengthening your feet will help alleviate and prevent pain throughout the rest of your body. If your training goal is to be able to move with better strength, balance, power, and control, then you must train the two things that tie it all together.

Before You Start Training Your Feet

Be careful you don’t dive into training your feet too fast.You may create a problem that sets you back. Consider strengthening your feet to be a long-term project. A little goes a long way, and you must slowly build up with constant effort and daily application.

Test how strong your feet are. Do this by using rollers of various densities and diameters. The softer the density and larger the diameter, the easier it will be on your feet. To begin, don’t apply your full body weight to a roller. It’s generally a good idea to begin seated. Carefully test how much pressure you can handle before applying more.

LEARN MORE: 4 Common Foot Injuries in the Athlete

If you feel pain back off and only do what you can handle. The ideal amount of pressure can be defined as “delicious discomfort.” It has to feel somewhat uncomfortable in order to stimulate positive change, but the key is applying just the right amount that you can handle without bracing, retracting, defending against the pressure.

5 Things You Can Do to Strengthen Your Feet

You may not be able to do these all the time, but you can certainly do some of them right away. Your feet didn’t become weak overnight, and it will take a consistent effort to build them up.

1. Ditch Your Shoes

One of the best things you can do to strengthen your feet is to simply get them out of shoes more often. Begin slowly at first so you don’t make your feet too sore. This can be as simple as taking your shoes off when you’re inside your home.

TRY THIS: 2 Critical Exercises to Prepare Your Feet for Minimalist Footwear

With your shoes off, raise up onto your toes and try standing and walking propped up on the balls of your feet. You’ll likely feel this creates a significant balance challenge. If this is the case, perform heel raises as repetitions – raising up and descending down – touching a wall or holding a door frame for balance, if necessary.

As you get stronger barefoot, you can up the duration and become more active (like running and jumping barefoot – but take it easy and don’t go too fast), which will continue to build strong stable feet.

2. Run in Sand

This may not be possible for those who don’t have access to a beach, but gently running in sand is a great way to increase the strength and flexibility in your feet. If you don’t have a sandy beach nearby, you can try walking and running barefoot on grass or any soft surface in the warmer weather. A surface like grass that is soft and yields to your weight will help improve the joint articulation within your feet, while increasing range of motion and strength in the process.

READ THESE FIRST: 2 Rules For Beginning Barefoot Running (And Avoiding Injury)

3. Walk on Rocks

This might sound kind of crazy, but walking or even just standing and shifting your weight on smooth rocks – the type of small smooth stones people use to landscape portions of their properties – will do wonders for your feet and your entire body.

The changing and shifting surface of these rocks will help activate all of the proprioceptive nerves that exist under your feet. There are lots of them and these nerves connect directly with the lower back. Unfortunately, these nerves endings are mostly dormant in many people. It is not just coincidence that more than 80% of people suffer significant back pain in their lives. When your feet are weak, you are practically guaranteeing you will experience significant back pain at some point.

RELATED: Walking: The Most Underrated Movement of the 21st Century

4. Roll Out Your Three Arches

Most people think of only one arch in each foot, but there are actually three. The lateral (outside), transverse (center), and medial (inside) arches all work together to spring load your feet, which increases strength, balance, and power when functioning properly. It is important you roll your arches out properly – in the correct order – or you risk making your problems worse.

1. Lateral (outside) arch – This ties directly into your calcaneus (your heel bone) and is your body’s first floor foundation.
2. Transverse (center) arch – Located just behind the ball of your foot, this is the one you have to roll out second and approach most gently. Emphasize rolling from the ball of your foot to your heel (rather than heel to ball). This takes slack out of the fascia rather than increasing it. You can certainly roll it both ways, but make sure to emphasize the ball-to-heel direction with more pressure than the other direction.
3. Medial (inside) arch – This does not directly connect to your heel and effectively rests atop your lateral arch. This one is the third for a reason. Releasing the medial arch without addressing the lateral arch first is like building your body’s structure from the second floor up, not on the first floor foundation.

You are likely to feel the most pain when rolling out the transverse arch. Pain is often felt most as you get closer to the heel, so be super careful not to press too hard in this tender area.

LEARN MORE: Understanding and Caring for Your Feet

5. Boards, Bands, and Balance Trainers

Another great way to stretch, strengthen and coordinate your feet is to use bands, boards, and/or balance trainers.

Bands: Take a resistance band (flat bands work best), fasten it to a secure point, and place the other end of the band around the top of your foot right below your toes. From a seated position, with legs extended straight on the floor, create tension on the band and pull your foot to your shin. You can perform reps by flexing and extending your foot, or for more of a challenge, move your body back while maintaining a dorsiflexed position to create more tension.

Boards: Take a slant board, or if you don’t have one use a flat board placed on something to create an angle (a rolled towel or a yoga block can work well). Position the slant board near a wall or doorframe so you can lean slightly forward and place your feet on the board with your toes facing up. With a slight lean forward perform calf raises, holding the top position to create maximum extension of your toes and mindfully engage the bottoms of your feet.

Balance Trainer: Use a BOSU ball or a BOSU Elite, if you have one. The Elite has a very firm dome that loads the feet with increased resistance. Position your feet back on the dome of the BOSU ball so your toes are higher than your heels. From this position (dorsiflexion with inversion) perform squats, weight shifts, running in place, and jumps.

Include these training tips in your daily workout routines and you are on the way to having a stronger, more balanced and powerful foundation.

Photos 1-4 courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post 5 Foot Strengthening Exercises to Improve Speed, Power, and Balance appeared first on Breaking Muscle.