SIRC

Authors: Murley, G.S, Landorf, K.B., and Menz, H.B (2010).

Clinical Biomechanics, 25, 728-736.

Commentary by Allan Wrigley

The number one predictor of injury is previous injury. With this the ultimate goal of every therapist is to be able to screen an athlete and determine if they are at risk of a certain injury, develop an appropriate corrective exercise training program to address the identified risk factors and hopefully prevent the injury from occurring or rehabilitate the athlete to prevent the recurrence of future similar injuries.

This article is a review of the literature on the use of Agonist- Antagonist Pairing in resistance training. Agonist-antagonist pairing is the pairing of opposite muscle groups (e.g. elbow flexors/elbow extensors) or biomechanically dissimilar exercises (e.g. power cleans/incline bench press or bench press/pull-up) for the purpose of improving maximal strength and muscle power.

When working with high performance athletes, we need to remember that most of these individuals do not fit within the normal population bell curve. This distribution becomes a problem when developing a treatment plan for them, as the majority of evidence based research for therapy intervention is based on normal individuals using parametric statistics. 

Muscle hypertrophy (increase in fiber size) is an important outcome of resistance training. Typical guidelines for developing muscle hypertrophy include repetitions in the range of 5-12 and loads in the range of 70-85% of 1 Repetition Maximum (RM). This type of loading mechanically stresses the muscle fiber and recruits the entire motor unit pool.

Understanding the hormonal response to training has led us to refine the design of a given workout and indeed the structure for the wider training program. While the body responds to a training stimulus with a milieu of different hormones two of the more commonly discussed by athletes, coaches and sport science staff are steroid hormones testosterone and cortisol.

This review discusses the parameters of power output and training with links to specific sport movement characteristics. The force-velocity relationship is the main topic and parameters we can manipulate to train power output are presented with evidence and practical examples. Training modalities are discussed in terms of motion pattern, velocity, and loading, regarding sport specificity. This paper helps in logically selecting training modalities.

Author: Fred Engh
Publisher: SquareOne Publishers