Deceleration is a specific form of power development, last year, I wrote about why general power development is important, you can read that here.

This blog will go more into deceleration; what it is and why you should care.

So, what is deceleration? It is your ability to slow down fast. Another way to think of it is your ability to apply the brakes quickly.

Why is it important to stop quickly?

Very simple, to reduce or prevent the risk of getting hurt when landing or falling. Many injuries happen because you cannot absorb the force of landing from a jump, stopping quickly, or falling.

That is another way to think about deceleration, your capacity to absorb force quickly.

DECELERATION FOR INJURY REDUCTION

One thing I think about my training is how can this benefit me now, and 20+ years from now. Power is one of those things that is constant in my training in some capacity and should be yours as well.

Power is one of the first things to decline as you age. Your ability to move fast and stop fast declines. You might have heard that older populations have a high risk of falling and getting hurt. Part of the reason for their high risk of falling is due to the lack of power expression and strength.

There are 32 million musculoskeletal injuries every year, and 45% of those injuries are soft tissue: tendons, ligaments, and joint capsules.

Undoubtedly, that is a lot of injuries and some of them can be avoided by developing the skill to absorb force faster, also known as deceleration.

Speaking of absorbing force, did you know that when you run, your legs absorb up to 2-3x your body weight on a single leg?

Then you wonder why your knees hurt when you run.

Running is not the issue, it’s your body not able to absorb that much impact repeatedly. Furthermore, when you get pain, that is your body telling you that you exceeded its capacity to absorb impact.

Luckily, you can train your body to increase its capacity to absorb impact and lower the risk of injury. You can also train your body to recover from these forces.

 

ECCENTRIC TRAINING FOR DECELERATION

Look closer at what deceleration is, it is eccentric forces on the body.

Before I go further, if you are not sure what eccentric forces are; your muscles can contract in three different ways:

• Eccentrically- Muscle lengthens under tension
• Isometrically- Muscle does not change in length under tension
• Concentrically- Muscle shortens under tension

To give you a visual representation let’s use your biceps. When you do a bicep curl, the bicep muscles shorten, which is a concentric contraction. As you lower the arm, the bicep lengthens, which is an eccentric contraction. Curl the weight back up but stop halfway and hold it, the bicep muscle is no longer moving and is under tension.

Hope that helps.

When it comes to power, each type of contraction has a role:

• Concentric- create acceleration and force production
• Isometrics- stabilize and balance
• Eccentrics- decelerate and absorb production

As you can see, eccentric contractions should be the focus if you want to get better at deceleration.

You want to be able to stop your body quickly and build the capacity to handle those forces, you must build strength.

Strength is the foundation for every physical attribute, without it, the body wouldn’t function. You need strength to handle the forces acting on the body. A little reminder, the part of the body that we want to strengthen, and build are the soft tissues tendons, ligaments, and joint capsules.

Tendons and ligaments are much slower to build up than muscles. There is less blood flow to these tissues and less activity than muscles. To make changes to the cells of a tendon you need to overload the and create time under tension, eccentrically loading the tendons and muscles.

In the rehab setting for an injured tendon, eccentric training is performed to help regenerate tendon tissue and improve tissue compliance and performance and slowly build up to deceleration for power development.

Instead of being reactive, you should be proactive with your training and use eccentric loading to pre-hab, reducing your risks of injury.

CONTRAST TRAINING: ECCENTRIC LOADING–>DECELERATION

Now that we covered what deceleration is and why it’s important, let’s talk about how.

The first body part that will be covered in the foot and ankle complex. The Achilles is a common tendon that gets injured and wanted to give you some ways to protect it during your training.

I will give you two exercises that you can use for your warmups, off days, or active recovery on upper body days.

The first one is going to target the soleus calf muscle, here is how you set it up:

• ½ kneeling position
• Front foot elevated on the small box (4-6 inches), couple of weight plates, or slant board
• Create tension in core and butt, slowly raise the back knee off the ground, 2-4 inches off ground and hold it
• Raise the heel in the front foot and squeeze the calf muscles and slowly lower all the way down. Spend 4-6 seconds to lower the heel and repeat 5-10 reps.
• Switch sides

The following exercise will be for the gastrocnemius calf muscle, here is how you will get set up:

• Use a small box (4-6in), a couple of weight plates, or a slant board
• Place next to the wall, squat rack, somewhere that allows you to hold on and be stable
• While standing, place one foot, balls of feet, on the box
• While holding on to something for stability, take 4-6 seconds to lower the heel
• Use both feet to raise the heels back up, remove the foot again, and slowly lower back down
• Repeat 5-10 reps

This is a great start to building strength and capacity for your tendons before you start working on deceleration. Slowly increase reps and add weight as you progress.

Moving forward, I will be giving guidelines on eccentric training instead of individual exercises. The guidelines can be applied to any exercise.

Eccentric Training Guidelines:

• Use an RPE of 8 to gauge intensity to decide the weight  
• Use both bilateral and unilateral exercises
• Incorporate it into warmups with lightweight and low reps. Use these to practice form and prep movement for the main lifts
• Main lifts-Spend only 2-3 weeks with eccentrics. Reintroduce it every few months
• Accessories- Use eccentrics to make the lightweight feel heavy. Form of progressive overload without adding weight all the time.
• Rest 90-120 seconds

Along with your eccentric training, you can combine a power exercise with it to increase your rate of force development, which means your ability to produce force faster. This combination is known as contrast training and post-activation potentiation.

This is well-known for athletes, but it should also be used by everyone to improve their power development. With contrast training, you can achieve maximal neural excitation and motor unit recruitment by mechanical tension (eccentric load) and neurological efficiency.

What this means is the heavy load increases the muscle and nervous systems’ recruitment and increases coordination to create force quickly. The nervous system goes into overdrive thinking that there will be heavyweight to move, so the result is more explosive and faster movements.

To perform contrast training, you will pair a heavy-loaded exercise with a power exercise of the same movement pattern, for 2-3 reps.

Here is an example:

A1. Squats- 3-5 reps with 3-5 second eccentric contraction

A2.Vertical Depth Drop- 3-5 reps

Rest for 2-4 minutes

You can use this for any movement pattern at the beginning of your workout. As you can see, rest time is long because this is very taxing on the nervous system.

This combination is great for your tendons, muscles, and nervous system. It is doing two things; building strength and capacity with the eccentric loading and teaching your body to quickly absorb impact.

BUILDING BRAKES FOR YOUR FUTURE

Now that you have built your strength and capacity to handle the absorbing forces, let’s practice.

The first exercise for you to practice is called a snap down. In the video below, I demonstrate what the exercise looks like. This exercise is meant to be quick and explosive with a quick and sudden stop.

Perform 5 reps but give yourself 5-10 seconds between reps and 60 seconds between sets.

Another exercise you can do to practice deceleration is simply a box jump. With box jumps, you are doing both acceleration and deceleration. You are accelerating your body to jump into the air and decelerating when landing on the box.

The great thing about landing on the box is fewer impact forces. This really lets you practice your landing mechanics with fewer forces acting on you.

Start with these two and progress from there.

I hope you found this useful and that it gets you thinking about how you can move your body in different ways. Regardless of what you do, everyone needs the skill to stop their bodies quickly. Use it or lose it, and if you lose it, your life is at risk of falling and injuries.

If you have questions, please reach out to cory@caruthersfitness.com.