With tummies full of festive goodies that may or may not be conducive to your Season 2015 fitness, here are some great off-season fitness tips from Manic Munchkin 🙂

Anyone who has previous conditions, injuries etc should consult their doctor first before performing any of the exercises and if they want alternatives they can message me 🙂 Also, if there are some who attend a gym, I would encourage them to get staff to help with finding neutral spine and squat range.

Tip #1
Do excises that improve stability, we can be super strong but have poor stability, and this is when injuries happen.
Example exercises:

Calf raises; these are important to promote strength around the lower leg area which will improve stability at the knee joint as well as at the ankle. Muscles are designed to absorb a certain amount of force, the stronger we can get the muscles around the joints, the less likely we are to injure those joints.

Glute Bridges:

Use with or without a weight, on a bench or on the ground.

From ground: lift hips to ceiling, keeping neutral spine (keeping natural curvature of spine, ask someone at gym or home to check, or use pole to measure 3 points of contact head, upper back and glutes, all 3 must be touching pole)

On bench: feet in squat position with upper back on bench, keep hips inline with shoulders and head, not letting them go lower or higher. If you want to use weight, rest on lower part of the stomach.

Powerlifters squat:
This squat is where knees do not go past toes. The movement is like sitting in a chair. It’s very important to know your squat range, which is to the point just before your lower back begins to curve under your hip. Do it in front of a mirror and watch your lower back, I also encourage people to watch themselves when doing other exercises in front of a mirror if training alone.

Tip #2
Do exercises that are relevant to Derby. Maybe you guys have heard of this thing called ‘Functional Movement’, to sum it up, part of it is doing exercises that are relevant to your day to day activity and training your body to perform movements you do on a regular basis.

Example of exercises that would be relevant are:

Bicycle kicks or Russian Oblique Twists: We twist our torsos a lot in Derby, these exercises strengthen the muscles involved because the exercises involve similar movement patterns.

Step ups; It’s very important in derby to have a good derby stance, this includes ensuring our knees track over our toes, by this I mean going in the same direction as our toes. Women’s knees have a tendency to cave inwards because of our wide set hips, so it’s even more important for us girls!
This exercise doesn’t necessarily need weights, it’s more to get into practice ensuring your knees are following your toes, if you can try doing them without touching the ground and if needed, use something to balance yourself with.
Our body is built so every joint is inline for maximum force exertion, when they’re not inline we lose the ability to exert that maximum force.

Tip #3

Cardio! I can hear the groans from here but cardio is incredibly important . Most people have probably heard of interval training, and most are probably too scared to try it. Interval training doesn’t have to be intense, it literally just means intervals between exercise. You could do a 1 minute walk then do a slower walk for 2 minutes. Intervals can be performed on a bike, rowing machine, in a pool or even on your skates! Interval training is very relevant to how derby is played, players have to get used to giving it their all for 2 minutes then slowing down to almost nothing. Please begin with caution, do not start with a high intensity, or even medium. Before starting interval training, ensure you have 6 months previous training in some form of cardio or other fitness experience e.g derby training or gym training.

Tip #4

Always keep neutral spine when training and do not compromise your safety just to push yourself a little further!