Bulletproofing Your Lower Body Part 1

Whether you play a sport that emphasizes jumping/landing, linear acceleration/deceleration, or endurance, you can find plenty of tailored training programs. But while the skill component and capacity demands of your activity are unique, there are a lot more commonalities in what your body is required to do from the hips down than many people are willing to admit. 

In preparing athletes to perform in all sports and at every level, I’ve come up with six zones that must be loaded and targeted in your training if you want to become a more resilient athlete. In this first installment of a four-part series, we’ll explore some of the common roots of lower body durability problems and then provide targeted exercises that will help you reduce the risk of acute and chronic issues in all of these zones. 

Building a Firm Foundation

If you’re a basketball or volleyball player, you’re subjecting your lower body to high loads in acute events like leaping, landing, cutting, and changing direction. Or if distance running is your thing, your legs have to absorb smaller forces during each foot strike over a longer period of time. Sports like soccer land somewhere in the middle. The frequency, duration, and loads are different and body types vary, but there’s a major similarity: your load-bearing structures must act as support beams that withstand the demands of your sport. 

Regardless of what you’re preparing to do, you need braces and beams that will hold up while you create and resist force. And according to multiple studies, including one from a team of Danish researchers who noted how collagen synthesis and overall tendon health increases in response to resistance training, the best way to increase the resilience of this scaffolding is by frequently performing load-bearing exercises¹.

The problem is that many athletes’ training fails to reflect this reality. How often have you thought, “I’m going to train today to get my bones, ligaments, and tendons stronger”? I’m guessing never. Instead, what people think about when they go to the gym is developing their muscles or burning calories by getting sweaty. This creates a huge blind spot that omits one of the major benefits of resistance training. Perhaps if you were to reframe the purpose of your workouts, it would make it easier for you to show up and stay consistent during the dog days of your competitive calendar when you’re feeling tired and worn down. 

While upper body injuries occur in every sport, it’s the lower body that’s particularly susceptible in many sports. For example, a study released via Sports Health noted that between 58 and 66 percent of all basketball injuries are to the lower limbs, including traumatic incidents like sprains and overuse ones such as stress fractures and tendinopathy². According to a paper published in The American Journal of Sports Medicine, 41 percent of NFL players sustained a lower extremity injury over the course of an average season³. 

You might think that a non-contact sport would be safer but in fact, 73 percent of female and 62 percent of male runners surveyed by researchers from Wake Forest University sustained at least one lower body injury over the course of two years and 56 percent were injured more than once⁴. Given how high these rates are, we need to find ways to help increase your durability and reduce your chances of getting hurt. And it all starts by building a strong base from the ground up. 

Surviving Spikes in Intensity, Density, Load and Frequency

If you suffer an acute injury or start struggling with a chronic condition like tendinopathy, troubleshooting it tends to lead in a lot of directions that fail to provide an adequate solution. There’s a lot of finger pointing at overtraining, under-recovering, and playing too many games, yet while some athletes fall into these traps, a common culprit often flies under the radar. A well-balanced training regimen will include sufficient opportunity to recover, repair, and reload, but the see-saw shouldn’t be tipped too far in this direction. In fact, too much rest paired with inadequate loading can lead to your tissues becoming slack and even atrophying.  

Something I saw firsthand when I was with the Lakers and continue to encounter with athletes today is that there were three high-danger periods during the year when durability issues surface more often. Typically, people break down when there are spikes in load, frequency, intensity, or density (or all of these together) that their body is unprepared to handle because they haven’t loaded their tissues to the point that they can tolerate such spikes. 

The first inflection point occurs during pre-season camp, when coaches often hold two-a-day sessions and push their players’ conditioning to the limit. If you make it through camp unscathed, it’s probably because you worked hard in the offseason and readied your body for the rigors it was about to be exposed to. But unfortunately, this alone doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get through the rest of the season without injury. 

The second spike occurs when the competitive season commences. Even the best training plan is only a simulation of game time, and when that first whistle blows, the demands on your body will inevitably go up. Unfortunately, this is precisely when a lot of athletes back off their resistance training. This might be because they believe that their lower body is being taxed enough by their sport itself, or that they’re feeling weary from playing hard. So they dramatically cut back their resistance work or stop it altogether. The trouble is that this stage of the season is the time that your body needs to be at its most durable because you're asking so much of it. 

The players who continually improve throughout a season are those who refuse to take their foot off the gas. Sure, they’re as tired after a long practice, a race, or an overtime game as everyone else, but they understand the need to keep going into the gym and putting in the work. Think of your physical resilience as a bucket with a couple of small holes in the bottom. Even if you filled it up with diligent daily training during the offseason, over the course of the year, it’s going to slowly drain away, so you need to keep topping it off. 

Suppose you make it through the regular season without getting hurt. Great! Before you give yourself too much kudos, realize that the third danger zone is just around the corner. When your team makes the playoffs, the intensity of each contest will go up, you might have to play at a high level throughout several series, and you’ll have to contend with the rigors of travel and back-to-back games. Or if you’re a track athlete who makes it to regional, state, or national meets, you might have to perform in a heat, semi-final, and final. Again, the spike in intensity, density, and frequency will put your lower body’s durability to the test. Continuing to keep your load capacity high with regular and targeted resistance training is the best way to pass. 

A Durability Roadmap

Recognizing that you’re going to be faced with at least two of these three spikes during your upcoming season, you need to put a plan in place to successfully get through them unharmed. To help you do so, I’m going to spend the rest of this article series explaining the six areas of your lower body that bear the greatest burden, and some of the common issues that athletes encounter with each. I'll also investigate what type of mechanical loading each zone responds best to and guide you through exercises that mimic the movement patterns you’ll be performing in your sport. The goal is that when you hit the road, court, or field, your lower body will be ready to handle whatever your coaches and opponents throw at you. 

Check back soon for the next three parts in this series, starting with how you can improve the resilience of your foot and ankle complex in part two. 

1. M Kjaer et al, “From Mechanical Loading to Collagen Synthesis, Structural Changes and Function in Human Tendon,” The Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, August 2009, available online at https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19706001/.
2. Jeffrey B. Taylor et al, “Prevention of Lower Extremity Injuries in Basketball,” Sports Health, September 2015, available online at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4547118.
3. Christina D. Mack, Richard W. Kent, and Michael J. Coughlin, “Incidence of Lower Extremity Injury in the National Football League: 2015 to 2018,” The American Journal of Sports Medicine, June 2, 2020, available online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/033546520922547.
4. Stephen P. Messier et al, “A 2-Year Prospective Cohort Study of Overuse Running Injuries: The Runners and Injury Longitudinal Study (TRAILS),” The American Journal of Sports Medicine, May 23, 2018, available online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0363546518773755.

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