Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Wednesday, July 28, 2004 Off balanceElite orienteers don't have good balance. That was the finding of a study some years ago. In the study, orienteers balanced on one of those balance boards (a platform with a round bottom that you can use to improve you balance and leg strength). People off the street apparently do better at this test than elite orienteers.A guy named Christer Johansson described the study at a training camp I was at years ago. Johansson was the doctor for the Swedish team. He wrote a bit about the study in his book (the translated title would be "The Elite Runner: Elite Orienteering from a Sports Medicine Perspective"). He wrote: Our study showed that our national team orienteers were extremely bad at standing on a balance board. When we tried to measure objectively we found that many of the national team orienteers couldn't stand on one leg for one minute on an even floor (on a pressure plate that measures th size of the swaying that occurs when you try to balance on one leg) without having to use the other leg as a support. It probably reflects our measurement method being irrelevant for measuring functional foot/ankle stability for an orienteer rather than our national team orienteers having bad balance. Johansson did some interesting research on orienteering injuries and developed ways for the orienteers to avoid injuries and recover from injuries quicker. In his book he notes that turned ankles once required missing training for 1-4 weeks. But, they'd managed to reduce the training missed to a few days. Without getting in to all of the stuff he said or wrote, the things the runners were doing differently (that Johansson felt explained the improvements) included running in the terrain year round; treating their own injuries as soon as possible (he wanted runners to carry bandages when they ran in the forest); and taping their ankles in specific conditions, but not all the time. I was reminded of Johansson's presentation and book when I read some discussion of ankle injuries on Attackpoint. posted by Michael | 8:31 PM 
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