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December 22nd, 202312/22/2023 THE LAST ONE! I’ve finally made it to the last post. I kind of want this post to just be centered around what stood out to me the most during these and what I’ve learned. The way that this project went was not at all how I thought it would go. Yes, I spent lots of time physically working out for this project. But really most of the progress I made was through online research. The week where I thought I wouldn’t learn anything was the week that I learned the most. During the deload week I just though I’m going to sit around so I guess there is nothing that I can learn. But the stuff that I learned about the human body that week was amazing. Like I said before it felt like the more that I researched the less that I understood. Nobody knows a clear cut way. But I know ways that are more effective than others. I’d say the most effective way that I found out during the 12 weeks was very surprising to me. The French Contrast Method was far and above the best workouts for building explosiveness. However, what I found out was that working out was just the start of building explosiveness. Mobility, joint strength, and condition of your body meant just as much. For mobility, it could be anything from a 15-minute yoga video all the way to a full-blown yoga class. For joint strength what I found worked best was isometrics. Rest meant so much because through most of the project, I really couldn’t feel any results but when I finally took the time to let my body just slow down is when I could finally see results. The main takeaway from this is it comes down to consistency just every single day doing what needs to be done.
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Blog post #1112/22/2023 I’m just going to update you on everything as the next one is my last post. I’ve been consistently doing those toe raises for my shins and with the rest from the deload my shins feel so good. I’ve been doing my yoga every single night. Which I never thought I would ever do in my entire life. A couple of nights ago I saw something that definitely made it easier for me to do. My favorite basketball player Steph Curry talked about how he does yoga and it helps him out a lot. Still, it’s definitely one of the least masculine things I’ve ever done. I’ve been doing plyometrics every day which begins to feel very monotonous as in theory, your really just jumping up and down in different ways. But I try to keep in mind that building explosiveness in plyometrics really depends on how high your effort is in each rep. I’ve started my presentation and am putting a lot of work into it but it’s definitely a hard topic to present on. Mainly because there’s just so much background knowledge that goes into each and every point. I’m struggling to find a good way to get around that because I want to make my presentation as interesting as possible and try not to make it sound so boring.
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Blog post #1012/22/2023 The deload really helped. This week during practice I was jumping as high as I’ve ever jumped. It’s not a huge difference but I can definitely tell a difference. This was a really big relief because it means that the stuff that I’ve done so far have actually done things I just was so overworked that I couldn’t reap the benefits. I was right about basketball season though besides doing some plyometrics and mobility work there really isn’t much I can do. I do get a break from basketball from December 20th- January 4th. I’m planning to get a lot of work done in that time frame because that’s before my presentation. I’m planning to have my presentation done on the second of January so probably right at New Year's is when the training part of my project will be over. Really all I’m doing the last bit is getting my presentation started and worked on, doing what I’ve been doing with plyos yoga and lifting on weekends.
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Blog Post #912/22/2023 I really didn’t know what to write about as this was the deload. I just spent the whole time resting and at practice. So I thought that I would talk about some of the stuff I researched and stuff that stuck out to me during this time. The thing that stuck out to me the most was the truth about Ice Baths. The common belief of ice baths is that they are beneficial because when your body is sore if you put cold on them it helps just like when you put an ice pack on a sore spot. What I found out was that that’s not why it’s so beneficial to our human body. Did you know that if you wanted to strip fat off your body for weight loss this is one of the most effective ways to help with that? Now I know what you thinking, “easy way to strip fat off your body” That sounds like every infomercial past 12 a.m. But what happens to your body as you are submerged in cold water is that your brain sends out what is called a cold shock protein. Your body produces 8 different types of cold shock proteins all with different benefits. YB-1 promotes wound healing and helps the body form scar tissue. It also plays a role in the immune response by helping draw immune cells to sites of inflammation. Lin28A/B helps regulate glucose metabolism ( one of the ways it helps with losing fat). RBM3 is one of the most beneficial ones for a deload. What RBM3 does is it helps maintain muscle mass, even when doing absolutely nothing. CIRP does a multitude of things, it helps regulate your circadian rhythm, helps keep muscle mass just like RBM3, and it helps with inflammation. Those are just a few of the cold shock proteins which shows just how beneficial those are.
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Blog Post #812/22/2023 During my last blog post, I talked about how I wasn’t seeing the changes that I wanted to see. It confused me, I had done the research and I had done the physical work but I wasn’t getting results. Even writing this now I’m still confused. I keep thinking is it really just all genetics? But I’m so close to the end of this project that I can’t end it now. I’m gonna go back to square one. I’m going to try what’s called a deload. A deload is basically planned recovery and rest. It’s not just sitting on your couch and binging Netflix movies ( even though that would be great.) It’s actively doing things to restore your body back to 100%. I thought that since I’d been going as hard as I could every day since summer football workouts that maybe this could help. The hardest part about this for me is the whole time I’m going to be doing the deload I’m just going to be thinking that I’m messing up the results by not constantly working. I won’t be able to do a good deload just because of basketball practice and games during the week. But I’ve got a good plan. I’m going to take an ice bath every single day, prioritize my sleep, and drink more water and electrolytes. Last time I talked about my shin splints and how I was going to work on them. They’ve been a little bit better since doing the toe lifts but definitely not back to 100%. I really hope that the deload can help with that as well.
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Blog post #712/22/2023 Basketball season is underway and so far my knees haven’t hurt. Which is a huge win. My knees feel stronger than they ever have. I haven’t been able to do the holding quad extensions at all just because of not being able to get into the gym, but I have been able to do the ATG split squat holds every day and I think those are benefitting me a ton. The only problem right now is my shins. I’ve had shin splints just about every year but lately, these have hurt worse than normal shin splints. Shin splints develop from repeated stress to your shin bone by the pulling and tugging of the muscles and connective tissues in your lower leg. Growing up anytime I’d tell an adult or coach that I had shin splints they’d just tell me to rest. It. But as an athlete in season, you don’t have time to so that never really helped. So I usually would just take some ibuprofen and hope for the best. But my travel basketball coach helped me out a lot. He played college basketball and plays on a minor league team now. He told me to squat against a wall, hold a basketball, and slowly bring my toes up and down over and over. While it hurts extremely bad it works. So I’m definitely going to start doing more of that. I thought that since I had been working on my explosiveness a bunch during the break from football season to basketball season I would be able to tell a difference during the season. But really I haven’t felt any difference if anything I feel like I can’t jump as high as I normally do. This really confuses me as I’m really far into the project and haven’t noticed any changes whatsoever. I’m gonna spend a lot of time thinking about what I’ve liked that I’ve done so far and what I don’t like. I’m going to adjust a lot of my routine.
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Blog post #612/22/2023 During my last post, I talked about the obstacles potentially prohibiting me from reaching my beginning goal and how I was gonna combat them. During this week I spent a lot of time searching online for things to do to not only prevent the knee pain but to fix it if or when it starts. I already had a plan in mind of doing more isometric exercises because not only do you not have to have weights, but you can do them almost anywhere, and get this they are in most explosive training routines. I think that the reason they are in a lot of those is because they help strengthen joints and tendons leading to a stronger more stable base to explode off of. Isometrics are static workouts that have the m muscles contract without a change in length or visible joint movements. I’ve done isometrics before but not to prevent knee pain. I wanted to focus on two specific exercises. The first is holding quad extensions for 3 sets of 30 seconds, but the problem with this is this exercise requires weight. So during my busy basketball schedule, the only time I could do this would be on the weekends. The next exercise is way more accessible. 3 sets of 30 seconds holding an ATG split squat. ATG stands for butt to grass and is one of the best ways to open up mobility. What I’ve realized as I’ve gone through the past couple of blogs is that I haven’t done a good job of talking about the progress I’ve made using the different methods. Partly because I wanted to save it up for the big presentation and partly because I felt like the blog posts needed to center more around what I was going to do and then the presentation for how it went. Last week I talked about mobility and plyometrics as the other two ways I was going to keep up my progress. Well, every night before I go to sleep I do an entire mobility routine. In essence, I do yoga. While it may only be a 15-minute youtube video after a couple days of doing it my body feels really good. It’s too early to tell if it makes you jump higher or run faster but for one thing I don’t feel half as stiff as I used to.
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Blog post #512/21/2023 As basketball season is almost underway I’m excited but also I’m kind of scared because I won’t be able to lift besides weekends. Also during basketball season, it doesn’t matter what I do, I always have terrible knee pain. I’m worried that I will lose almost all of my progress. Basketball practice starts at 5:15 and ends at 7:30 and I have to stay after school so I can’t lift any from after school to then. But the only bright spot is that during basketball I jump an insanely high amount. I need to come up with a plan for all of those problems so I’m not screwed when the season starts. The main problem I wanted to focus on was finding a way to actually get in work so my results weren’t skewed. I definitely need to make sure I take care of my knees since if they're hurting all the time I won’t be able to produce a lot of force off the ground. But with my knees, I wasn’t too worried as I had a good idea of what to do for that. I’ll talk about that in the next blog post. In this blog post, I want to start making my plan for how I’m going to fix the issue of not being able to lift. After thinking about this for a really long time I’m going to focus on three different things. Plyometrics, mobility, and research. At the start of this project, I thought that I was going to spend way more time working out than I was researching. But especially now with the start of basketball season more than ever I’m focusing on research. The one thing that sticks out to me the most when researching is realizing that the more I research the less I feel that I understand the science. There is no one right way to increase explosiveness but there are ways that are far more efficient than others. That’s what I want to find out, what methods are more effective than others.
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1/3 mark11/2/2023 We’re at the one-third mark of the way through the project. I’ve learned a lot and have usually focused on one or two things weekly. I was back to thinking about the French Contrast Method and wanted to experiment with other Methods similar to it. I was researching about it and I found something called the Russian Contrast Method. I was super excited and clicked on the website. Upon reading the first couple sentences I was growing more and more interested. As the website told me it was discovered by the soviets in the 1960s and as everyone knows if it’s from the Motherland Russia it must be something that works. But as I continued on I realized that it was a copy. It was exactly the French Contrast Method but someone was trying to take credit for it. I was sad but also happy that I could identify the French Contrast Method so obviously. During this week I wanted to focus more on learning more instead of doing more as it’s early on in the project. The main reason that I wanted to do this project was because as an athlete I really wanted to be more explosive but I also wanted to work something in the physical training field so I wanted to have a deep understanding of how it worked. I’m not sure what I want to do whether being a trainer or being a physical therapist but this would help me get to either. I’ve been studying this stuff for a while and decided I wanted to test my knowledge. In order to become a physical therapist you have to pass a really difficult test known as the N.P.T.E ( National Physical Therapist Exam). So I went on Google and took a practice exam where it only let me answer a fair amount of questions before making me pay however I got an 80% so that was super encouraging.
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