Z-Health Essentials Day 2

Today we started out with the R- Neural Integration warm up. This is just a big long way of saying joint mobility that opens up he joints and makes the brain think about how it's moving the body. The true importance of this type of work may not seem readily apparent until you imagine a race car. It doesn't matter how much time and money you put into the car if you don't have a good driver for it. Today we spent the majority of the class working on two main ways of training the brain and nervous system, through balance and vision.

I was really quite surprised to see how quickly altering a person's vision changes their movement patterns. At one point in the class the instructor put a pair of goggles on one of the students that blurred the students vision. The student immediately became stiff and apprehensive, drawing his limbs in closer to his body. His movement patterns very closely resembled those of a lot of my volleyball kids. When I tried the goggles on, my sense of balance kicked into overdrive to in an effort to compensate for my vision. I grew up playing outside and continue to spend a deal of time "playing.". This has helped to develop my sense of balance. A lot of my volleyball kids don't have near as much of a background in this area. This simple exercise with the goggles helped me to understand why some of them might have difficulties with timing and with learning certain skills. At the beginning of practice on Monday I'll do some vision work with them as well as some balance work from the course. In addition to this, they'll also go through the motions of some of the skills with their eyes closed. Hopefully this will help them to get a better feeling for bow their bodies move in space.

One quick way I incorporated this into my own training was by doing a pistol with my eyes closed. This proved to just as challenging as using a bosu ball, not to mention $135 cheaper and taking up a lot less space.