by Chris Korfist
RPR Level Three: Deep Core, Propulsion, and Rotation
Think of the most graceful athlete imaginable: a ballet dancer. Picture how they move, it’s effortless, almost like their body is lifting itself. It looks as if they’re gliding. Nothing moves out of their frame. It is as if their body is inside a cylinder as they glide along. That is the Deep Core, starting in the toes and lifting all the way up to the jaw. When they go to leap, there is no great counter movement. It is a short explosion. And they seem to hang in the air forever. That is Propulsion. When they go to turn, rotate and spin, it is as if their entire body is locked in a cylinder and the slightest movement completely changes the whole spin. People will say well, our athletes aren’t ballet dancers. But maybe they should be. Isn’t a great sprinter equally graceful? How about the athlete that changes direction without a single flinch in a wrong direction. That is Rotation.
This is why I came up with Level 3. Level 1 is incredibly effective in the basic movement patterns and will have a profound effect on your athletes. Level 2 identifies how to optimize those basic movement patterns and find solutions to problems that you've never been able to solve. With Level 3, I wanted to create something that gave us the grace of an elite athlete.
Deep Core
Deep Core is the concept that there is a group of muscles that pull and hold your body in an upright position and keep your mass as centrally displaced as possible. I call this concept “zipping up" your body. We know from Level 1 that the lateral chain (glute med and lat) prevents your body's mass from falling outside the hip (think of runners who cross over their body in their gait). I call this "staying in your cylinder" which is a basic concept for all of Level 3. While Level 1 does a great job of helping runners get rid of the crossover, Deep Core can help even more by making sure the muscles that run deep within your system can zip you up.
If an athlete can use muscles that lift their body, even those that can only lift the body by a slight amount, a slight amount more, they will reduce the mass displaced when they land. This not only helps keep their body in the cylinder, but also allows their mass to fall forward, allowing them to use more momentum and less energy to run. It’s Physics 101, the conservation of energy. I’ve found this occurs because without the “zipping up”, an athlete cannot get to the instep of their foot which reduces their forward propulsion and causes poor arm action. An athlete who isn’t “zipped up” will push off the outside of their foot, their arm will swing, compensating for that diagonal push, and the sum of all movement will point towards the target. An engineer might use the phrase “heat loss due to friction.” Can this “unzipped” athlete be successful? Yes. Is it optimal? No. Can we do something about it? YES.
Propulsion
Propulsion comes from the simple idea that our limbs are not pistons. There’s a lot of research out there that talks about vertical and horizontal forces, but that research generally doesn’t take into account all of the things that have to happen in the body to allow that force to occur. That’s not a failure of research, but it's a failure on the part of us as coaches for adopting a rigid reductionist view, when the evidence of its limitations is around us all the time. Breaking it down to the simplest level, if our limbs are pistons, the architecture of our muscles and tendons doesn’t make any sense. There needs to be something that’s creating systemic tension in order for the body to propel itself. If it weren’t the case, bipedal robots with their legs like pistons could run as fast as humans.
We aren’t robots. We transfer energy through tendons and muscles that wind like springs through the body. Some of those winding actions can look like pistons, but it’s much more sophisticated than that. The hip and ankle can wind the entire leg. The ankle rocker rolls forward, the bodyweight shifts to the instep and the ankle is wound, meanwhile the pelvis tilts forward, winding the hip. Then the synergist muscles like sartorius both abduct the thigh at the hip and medially rotate it at the knee. This final action from a small muscle creates tension through the thigh and links the wound ankle and wound hip and the entire limb is ready to explode. None of those segments are pistons. Each of them is a winding - or rotational - action.
In addition to the springs that make intuitive sense like the arms and legs and the linking between the upper and lower halves of the body, the neck plays an important role in propulsion as well. From a survival standpoint, protecting the neck is one of our primary duties and stability here will determine how much power the nervous system will deliver to the rest of the body. In Level 1, we give the neck isometric strength in flexion. In Level 3, we give it strength in rotation with flexion and extension.
Rotation
In Level 1, we teach the Rotation wake up drill to optimize rotational strength and the Anti-Rotation test to demonstrate the isometric strength we can produce to anchor any type of rotational movement. In Level 3, we go a few steps farther. The demands of sport are dynamic and multi-planar, not isometric. An athlete needs to turn while running and keep going in a straight line. They need to turn and reach for a ball while running, then catch the ball and continue running. Some athletes can innately demonstrate this at an incredibly high level - those are your athletes with great game speed. What about the athletes you have who can run a great sprint, but slow down as soon as they turn? This will be a game changer for them.
Ever wonder if the quarterback actually overthrew the receiver or if maybe the receiver slowed down a little bit when they turned back for the ball?
More than 30% of field sports are played with the shoulders not square on the hips. We need to make sure our athletes are always fast, no matter what is going on in the game. In Level 3, we give you the tools to make sure your athletes are as fast as they can be.