Marilia’s Powerlifting Blog

Strength sports are still a lot about pushing the athlete through the stress curve. As a competitive powerlifter and researcher, I have been looking at this subject from inside and out. From the inside, there are two distinct approaches to achieving the “special maximum strength” observed in certain meets: the extreme stress-driven performance, with a lot of screaming, hitting and other means of enhancing alertness and stress response, and the focused approach. The latter is less common.

With the help of a more experienced and accomplished lifter, I came to adopt the focused approach about a year and a half ago. We called it the “white chair thing”. Basically, I spent the moments preceding my turn to lift facing the back of an available white plastic chair, emptying my mind. It is hard to claim this is the one or chief reason why my performance leaped to another level, I broke a couple of national and continental records and visibly improved. There were other factors involved.

After this event, however, I started systematically searching for evidence in the literature. Besides a very old article from decades ago showing competent Olympic lifters performed mental rehearsal of their lifts in opposition to less competent ones, there was very little published material. The search brought me to martial arts techniques. That, however, is a whole different realm of encoded knowledge. I wanted to understand the concept and application of QIGONG training to strength tasks.

The only way to do it, it seemed to me, was to learn through practice. I spent one year (from November 2007 to October 2008) learning qigong in a tai-chi-chuan program. During this one year, I was frustrated. My performance was irregular, mediocre at competitions and my injuries were a real impediment.

About three weeks after I quit tai-chi-chuan, however, I started applying some qigong techniques in weight training. The results impressed me. I want to create a self-experiment on this and record my results. I haven’t been doing this the way I want.

I think I will create one entry just for exercise and progress log.

Let’s see where I get from here. All input is welcome.

Again it seems that between science pull and market push, innovation, in this case, came from the latter: try typing “prehab” or “prehabilitation” in any scientific search tool. You get very few results (to be precise, 7 at Pubmed). But Google it and you get 45.200 results.
A number of prehabilitation clinics have already taken advantage of the generalized perception among coaches and athletes that prevention is the key to performance. They must rely on their own clinical experience and feedback from patients, since Academia hasn’t provided a critical mass of empirical evidence yet.
I started doing prehab too late: technically, it was not prehab. It was just a more systematic approach to rehab, since my injuries had evolved to a point that I could no longer train or compete without excruciating pain. I don’t have to add that it has been a mediocre competitive year.
Prehab is about a special type of physical therapy intervention: monitoring the athlete throughout the competitive season. Early signs of injury are checked, a periodized program of injury prevention is developed according to the competition calendar and exercises and treatments are adjusted according to the athelete’s response.
I think I can only say that I am engaged in prehab now. I still feel my epicondylitis in both elbows, but it is improving. Not fast, but improving. We have slowly added new preventive practices to my weekly and daily routine and, if I stick to it, I am pretty sure I will get better.
All in all, prehab requires discipline from the athlete. Not easy, but a sufficient amount of love and commitment to your sport should do the trick.
Check this:
http://www.prehab.com/