prevent injury

How Do You Prevent Injury?

Follow these suggestions to decrease the chances of injury:
Maintain good posture: Incorrect posture can easily lead to injuries. If you start to lose your posture, stop the exercise and reposition yourself.

Listen to your body: If anything hurts while you're training, stop doing the exercise.

Always warm up: The muscle groups should be warm before every strength training session.
Always stretch: It is important to finish your exercises with stretching.

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tennis

Recognizing An Early Weight Transfer During Groundstrokes

When performing groundstrokes, many beginners make the mistake of prematurely transferring their weight. They step forward too soon, losing all the power from their shift of body weight, and end up hitting the ball using arm-swing only. The result is a weak, poorly directed shot and the misperception that it takes a lot of strength to hit a tennis ball.

Recognizing an Early Weight Transfer
Here's a way to recognize an early weight transfer. If your back heel leaves the ground before they make contact with the ball, you've stepped forward too soon.

Better Technique
You will hit groundstrokes easier and harder if you step into the ball during the swing. Time your weight shift so you contact the ball just as you step from your back foot to the front foot.

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swimming

Use Explosive Breathing For Better Buoyancy

Every beginning swim class has a "sinker" or two - students whose body density is greater than that of the water, and who swim low in the water or even sink if they stop moving.

Air is less dense than water. As a result, your students are more buoyant when there's air in their lungs. This suggests that your sinkers can actually improve their buoyancy by changing their breathing pattern.

Use Explosive Breathing for Better Buoyancy

To become more buoyant, your sinkers should use "explosive breathing" as opposed to "trickle breathing." In other words, rather than releasing air gradually, they should hold their breath as long as possible and blow out explosively.

This breathing pattern keeps air in the lungs for most of each stroke, which keeps them higher in the water.

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basket ball

Run, Stop & Shoot Drill For Unhurried Shots

When players are moving quickly before taking a shot (i.e. while dribbling, getting open for a pass,etc.), they often continue to hurry while they shoot. This reduces accuracy.Instead, they need a change in mental set when they're shooting. They should switch mentally from "rush" to "relax" so they can square up to the basket and aim their shot. Here's a drill that teaches this skill.

Setting Up

Line up your players at the top of the key, facing the basket. Place a ball on the floor in any shooting area.

The Drill

1. When you say "go," the first player runs hard to the ball, picks it up, then takes a relaxed, measured shot.
2. The player gets his/her own rebound, returns the ball to its position under the basket, yells "go" to the next player and returns to the line.
3. The drill continues with each player taking a turn.

Run, Catch, Shoot Variation

For a change of pace, have the shooters sprint to the key, catch a pass, and then go up for an unhurried shot.

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baseball

Dropping The Rear Shoulder: A Common Hitting Error
According to Jerry Kindall, coach of the U. of Arizona baseball team, dropping the rear shoulder at the start of the swing is one of the three most common batting errors.

This mistake results in poor visual contact with the ball-especially during the final, critical 20 feet to the plate. It also produces a weak, upward swing path.

Why? Because dropping the back shoulder causes the front shoulder to move upwards and away from the pitch. It also lifts the head, producing a loss of focus on the ball. Finally, the back elbow drops with the shoulder, resulting in a weak, pushing, upward swing path.

How to Correct

If your batters are having this problem, instruct them to lift their back elbow a little higher while waiting for the pitch. And tell them to keep their front shoulder pointed towards the incoming ball as long as possible before starting their swing.
These corrections will help them to keep their shoulders level and their head motionless for better eye-focus on the ball.

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