By: Luis Garcia ATC/LAT,CSCS
Intro
When it comes to optimizing athletic performance, explosion, and power output mastering your landing mechanics is vital. Aside from enhancing performance, learning to properly land with the right biomechanics plays a key role in injury prevention, stability, proper muscle function, and motor control not only in athletes but for general population as well. I personally use a ton of different exercises / techniques to teach proper landing mechanics, in this article I’m going to show you a few of my top methods to do so.
Majority of injuries happen on the declaration of a movement, so when we land and don’t properly absorb force, the stress from an improper deceleration can make something in our body give out (injury). Now wether that injury is muscle, tendon, or ligament related depends on the individual and on the position of their body when landing. Landing mechanics is all about how you land and how it looks. If your landing looks “weird”, “unbalanced”, “unstable”, theres usually an issue with your mechanics. As an athlete your muscles must have prerequisite strength in declaration, to absorb force properly.
Phases of the jump/landing
*Prep* *load* *jump* *land*
Above you see some ideal positions of what landing/jumping mechanics should look like, there are a few key points I want to go over about this.
Form
We should be able to draw a straight line down from you shoulders to your toes crossing through the hips and the knees. So shoulders and hips lined up, hips and knees lined up, knees directly over the toes. If you look at the picture on the left, this is "knee valgus" a less than ideal position that is going to lead to energy leaks and in excessive amounts can predispose athletes to ACL tears in the knees.
Shock absorption
As far as shock absorption goes we want to have something that called triple flexion. A simultaneous flexion of the ankles, knees, and hips/torso.This will distribute force through your body, putting less stress on the joints. We want to have a "soft" landing, so a cue I like to use is "make as little noise as possible with your landing", to do so you must master triple flexion! As soon as my feet hit the ground my weight should shift from my toes to my mid/back foot, my knees should bend, and my torso should slightly come forward *Hip Flexion* (Pic top of page)
Proper weight distribution
We see a problem here with athletes who have muscle imbalances, favor a “strong side”, or just haven’t practiced their landing mechanics all that much. As we land we want to transition the weight from our toes to the mid/back of the foot. We don’t want to see an athlete favoring one side, so weight evenly on both legs. An athlete favoring one side will usually have a dip in their hip as they land. lastly trunk control, our trunk should be flexed forward and not to any specific side. (video below)
Below are 3 of my favorite and most used exercises for teaching proper landing mechanics.
*Drop landings*
*unilateral drop landings*
*unilateral lateral drop landings*
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