What’s Deceleration And Why’s It Important?!

Let’s face it, speed kills!

But how fast would you drive with no brakes? *Hint* not very fast. In fact, your body hates that.

You guessed it, we’re talking about deceleration! Let’s dive deep.

Useful Terms

Before we dive in further let’s iron out some definitions.

Speed: the skills and abilities needed to achieve high movement velocities.

Change of Direction (COD): the skills and abilities needed to explosively change movement direction, velocities, or modes.

Agility: the skills and abilities needed to change direction, velocity, or mode in response to a stimulus.

Understanding terms will help us stay on the same page. As we dive deeper into the article, the ability to differentiate between COD and agility actually becomes important!

Training The Brakes

Athletic Performance

OK so we already KNOW that speed kills; yet it’s not enough to be fast in only one direction. If that were so, Usain Bolt would choose whatever sport offered him the most cash, and he’d be the star in that sport.

But we know that’s foolish. Athletes that can move in multiple directions, with the best efficiency, the quickest; will be the best players on the field.

The ability to accelerate and decelerate, then reaccelerate is what gets athletes paid boat loads of loot.

The athletes that can do this, while maintaining the optimal posture and position relative to their sport, are usually the players that make the biggest impact on the field. Obviously, this is specific to certain positions and game plans. For example, Tom Brady isn’t going to rush for +1000 yards. It isn’t in his game plan and he isn’t asked to. However, Lamar Jackson will. So let’s not get caught up in the position specific demands/game plans and all agree that regardless; athletes will always choose to be faster and have better capacity to slow down.

One then must ask the question,

“if we know that the body will self limit our speed by our ability to decelerate, then why don’t we train deceleration?”

Oftentimes, athletes and coaches only focus on concentric muscle actions or acceleration - top speed. Paying no mind to the very thing that gets athletes paid. The brakes.

Josh Henkin of DVRT Training Systems said it best during a conversation with Legendary Strength & Conditioning Coach, Robert Dos Remedios.

“The hips are tri-planar muscles and the hamstrings act as knee decelerators, yet most people train the hips primarily only in the sagittal plane and train the hamstrings to be ‘force producers’.”

So for the uninitiated, this simply means that the overwhelming majority of training programs select exercises that are performed in the sagittal plane (think exercises that can be done in a small closet) with a concentric focus. Further, they never train the hamstrings as decelerators.

So why do we act surprised when training programs are acting more like “injury promotion programs” rather than “injury reduction programs”?!

Force Absorption & Repositioning

The brakes. An athlete’s ability to slow down rapidly. We’ve already established that the athletes that can slow down the fastest, are also the ones who are the fastest on the field/court.

 Why? 

Athletes that have great brakes put themselves in the optimal position to reaccelerate or to change direction.

Why is that? Strength & Conditioning Coach Shawn Myszka says it best

“fast in the break, fast out of the break”.

In fact, Strength & Conditioning Coach Cal Dietz has an awesome image detailing this concept.

The concept presented by Coach Dietz, closing the “V”, illustrates this perfectly. The idea behind “closing the V” is simply, power absorption then exertion. The faster, the better. The steeper or more upright an athlete can get their “V”, the more force they can absorb and then exert. Thus, making motor control, movement efficiency and technical skill better under high degrees of stress during sport. 

Still don’t grasp the importance of having a great set of brakes?

Try this.

Change your view from deceleration being a means to slow down, and view it as a means to control force absorption.

This view point completely changes the game. The more athletes can control their force absorption, the more they can control their force production.

For example, if an athlete has poor “agility” and needs to unexpectedly change direction, (this is literally field/court athletes) and they can not control their body as they slow down, i.e. they take multiple small steps to slow themselves/when they do come to a stop, their body sways like a tree in the wind. This is a tell tale sign that this athlete needs to work on their brakes! Core strength too, may be a limiting factor. In this example, they cannot control the posture and position as they slow down, making the process of reacceleration, slower.

Yet Another Practical Example

Here’s a great example for any who has ever watched a postseason football game. Every year during college bowl season, you’ll see countless players each game go down with some sort of muscle cramp. Why? Conventional wisdom would have you believe that they are dehydrated.

Maybe.

The better part of a week on Bourbon Street tends to do that. However I can assure you that the entire strength & conditioning and athletic training staff will be walking around during each meal preaching “hydrate!”. So maybe it isn’t an electrolyte/hydration problem. Maybe, it’s a CNS problem. Maybe the number of full speed reps during practice have been reduced. Players haven’t been tackling and sprinting full speed for weeks. Essentially they haven’t been training and absorbing force the way they did during fall camp and during the regular season. Then, the moment they need to do it (game day), the muscle gets overloaded and shuts down.

Interesting.

Next time post season football comes around, compare the number of muscle cramps from teams playing in bowl games (extended lay off) vs. FCS/D2/D3 football with no lay off.

Injury Mechanism/Reductions

At this point we’ve already established that before you can effectively exert maximal force, you must be able to absorb it. We can’t state this enough. The overwhelming majority of non contact sports injuries come from being out of position. Any internal force that contributes to an injury, whether that’s an over reliance of the quads to stabilize the knee joint or simply poor work capacity. All are contributing factors that put an athlete out of position. Whether or not that is a tactical issue is irrelevant. What does matter is that when athletes get put into these compromising positions, are they capable of withstanding the ground contact forces that are responsible for injuries.

 **For more on non contact injuries, click here to read our latest blog post on the subject.**

Just like programming for “injury prevention” shouldn’t be just a one day a week thing, rather a critical aspect of the program as a whole. Programming for deceleration is the same, it’s a critical aspect of the program. The principles of producing and absorbing force efficiently and effectively.

When developing athleticism, deceleration appears to be the rate limiting factor. The CNS does not like when the body produces more force than it’s capable of absorbing. When it does, it decreases motor control, decreases movement efficiency and has an increase in breakdown of technical skill.

Before an athlete can effectively absorb force during athletic endeavors, they must first learn to stabilize and organize their joints to create angles that will improve the quality of movement during change of direction. Being able to absorb force is one thing, it’s a whole ‘nother thing to do so during dynamic, athletic movements in a setting where one is unsure of the outcome (agility/sport).

The lines between injury prevention and sports performance should be blurred. The very things that will aid in improving performance on the field/court are the same things that will help create more resilient athletes. 

Again, if it were solely about the ability to just simply produce force, maybe the best place to recruit players would be Venice Beach. But it isn’t. So we won’t.

Sources

Myszka, S. (2013, January). Slam on the BRAKES: Deceleration qualities to optimize. Retrieved February 09, 2021, from https://www.nsca.com/education/videos/slam-on-the-brakes-deceleration-qualities-to-optimize-performance/

Dietz, C., & Peterson, B. (2012). Triphasic training: A systematic approach to elite speed and explosive strength performance. Hudson, WI: Bye Dietz Sport Enterprise.

Dos Remedios, R. (2019). CHAOS 2.0 "Sport Speed". Lecture.

Josh Henkin Interview: Chaos 2.0 Applications to All Populations [Interview by 1188130395 888740378 J. Henkin]. (2019).

https://www.physio-pedia.com/Sport_Injury_Classification#:~:text=Indirect%2FNon%2DContact%20Injury,-An%20indirect%20injury&text=The%20injury%20does%20not%20result,muscle%20strain%20or%20ligament%20sprain)