Hop Down to Single Leg Touchdown to Balance

Hop Down to Single Leg Touchdown to Balance is a fun and effective exercise that strengthens your core muscles, improves coordination, and challenges your balance. Using just your body weight, begin by standing on one leg and hopping down to a single leg touch touchdown. Then, bend the knee and touchdown with your opposite hand while balancing on your single leg. Keep your hips stable and try to maintain your balance throughout the exercise. Increase the difficulty by holding the single leg touchdown for a few seconds before

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Transcript

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This is Brent of the Brookbush Institute,

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with the exercise progression hop-down

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to single leg touch-down to stabilization. This exercise could be

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seen as a progression from the hop-down to stabilization video we did in the

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past. You could look at it as a reactive progression to single leg touchdowns. You

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could also look at is a progression from posterior tibialis reactive activation,

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as we start to progress somebody back towards athletic performance. Now what

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inspired this video is there's been several studies that have come out that

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have shown a decrease in eccentric control, or eccentric hip strength in

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those who have knee pain. So I started thinking about this issue, being somebody

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who's had knee pain right. I'm a basketball player, knee pain and

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basketball unfortunately seem to go hand in hand a little bit. Individuals with

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knee pain get into this fear posture. They get into this strategy of

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trying to stabilize things by keeping an almost locked to knee. Now that doesn't

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really help knee pain at all, it just kind of jams everything up. But on top of

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keeping that knee locked, what ends up happening is they also don't flex with

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the hip, allowing them to use some eccentric glute control to take up some

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of that force when landing. A lot of times this will look like somebody comes

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downstairs and they do one of these things, and land really like hard on an

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almost locked leg. So as we think through this problem, well how can I force

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somebody to start using their glutes, and that's where the single leg touchdown

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came in. Which is almost a deadlift, somewhere between a squat and deadlift.

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Obviously requires a lot of eccentric glute control, and then if we add it to a

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hop down, it becomes this reactive exercise that is actually pretty

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powerful in getting somebody to go back to a more natural or optimal

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stabilization and eccentric control strategy. I'm going to have my friend

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Melissa come out she's going to help me demonstrate this exercise.

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So a couple cues you need right off the bat. She's going to kind of reach out

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with this leg, and I need her to assume the same position we did in posterior

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tibialis reactive activation. Which is foot down, toes up, like she's aiming the

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ball of her foot at the ground; because I want her to land on the reactive portion

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of her foot. That's the portion of her foot just behind the ball of her foot or

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metatarsal heads. As soon as she hits the ground as softly as possible, she's going

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to try to touch this toe with this hand in one smooth motion, and then stand back

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up on that leg and balance. You ready? Okay, and that's pretty good, try not to

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look forward let's try that one more time. Alright so she goes down, she can

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look down at the floor. I want to keep her spine in pretty neutral alignment.

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She can look at her foot, Good, a little softer this time. Let's go straight ninja

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style with the sound. So that that sound is a good indicator of how

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well they're absorbing force, good. Squeeze your glute on the way up,

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stabilize, good. You want to give them one on the other leg so they see both of views,

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nice. You can see immediately she asked to use

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her glute to control all that force, right she starts bending her

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knee, even coming off of knee pain this exercise forces her to adopt a more

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natural position, and pretty quickly people's knee pain will start to reduce.

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Now let's talk a little bit about the height of this step, Melissa is actually a

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pretty good athlete over all righ,t a great athlete overall really. This is

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actually a really high box to start with, half of this would have been just fine.

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Just can you go ahead and show them just just one with the half the box. You just

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need a little bit of force, a little bit of speed, yeah that's it. We're just

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trying to get somebody used to stepping off a curb, stepping down stairs, or of

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course landing from a jump. Now you could progress this and go off a higher step.

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Probably the highest i've seen at this point with good control, is about an

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18-inch step. Anything higher than that I think you're actually getting a little a

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little excessive. We do have to kind of consider what the intensity and the

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number of reps we're going to do, how that's going to impact things like the

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hip, the knee, and possibly the low back on this exercise because we have so much

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forward bending. Now the other progression which gets a little fun, is

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we could progress through planes of motion. So I'm going to have Melissa here

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to demonstrate a frontal plane hop down to single leg touchdown to stabilization,

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and then a transverse plane which she's still learning. She does pretty good on

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the frontal plane.

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All right good, and you're just going to take a little hop over, boom. And you can

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see now she has to stabilize that frontal plane force as well. Let's try

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one more of those, oh wow, good. Use this glute, thrust up, all right. Now let's try

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transverse plane. all right so transverse plane she's still going to be hopping on

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to this leg, she's going to start facing this way, and then end facing this way.

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This one guys be particularly careful with about how much volume you use, how

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many reps times the number of sets. This actual position of flexion with rotation

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is a great way to start irritating somebody's low back a little bit.

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And back up. So there you guys go. Very very powerful technique to help getting

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somebody back to more of a hip stabilization strategy, coming off some

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knee pain, coming off of knee surgery. it's also a great way to teach people

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landing mechanics. If you want to learn how to jump really high, I get asked how

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to increase somebody's vertical all the time, I can tell you the number one thing

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is teach them how to land. I look forward to hearing the results you guys get, what

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type of outcomes you guys get, and what type of regressions you come up with for

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this exercise. I'll talk with you guys soon.

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Hop Down to Single Leg Touchdown to Balance

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Hop Down to Single Leg Touchdown to Balance

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