On your toes...blah, blah blah

[giancarlo]

I am organizing a survey; how many of you have heard the term "stay on your toes all the time"? Well, I have and it has for sure caused some injuries. I want to draw your attention on one aspect in particular: the ready hop on the baseline. Looking at the Stroke Archive and thousands of HighSpeed clips of Fedi and Co., I have noticed something. As they touch down from the Ready-Hop, the whole lenght of the foot is contacting the ground. Where as I thought that it's better to not let the heal touch the ground, "on your toes", that is the mantra. Well, I can tell you from painful experince that taking this to the extrem is painful and counter productive. It puts a lot of stress on your knee and all the ligaments and tendons to push-off from this "on your toes" position.
Why are we all thaught to use your big muscles to push off in plyometrics. Use your gluts! And then we are taught to be on your toes all the time?
That being said, if you are moving latteraly, then you need to be on the balls of your feet, that at least I have seen on all the clips on this site.

I would be interested to know if some of you have had similar problems with injuries from pushing-off after the ready-hop.

Thanks,
gc

[lukman41985]

Giancarlo,
That is such a great observation. Whenever I'm told to be on my toes, I notice no increase in the quality of my movement but a serious increase in the pain I feel in my arches. It really hurts! I wonderif you'reonto something. And yes, looking at the pros play, they don't constantly stay on their toes. Great stuff!

[jhm36]

Maybe this could be a new article for the "Myth of the..." series. Good observation. Something new to be learned from the slow-motion clips on the site.

[vmiller]

I always felt like split stepping onto the balls of my feet has dramatically improved my movement, but I've also been susceptible to knee pain and tight calves (although Active Isolated Stretching has been helping that a great deal).

If I understand the split step correctly, it's supposed to add explosion to your first step through a stretch-shorten cycle (elastic energy) of the calves, which is not possible if your weight is on your heels. And it seems to me that using the glutes for an explosive reaction out of the split step would be slow and inefficient. But that is based on my very limited knowledge of physiology.

Here's another thought. Maybe when you see the pros' heels touching the ground, maybe they are just letting their calves stretch more but still have the majority of their weight on the balls of their feet.

Interesting topic, I'm curious to hear more.

Vin