Reaction and agility training can save you from accidents
- Image via Wikipedia
Here at fight or flight fitness we argue you both need long term endurance ability but also very fast twitch fiber driven ability which includes sprinting but also even more pure reaction ability.
Lindsey Vonn, Olympic gold medal winning skier, credits her new reaction and agility training for preventing a terrible ski crash, as you can see in the following video (at about 48 seconds). She ended up coming second in this race, but if she hadn’t rescued her fall she would have not even finished, and could have been badly injured.
In the wired article she credits her new additional agility and reaction training to preventing this accident and another one.
…she added a routine of agility exercises like cone drills, knee-high hurdles, and agility ladders, which encompass a horizontal circuit divided like a ladder and you step between the “rungs.” Combined with explosive power workouts, it was designed to boost her reaction times and reflexes to respond to the kinds of minute but important course corrections needed to excel at events like the slalom. As Vonn learned, it can pay off elsewhere
She also thinks her new training program helped in another near crash situation.
Similarly, at a November slalom in Levi, Finland, Vonn made another near-instant course correction that she says saved a crash. She finished sixth, and now says that “I never would have been able to do that” before her training.
So add reaction and agility training to our workout routine. It might not only save you on the slopes (or other x-like-sports) this winter, but who knows when else.
