Some Movements before Today's MTB Adventure
Movement Preparation is a vital piece of the performance puzzle. Here at MPF we program a more in depth warm up prior to an individual's workout. Each movement prep sequence addresses that person's specific needs for their upcoming workout, allowing the body to move in a more connected manner. In turn, this increases the overall benefit and training response of the intended workout.
This is imperative if an individual is dealing with current or past injuries and imbalances, sits or is in a static work environment for much of each day, performs repetitive movements that can lead to overuse injuries, etc. These are just a few scenarios.
In my case, I have a couple of herniated discs in both my cervical (neck) and lumbar area (low back), as well as some compression within my t-spine. These injuries happened during the course of my life. They range from fallen out of trees when I was young, old wrestling and football injuries, snowboarding fails, as well as some bad mountain bike crashes just to name a few. Given my history of injuries, it's imperative for me to always work on stability, mobility and strength. A proper warm up is vital.
In this video I show a glimpse of my specific movement preparation prior to this particular mountain bike ride.
For today’s ride, our plan was to visit some very old trails and woods roads near Ringwood Manor and within Tranquility Ridge County Park. We also wanted to avoid the Power Line descent. We had about 3 hours of ride time to explore. Temps were well into the 90º's and humidity was very high.
The day prior I had tried to ride up the Power Lines from Sloatsburg Road, just before the entrance to the Cooper Union Trail (yellow). I would always see this ridiculous climb each time I entered into the yellow trail and thought, that's rideable... It wasn't, at least for me that day. It had some very steep pitches and tons of small loose rocks that layered much of the climb.
I knew that it would be a tricky descent so we wanted to avoid it. After a couple of wrong turns and our ride time running out, we found ourselves atop of this descent. The GoPro did an okay job of capturing the steepness of it. It was very hot and humid out, making it difficult to keep the lens clean.