Specialty training advice

[Urdcr]

Hi Mark.

I play an unknown sport called freestyle footbag (you're no doubt familiar with the brand name hacky sack) and I was hoping you could advise me on adjustments I'd like to make to my training regimen. To start, here's a link to a few minutes of footage from three elite footbag players taken from a casual circle at this year's world championships to give you an idea of what I'm training for.

Footbag is a finesse game, by which I mean the winners and losers are determined almost totally by technical proficiency rather than fitness, as opposed to sports like football or hockey where relative strength and size are huge factors. Fitness in footbag is important mainly for injury prevention and to allow frequent hard training. My experience lists the following priorities for my training:

1) Ankle stability
2) Knee stability
3) Shin splint avoidance
3) Hip ... Not stability exactly, more like integrity. I'm often (and currently) sidelined by hip strains.
4) Lower back stability and flexibility.

I'm about three and a half months into your starting strength program, and I feel like issues 2 and 4 have been well served, and 3 hasn't personally given me much grief in the past year or so, so no worries there. But as I mentioned, I'm currently nursing a hip strain (specifically my right hip flexor is sore, and has actually prevented me from squatting for about two and a half weeks as well), and I wanted your opinion about adding some isolation exercises to my workout. I've been thinking about doing a 4th day on Sundays (on top of my t,t,sat) which includes that crazy hip adduction/abduction machine, calf raises (1), hamstring curls, and weighted hanging leg raises.

Do these seem like appropriate exercises for me to be doing? Will a fourth workout be a major detriment to my regular training? If you have anything to suggest, I'm all ears. The level of play in footbag has exploded over the past decade, and the entire community is hurting for some good cross training advice. Young, fit men are being felled by shin splints so severe as to cause stress fractures. The US champion recently had to take three months off due to a vertebral stress fracture, at 19 years of age!

I'd like to end by thanking you for your wonderful book. I've been plagued by a bum knee since around 2002 and two bum knees since 2005. Well, no more. Proper squats succeeded in a month where countless doctors and months of regular physio had failed.

[Mark Rippetoe]

I shall not stoop to the disparagement of the noble sport of footbag, although I am tempted mightily. Suffice it that I merely observe that soccer players formed the ranks of most hackysackers back in The Day. Your statement that "Young, fit men are being felled by shin splints so severe as to cause stress fractures." just flies in the face of my admittedly limited exposure to the, hmm, activity.

That having been said, it sounds to me like you are a bit overtrained. If this is correct, the fourth workout is out. And as for making it up from machine training, you should know why I might make fun of you for that. Hip flexors are better trained by crossfit-style roman chair situps, knees-to-elbows, L-sits, and L-pullups. The quick external/internal femoral rotation and its attendant lumbar flexion is probably the problem movement, and since this is not terribly normal to human hip function I would expect it to be a continuing source of problems for anyone playing the sport. If you figure out a way to train it, or invent a Hackysack machine, let me know, but this is out of my bailiwick.