At Sandbox Fitness & Therapy, we are privileged in that we train many talented athletes in our studio. Their athletic development is one of our top priorities when training.

Hockey, swimming, basketball, volleyball, we see all kinds of up and coming, as well as nationally ranked, athletes in our space. Each has taught us more than the last.

Based on these experiences, we believe there are four pillars essential to any athletic development program: structural balance, core bracing, hormonal profiling, and “selective volume training.”

Let’s break them down.

Structural balance

When looking at athletic development, we have to remember that bodies are flexible and symmetrical in design. However, sports are filled with repetitive asymmetrical movements that pull our bodies away from this intention. When a body is inflexible or asymmetrical, our risk for poor nerve signalling, decreased muscle firing, and injury increases. It is possible to be stronger on the left side than the right, dominant in push-based motions instead of pull-based motions (or vice versa), and inflexible in a way that throws off overall structural balance in more ways than one.

Luckily, all of our personal trainers are equipped to identify musculoskeletal imbalances. They are experienced in assessing muscle compensations, asymmetries and inflexibility in ways that allow them to design personalized programs to improve your game and prevent injury.

Core Bracing

Our athletic development also focuses on the ability to generate core pressure.

Have you ever seen an athlete ready to make an explosive movement (like a baseball player about to hit the ball)? You’ll notice their cheeks fill with air and they might physically look ready to explode. Athletes do this because they want to create pressure in their core.

Bracing your core is the single most significant mechanism in your ability to generate power. The pelvic floor muscles, spinal erectors, rectus abdominals, three layers of oblique muscles, and the diaphragm, are all involved in building a ton of pressure that significantly increases your ability to generate power. This is the reason why, despite the disadvantage of their size, heavier athletes are still capable of extremely explosive movements.

Hormonal Profiling

The personal trainers at Sandbox Fitness understand how to develop a program that manipulates nutrition and lifestyle. Their goal is to work with your hormones, as a way to accelerate muscle building.

An athlete’s diet must be sensitive to their androgen (male/female) hormone balance. It also needs to consider the connection between insulin and human growth hormone, as well as consider the role of the stress hormone, Cortisol, and its impact in athletic performance.

We believe managing diet and stress is the bridge that can take any athlete to the next level.

Selective Volume Training

By combining the concepts in our third pillar with selective volume training, many of our novice lifters will see a 40lb increase in muscle within their first year training. Our personal record? 65lbs.

Part of our success comes from using what we call the “30% rule.” This rule takes advantage of the large maintenance zone in strength training. Most lifters agree, that even if they took months off from the gym, it wouldn’t take them long to get back to where they were. Why? Because once you’ve built muscle, it’s easy to maintain. In most cases, you can drop your weekly volume by 30% and still maintain strength.

When you selectively drop the frequency for certain muscles you can focus on supercharging others. If this still isn’t entirely clear, check out point #4 from our blog “4 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Have Hired Me 5 years Ago” or drop us a line.

All of this to say:

By combining and concentrating on our four pillars, we create programs that effectively increase muscle mass, strength, and the ability to generate power. All factors necessary for top level athletes.

To learn more about our approach to training, therapy or nutrition, follow us on Instagram @sandboxoakville