Jumping Higher, Serving Harder with Derek Epp
About Derek
USports Player of the Year 2022 - Trinity Western University Spartans
Setter
Canadian National Team
AWA and Derek’s History
Worked with him this past season fairly regularly online. We found out he was more of a strong and rigid athlete that lacked rotational capabilities throughout his body. He wanted to improve his serve velocity so we started by unlocking more range through thoracic and shoulder rotation and then giving him some intentions to work through while practicing his serve. This increased his peak velocity by 13km/hour!
This encouraged Derek to commit to the process and he signed up for an overhaul session in Edmonton once the season finished. His goal for the session and our work together this summer is not to leave anything to chance. He wanted to learn about his body’s strengths and limitations, become more resilient, and improve his on court skills other than setting; blocking, serving, and defence. This goal shaped our assessment to focus on his jump (blocking), rotational abilities and shoulder function (serving) and his lower body function (jumping and defence).
Part 1: What We Did
Throughout our initial session in the overhaul we assessed:
Movement Quality - How is his range of motion? How does he perform basic human movements like hanging, crawling, squatting, walking, and jumping? What stabilization strategies and abilities does he use in different positions and movements?
Capacity - How strong is he through a single arm pulling motion? How strong are his legs when loading them one at at time?What is his rotational strength as he rotates his torso to the right and left?
Performance - How powerful is his lower body through broad jump variations?
Our main findings in the initial session
His right ankle doesn’t dorsiflex (bend) as well as the left and this limited range of motion affected the efficiency of his jumping and landing mechanics as well as his power output off of that leg.
His right heel lifts off early in the picture below requiring more effort to be put through his left leg. When we jump off two feet, we want to jump off both feet more equally to produce maximal force propelling us vertically.
His single leg broad jump distance was 10cm lower on his right leg than his left.
As he jumps and lands he rotates his right foot out which creates an inefficiency in his mechanics which can cause a decrease in power potential and increase his risk of injury somewhere throughout the body.
His anterior hips are locked up and he is limited through hip extension.
His right shoulder blade (he’s right handed) lacks stability and wings off his rib cage which translated into his right arm being weaker than his left.
This reduces the range of motion through his right shoulder and opens him up for more risk of shoulder pain. Also this instability through his shoulderblade can affect the pattern he uses as he serves and lead to reduced potential velocities.
He was weaker rotating to his left (which is the way he rotates as he follows through on his serve).
What we found to work in our follow-up session
Right Ankle
We loaded and challenged his right foot/ankle complex through dorsiflexion, trying to create wrinkles in the front of his ankle joint as he stabilizes through it.
This doubled his range of motion through the dorsiflexion (knee to wall) test from 4cm to 8cm in 20 minutes of work. This doesn’t mean it’s changed or fixed for good, but it gives us a good idea of what to do moving forwards.
Not only did his movement quality improve, but the power he was able to produce through his right leg increased. His right leg was now able to jump through a single leg broad jump motion as far as his left leg which means he improved by 10cm. Movement quality doesn’t always enhance performance but in many cases it can be the missing link to improving performance measures like jumping higher and hitting harder.
Anterior Hip
His anterior hip mobility should look a little more like mine below. It doesn’t have to be the same but it has to be more than what showed up in his assessment because his assessment showed a serious lack of hip extension ability.
In our follow-up session we gave him some exercises to encourage the front side of his upper leg to be strong and long!
The below exercises are inspired by our friends at Apiros.
We were able to make some immediate improvements in his range of motion so we decided to stick with similar movements on a daily basis to see if we can lock the changes in. The goal will be for him to look more like my picture above when he tests it out “cold” before he workouts.
Rotational Strength Imbalance
He had a big discrepancy between his strength rotating left vs right and for this I used something I saw Apiros test out when they had an athlete with a similar discrepancy. This was to see what musculature he was using to rotate left vs right.
We found that when Derek rotated to his left (the weaker side) he was recruiting a lot of effort through his right QL (quadratus lumborum, a muscle in the side of the low back). When we found this out he revealed that this area actually woke him up a few nights in the past few weeks from being tight.
We worked on a few awareness exercises to bring more attention to firing his hips as he goes through left rotation vs his right QL.
We kept it slow and ground based to start so that he could start to feel things firing differently.
Just by creating more awareness we re-tested his max strength left and right and he made a 50% increase on the gap between the sides.
Then we added some more challenging rotational exercises with the same awareness and this balanced out his left and right rotational strength.
We are hoping that as we lock in this rotational strength balance we should see an increase in his velocity serving - we may have to address more of the technique in his serve to allow better, stronger movement to translate into better on-court skill but that is the experiment we are running.
Scapular Instability
Already just by changing his rotational firing pattern we found that he went from not being able to do a single arm hang which is an important test for scapular ability, into being able to do 3-4 seconds on each side. To further these changes we are doing a ton of specific hanging, climbing and swinging work. Humans shoulders evolved to hang, swing and climb and the lack of stimulus in these movements devolves the shoulder blade into what we see with Derek’s right one.
Here are a couple of drills we are using to improve his shoulder function - we eventually want to see his right shoulder blade stay on his rib cage, and his single arm hang time continue to improve.
What we are going to do next
Clean up these 4 weak and imbalanced areas.
Translate better movement quality into becoming a better server, defender, and a more explosive athlete.
Decrease rigidity and create more fluidity in his movements.
Look out for part 2 coming soon!
Interested in doing a Tune Up or Overhaul session with us?
