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Muscle Activation Techniques (MAT) specialist Brad Carlson plies his trade on the muscles in one athlete's lower back while the next victim looks on.
Brad Carlson Day
Every successful team has keys to their success. A well-conceived in-season training regimen is the most obvious key to any team's success. Most successful teams have an off-season training program to lay the foundation for what they do in-season. Many teams add a strength-training element. Many more teams make large and regular investments in nurturing team chemistry.
At The Classical Academy one of the elements of success has been the assistance of Brad Carlson. Brad is a specialist in identifying muscles that have checked out of a state of willing cooperation and getting those muscles back to their regular level of function. Today, the day prior to our departure for Portland, was our day to have him work his magic.
Brad describes Muscle Activation Techniques as the art of identifying and correcting isolated muscle weaknesses/dysfunctions. To accomplish that, he takes the athlete through a series of performance tests to identify key muscles that are hesitant or delayed in their proper function. As those muscles are identified, treatment begins. Treatment consists of going to the origin, or insertion point, of the affected muscle and applying deep tissue palpation to restore the muscle's capacity to fire properly.
The clinical description is a little sanitized, however. "Deep tissue palpation" is mostly a euphemism for inflicting acute pain by applying pressure at the point of origin to awaken and restore the muscle to its normal function. Sometimes, that's about as much fun as driving metal slivers under your fingernails.
Skeptical? I, too, used to fancy it sounded like the disreputable first cousin of voodoo.
The trouble with my original assessment, though, was that almost all of the compomised athletes who made appointments with Brad and took his recommended day off from training after the treatment came back, almost immediately, to high levels of performance.
I confess to freqent attempts at manipulating the timing of those appointments so that the day off falls on a recovery day instead of a quality day 
. Sometimes Brad and I have a little give-and-take over how much time an athlete should take off following treatment. Brad's a good negotiator--sometimes I lose. He has made me become a better listener. The results speak for themselves.
I have learned that IT band syndrome isn't just an inevitable consequence of accumulating miles for an unfortunate percentage of the running population. I have learned that, through restoration of proper muscle function, an athlete well down the road to a debilitating case of IT band syndrome can still enjoy a spectacular end to his or her season.
It will surprise no distance coach to learn that we, now sixteen-and-a-half weeks into our formal cross country season, have a pretty fair collection of aches and pains going on among our team members. Nothing that would keep anyone from suiting up and toeing the line on Saturday, but things that could impede their performance. Some cases are more advanced than others, of course.
All eight of our girls making the trip to Portland took turns on the table. The "tune-ups" they dropped in for ranged from five minutes to a half an hour, mostly closer to five minutes. Thorough sessions require appointments and typcially run about an hour.
For more than half of the eight, they came in unable to identify any particular weaknesses or dysfunctions. Except in two or three cases, all that each young woman could identify was some soreness. Yet soreness is clue enough for Brad to start his search. Soreness is typically indicative of an overtaxed compensating muscle--the muscle that takes over when the regular muscle checks out of the business of contracting on demand.
Each of the eight left, however, left recognizing their muscular response and effective range of motion had been enhanced. One of the eight will spend some time tonight in some additional treatment modalities. All eight should be able to race at maximum, or near-maximum, function on Saturday.
That's why Brad is a part of our formula for success.