Team Doctors Treatment and Training Center
American Fitness Quarterly - October 1989

Volleyball Training Tips from the Elite

By

Dr. James Stoxen D.C.,
Michael Billauer,
Gary Sato, PhD

Volleyball has been a sport which his gained in popularity over the course of the last decade due to the tremendous success of the men's and women's national teams in the 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games. As you know volleyball is a sport of technique therefore the coordinated interaction of the various muscle groups is critical in. the performance of the sport.

Treatment and prevention of musculoskelital injuries demands that the volleyball athlete have a more advanced knowledge of the anatomy involved and its relationship to the technique employed. With the assistance of Men's Olympic Volleyball team members, Pat Power, Steve Timmons, and Karch Kiraly we plan to offer insight as to how these injuries can be avoided through proper strength and conditioning exercises.

The two most common areas of injury from high school to the professional ranks, appears to be overuse of the shoulder and knees. An explanation of the reasons for overuse injuries could be:

 1   Strength unequally distributed about a joint
 2  Inadequate balance of strength in adjacent joint structures causing tendon or joint irritation
 3  Improper technique
 4  Inadequate conditioning
 5  Others

In this article we will discuss the training methods utilized by these athletes to prevent, rehabilitate and maintain the strength and conditioning necessary to meet the demands of elite level volleyball training and competition. lnjuries of the shoulder are frequent among players due to the tremendous stress it absorb during the serve and the spike. With these high velocity movements comes the necessity to maintain balance of strength. The most common injury eminates from the rotator cuff region namely the supraspinatus, infraspinatus and the teres minor muscle and tendon regions.

These muscles are principle decelerators of the arm motion during the spike and the serve motions. For the sake of simplicity lets break the serve and spike into phases, the acceleration phase, dominated by the actions of the triceps pectoralis and the latisimus dorsiand others, and the deceleration phase consisting of action supplied by the external rotators of the cuff, the infraspinatus teres minor, and the supraspinatus which checks downward translation. The supraspinatus tendon is also in a precarious position during the overhead arm swing motion of the serve and spike.

If the musculature which checks the movement of the acceleration of the arm swing are not trained adequately to absorb the associate forces, there will be a fatigue of the tissue and a resultant breakdown of tile individual muscle and connective tissue fibers. A predisposition to rotator cuff teat, leading to pain and instability