balance

Take a look around at your gym, weight room, or training facility. Do you see a squat rack? Good. What about a bench, free weights, or maybe plyometric boxes? Awesome. Maybe if you’re one of the fortunate ones, you see some resistance bands, medicine balls, or kettlebells? Terrific. This means your place for training is like 100% of the population. This can be a good thing. You have strength equipment, speed equipment, and power equipment. This sounds like it covers all the aspects in being a great athlete. However, the majority of training programs lack the single critical component in creating the ELITE athlete. This is of course being prepared for every chaotic movement involved in sports. Continue reading →

Last post I introduced our new “Khaos” line of products and the first product in that line, the TAP Khaos Ball. As a refresher, the Oates Specialties Khaos line consists of uneven and/or unstable training products that challenge athletes and transform otherwise routine or ordinary workouts. Today, I want to introduce to you the next product in Khaos line: the TAP Khaos Pivoter. The Pivoter is a training and conditioning tool based on the Asymmetrical Bar Training concept (“ABT”). ABT helps to train an athlete’s balance while simultaneously improving core strength and rotational power. ABT uses a bar with resistance on only one end to create an unbalanced load, which can be used in any number of exercises. The uneven load naturally forces an athlete’s body to rotate/move toward the loaded side. This requires the athlete to engage muscles throughout the shoulders, arms, core, and legs to help maintain a “normal” or “neutral” position. Continue reading →

As many of our customers have learned over the years, Oates Specialties takes pride in finding new exceptional conditioning products to add to our TAP product line. This year is no different as we have added a number of new exciting products such as the TAP Rotational Core Builder, TAP Bell Clubs, TAP Eagle Claw Grip Strength Trainer, and Valslides to name a few. In addition, those of you who have read my past blogs and follow pitching coach Ron Wolforth know how much emphasis we put on an athlete’s ability to be stable while performing the movements of his or her sport. Continue reading →

I wanted to take the opportunity in this post to bring to your attention a newly added section on the Oates Specialties home page. The new tab located on the left hand side of the screen is titled “Stability and Balance.” For those of you who have read some of my previous blogs you already know how critical stability and balance is to athletes. Because of the growing emphasis placed on those types of exercises we wanted to create a section with just those products that you can pick from to help increase you or your athletes’ stability and balance. Continue reading →

In my last blog I discussed the stability/mobility kinetic chain that exists within an athlete’s body. As I mentioned before, the joints in a body alternate between being inherently in need of stability or mobility, as each mobile joint needs a stable one in order to move effectively. But having this information is just the first step, as you now need to know how to improve the stability and mobility throughout your body. There are a number of ways to improve the stability and mobility throughout your body and I’m going to mention a few ways which I have utilized in the past to help improve my lower half, including some which I have recently seen athletes at the Texas Baseball Ranch include into their workouts. Continue reading →