Pro strength coaches have used slide boards for years to improve strength, speed and agility. Now discover world renown strength coach Mike Boyle's two favorite mini slide-board exercises for 'functional sports strength'.
For those of you that may be unfamiliar, the slideboard is a training tool made popular by speedskaters in the 1980's. Speedskaters have been using the slideboard for years to develop specific conditioning and mechanics when ice surfaces were unavailable. However other athletes have been extremely slow in recognizing the value of the slideboard as part of their off-season and preseason training. A large part of the problem has been the production of commercially available slideboards. The advent of commercially available boards provided athletes with an excellent training tool that has been used in some unusual ways. One of the surprising aspects in the development of slideboards was the "invention" of functional exercises that utilized the slideboard as part of the strength program. Exercises like slideboard leg curls and slideboard lunges make use of the slick surface of the board to take good exercises and in my mind make them into great exercises. As a result slideboards were being dragged all over the weightroom or, athletes who wanted to do lateral movement conditioning found themselves waiting for a set of slideboard lunges to be completed so they could condition on the board. The solution was to develop a "Training Board" that was not a lateral movement trainer but, simply a slick surface to exercise on. This Training Board, as Ultraslide has named it, is portable and can be placed in front of a cable column or placed inside the Power Rack. The Training Board allows the benefits of slideboard strength training to now be performed anywhere, in any size facility. In our new facility a Training Board will be placed at each Power Rack so that slideboard lunges can be performed with an Olympic bar in complete safety. My top two slideboard strength exercises are: Slideboard Lunges- all the benefit of walking lunges but no need for a large space. The athlete positions the rear foot on the Training Board and slides back into a lunge position. When the athlete reaches the lunge position he or she pulls up to an upright position again. This is a great exercise because it involves all of the extensors of the lower body in the pushing/ pulling action so vital to speed. Slideboard Leg Curls- similar to a Stability Ball Leg Curl. The athlete begins in a bridge position with the feet and knees together, ankles dorsiflexed and extends out until the rear end almost touches the training board. The athlete must then perform a leg curl without flexing at the hips. The key is that the glutes must act as hip extensors while the hamstrings act as both synergists of hip extension and knee flexors, this a closed chain leg curl that also activates he glutes. The Training board is available from Perform Better. www.performbetter.com