The Tricking Corner

Often times, athletes of all sports commonly associate "locking out the knee" with pain, injury, and death(JK but at the same time not). Coaches in volleyball, football, or any other ball will often tell you that in order to keep an athletic stance, it is necessary to maintain a slight bend in the knees. They will tell you to bend your knees to absorb impact and to prevent hyperextension. Some may even tell you not to lock out your knees when stretching. These all have some merit(except the last one; Do your stretching!!), but they create a stigma around the idea of locking out your knees as a whole. Locking out your knees isn't inherently bad at all. In fact, it may be the one thing you're missing! What is "Knee Extention"? The knee is a Hinge joint. This means it moves on only one axis. In the knee's case, it means flexion and extension. In simple terms, knee flexion is when you bend your knee, and knee extension is when you lock out your knee. Knee fl...

One of the graces of Tricking is the fact that we embrace non-linear movement. We have multiple axes that we have names for and that we use regularly. At the end of the day, what matters is what we do and not what we call it, but to better understand twists, flips, and their respective axes, we must understand X, Y, and Z. What is X, Y, Z? X, Y, and Z are the three spatial dimensions that are used to describe area. Generally, this means size(ex. 5 x 5 x 5 cm) or coordinates(ex. X:39 Y:40 Z:-39). Each of these dimensions has its own respective axis. We can use these axes to describe motion and human kinetics. X Movement on the X-axis is described forward and back movement. In tricking, this means Frontflips and Backflips. Although gruesome, imagine shoving a pole through the sides of your hips so that the pole is sticking out to your left and right side. Now, imagine that the pole is stuck in place and you're spinning around that pole.   That is the X-axis. You can also think of mov...