The Carolina Rollergirls love our sponsors! As a way express our appreciation, we’re showing off the Athletic Performance Center (APC) in our Sponsorship Spotlight. Read on to hear about what they do to keep us on track.
Athletic Performance Center helps out the Carolina Rollergirls in a number of ways:
1) As part of Raleigh Ortho, both Raleigh Ortho and Athletic Performance are our sponsors and preferred providers of ortho services.
2) Athletic Performance provides critical after-injury care with physical therapy.
3) Athletic Performance provides team-training opportunities and their staff understands our unique sport.
I’ve had the pleasure of using all three – Raleigh Ortho for surgery and diagnosis, Athletic Performance for physical therapy and attending an Athletic Perfomance workout with my teammates. Obviously my favorite of the three is the workout, because it’s optional! 😉
Of course, no one wants to get hurt. But since roller derby is a full-contact sport, it’s inevitable. The joint services of Raleigh Ortho and Athletic Performance help keep the Carolina Rollergirls on the track as much as possible. I’ve had several broken bones and ligament injuries as well as ongoing IT band syndrome. Raleigh Ortho is there to diagnose my injuries and then Athletic Performance is there to help me work around them. At Physical Therapy at AP, Brian Schiff is usually the person I deal with the most. Brian and I do a lot of single-leg strengthening exercises – squats, leg dips, leg bridges. I’ve made the mistake of thinking that I could do my PT during my lunch break, but Brian always has me working hard enough to sweat through my workout clothes. I often look like a drowned-rat after one of those sessions.
We work even harder at the evening APC workouts. Often led by Jeremy Swafford, we’ll do a series of warm-ups that involve a mixture of jumping, stretching and footwork. Then, we’ll get down the the circuits. Sometimes we flip giant tires, sometimes we race in pairs of two through the circuit training, sometimes we have to race under hurdles. It really depends on what the strength training coaches at APC want us to work on that day. My favorite activity is always the card game. Each suit in the card deck represents an activity. We all line up and the APC coaches will cycle through the cards. For example, let’s say spades is burpees. So if I draw a 7 of spades, I complete 7 burpees and then race to get back in line. Next up is a 10 of hearts – hearts = hitting the big tires with a sledge hammer. I would complete 10 swings on the tire with the sledge hammer and then get back in line. This continues for about 20 minutes and then we move on to another circuit. No matter what we do at APC, the staff is always willing to modify for our multiple injuries, balancing motivation and competition with the health of our bodies.
When you arrive at APC for physical therapy, there are all these individual photos on the walls signed by famous athletes, thanking APC for their help. So many of the Carolina Rollergirls that have used APC’s services that we’d need a photo of the whole league with the caption, “Thank you for keeping us all on the track!”
We love them, but you can “like” them on their facebook page!
Contributed by the lovely and talented Beth Row