Has anyone read the book 'Athletic Body in Balance' by Gray Cook? I just started reading it - pretty unique way of looking at the way we all train. The author is a physical therapist. I recently became one of his clients and decided to read his book so I'd know why he had me doing squats and toe-touches to improve my swim, bike, and run. Gray's idea is that to improve sport-specific training (the tip of the pyramid), we may need to go back and reinforce the base of the pyramid with basic movement and stability exercise. He provides a few easy tests in the book that you can use to evaluate how well you learned basic movement patterns(the theory is that you need to walk a mile correctly before you even think about running a mile) , and if they may have been thrown out of balance by an injury, or like me, by a leg-length discrepancy.

The author has credentials and experience to back what he says. His text is very detailed with lots of photos so you're not guessing what he's trying to describe. The book is written just as you'd expect it to be after bing around Gray for a short time - he takes however long it takes to be sure you fully understand why and what he's doing to you to fix something that's not balanced. I'll keep reading and see how the rest of the book goes.

Let me know if any of you have read it and what you think of the book...

http://www.amazon.com/...s=books&n=507846

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Daren Marceau
USAT & USAC Certified Coach