A good athletic stance can enhance an athlete’s reaction time, explosiveness, strength, core strength and your ability to make plays, also helps the athlete with injury prevention. No matter the sport a good athletic stance should be part of the basic fundamentals taught to all youth athletes. A defensive basketball player, a lineman in football, a wrestler at the starting whistle, a soccer player moving laterally in defense and even a power cleaner in the starting position. All functional movement should start with a good, strong athletic stance. The simple The foundation of all sports—the stance—is often times overlooked because of the ever increasing natural athleticism of athletes of this era. In an athletic era where natural gifts supersede technique, many coaches and athletes have forgotten to focus on this piece of the puzzle that can help garner continued success and possibly reduce the chance of injury occurrence. By placing the athlete in a proper starting position, the athlete has the ability to move more efficiently with less effort.
All athletes will not look the same in a good stance because of the different body types & limb functionality in sports. At H&R Next Level Sports training our goal is to train athlete’s to understand the basic postural mechanics of a good athletic position so that there will be an efficient transfer to strength training, running exercises, movement mechanics, and sport-specific position drills.
Here are the basic as written in an article on Rivals.com
Keys to an athletic stance, starting from head to toe:
• Head - Eyes level and looking straight ahead, face is relaxed.
• Shoulders - Slightly squeeze your shoulder blades together without shrugging. Bend just enough at the waste so that your shoulders are slightly forward and aligned over the knees.
• Arms and hands - In front of body in a relaxed position. Elbows are not bent more than 90 degrees.
• Low Back - Slightly arched back. Avoid the extremes: the "sway back" (you're not a guerilla, are you?) and "hunch back" (stop looking 80 years old!)
• Knees - Bent comfortably and pointed straight ahead, 45 degrees of knee bend allows for 360 degrees of movement. Knees are in line with your hips and can be slightly inside toes.
• Ankles - Ankles are bent (45 degrees between lower leg and foot) to match the 45 degrees of knee bend.
• Feet - Shoulder width apart and weight on balls of feet (pad between the big toe and the medial arch). Have a little bit of daylight under your heels.
Things to keep an eye on:
• Avoid tensing muscles. Stay relaxed, keep breathing, and be prepared to move. If you tensing muscles, those muscles must relax before you can use them to move. This slows down reaction time considerably!
• Keep weight on the balls of your feet. Too much on the toes and you can only go forward, too much on the heels and you will pop up when you start moving.
• Avoid being "knock-kneed" (knees inside hips and turned inward) or "bow-legged" (knees outside hips and turned outward). Keeping the knee over the foot to slightly inside the foot, ensures the best position to move; especially laterally.
Once you improve your stance then your all around game in all sports will improve. You will feel more comfortable and relaxed as an athlete. It’s the little things like a good stance that many of today’s coaches and athletes are over looking in favor of just being the most athletic, or fastest, or quickest, or strongest athlete and just letting the do what comes natural to be successful. The little things like a good athletic stance, knee drive, arm swing and other techniques that’s skilled teams and great coaches teach to all of there athletes. Technique must be coached and learned in all sports in a consistent way and it starts with a good athletic stance. Look at your team and athletes this week and weekend in there sport to see what there athletic stance looks like.