Road to NBNI Blogs, 2015: Kate Hall, Week 4
Kate Hall's Road to NBNI Blogs, Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3
Photo: Team Kate Hall (family, coach) from last year's NBN.
Hello once again! I hope everyone is doing well!
This past week I have been preparing for New Balance Nationals! After New Englands, I took a little bit of time off just to let my body recover; however, this week I’m getting a few good workouts in before Nationals. Speaking of workouts, I’m going to tell everyone a little about my trainer and how much he has helped me and changed my life.
Five and a half years ago, I pulled my hamstring during the 100m dash at the state track meet when I was thirteen years old. Because I pulled my hamstring, I missed the state record by about one tenth of a second and also had to pull out of the long jump and 200m. I was obviously pretty disappointed. Being a thirteen year old, I didn’t understand the importance of rehab and strengthening a pulled hamstring, and just wanted to rest for the summer.
Finally my parents convinced me to go to physical therapy for a short while. Every session I had the same lady helping me, although on my final session, a man named Chris Pribish helped me instead. He not only seemed to be incredibly knowledgeable about how the body works, but he also worked with athletes to make them stronger. I had never really imaged having a personal trainer, but from that one session with Chris, he really made me realize how much he could do for me as a track athlete.
Chris’s workouts and training methods were different than I expected, at first. He started me out with a lot of small stabilizing exercises, which actually were the hardest exercises of them all. Everything was about getting my body to function properly before even thinking about lifting any weights. These corrective exercises were designed for me to re-ingrain movement patterns from when I was a little kid. For example, have you ever noticed how three year olds can squat perfectly? When you’re little, everything is working properly and it’s not until when you get older, and start doing little things that mess up the correct movement patterns, that you realize that things aren’t working properly.
So from this, Chris evaluated me and learned which parts of my body weren’t working the way they should and then began teaching me how to ingrain the right ways once again. This consisted of rolling patterns, crawling, squatting, and much more (all things we did when we were little).
These things are all done in the preseason. Once we get closer to meets, we start lifting a lot of heavy weights to get me nice and strong, while also continuing corrective exercises during warm ups and on easy days. At that point in the season, Chris has a plan for me that goes all the way until Nationals. This plan consists of all the workouts I’ll be doing from week to week, while also giving me just the right amount of rest between practices and meets.
From these workouts during the past five and a half years, I have seen huge improvements in my times and distances not only every year, but also every season. Each season I feel stronger and faster than the last and I owe it all to Chris. Not only that, but I haven’t even been injured since middle school. Chris has become not just a trainer, but also a close friend to me. He attends all of my meets, including the meets all over the country. He proves to me every single day how dedicated he is to helping me become the best that I can be. Lastly, Chris has inspired and taught me so much that I’m going to be majoring in exercise science at Iowa State. I could never, ever thank him enough for everything he has done to get me where I am today and it’s going to be very hard to say goodbye to Chris in the fall.
Good luck to everyone at NBNI this weekend!
