When I first started skating, it was the skating that I was doing to get myself fit and active. I’m sure it’s the same for 90% of derby players. Women’s involvement in sport in the UK is pretty dire. For example, at school, I had a whole year where the only curriculum exercise was going ten pin bowling. If I hadn’t found skateboarding I reckon I’d be massively overweight and unhealthy by the time I reached my twenties.

I did have a few years between quitting skateboarding and taking up Roller Derby. My main hobby during this time was baking cupcakes and an occasional trip to the gym. Needless to say I wasn’t in the best shape of my life, and for me, finding any motivation at the gym was just too hard to maintain.

So, I started skating, and it was fun, and sweaty, and a workout of brand new muscles. Until it wasn’t anymore. With any sport, no matter how hard you push yourself, if your time on the track is limited to 2-3 sessions a week your muscles will start to get comfortable. When training moves towards strategy and packwork and 40 people turn up to every session, it starts to get challenging to push your physical fitness as well as your technique and gameplay muscles.

That’s where crosstraining comes in. I never imagined myself making the switch from skating to get fit to getting fit to skate, but once you start feeling the benefits on the track it can become pretty addictive. I recall about a year ago someone referring to me as an ‘Athlete’. Now this was cool, but back then there is NO WAY I could make my body do the kinds of things that I would consider Athletic. In my opinion I was ok at rollerskating and slightly fitter than the average person that doesn’t do any sport and maybe goes to the gym a few times a week. There was also a lot more talk about rollerderby being considered a sport rather than a spectacle. If I wanted to stand by my opinion that rollerderby should be considered a sport then I needed to put my money where my mouth was and start doing some of the things that I consider to be athletic training. I needed to take fitness a bit more seriously. So I started regularly doing plyometric workouts, strength training, interval training, cycling the 10 miles each way to work. I got off my ass.

I thought that the major benefits would have come from building up my quad muscles, afterall, we place so much emphasis on having strong thighs and all remember those first few training sessions and how the new derby stance was more of a ‘world of burning pain’. Turns out that the biggest difference came from strong core muscles however. Skaters that could floor me with powerful hits started to have trouble moving me out of position on the track. Now I’d tell everyone to work on their core muscles, and I’ll tell you to work twice as hard if you are a little on the short and small side like me.

The majority of my fitness training is actually done off skates now. This has major benefits for warding off that evil thing called Injury that haunts all serious athletes. The biggest flaw in only training for rollerderby by playing rollerderby is how much muscle imbalances court injuries.

   “ A muscle imbalance of greater than 10% can increase the risk of injury by 20 times.”

Holey Moley! That’s a lot! Think about all of those hours fighting the momentum of the track in one direction and how that is creating muscle imbalance in your body. The great thing about cross training is that it is usually easier to notice if one side is weaker than the other and you can spend a little bit longer building up the flexibility and strength on your less-strong side.

In a couple of days I’ll post a few tests that you can do to check whether your muscles are balanced or not so you can see for yourself. But right now I’m off to do some cross training at the climbing wall, because not all crosstraining has to be boring.