April's Beach Volleyball Log

Pro Beach player Angie Akers overcomes personal obstacles

One of the reasons I created Volleyball Voices was so that younger players can learn from the personal stories of experienced professional players.

Angie Akers has a great interactive website that all young indoor and outdoor players should visit. Be sure to visit her "Overcoming Obstacles" link which she retells the story of having to recuperate from leg injuries.

In many cases the hardest part of recuperating from an injury is the mental part. Overcoming the fear of not repeating the injury or regaining the natural normal movement that you had before getting hurt. Check out how Angie endured her experience.

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Grrlathlete Blog

Just checked out the grrlathlete blog.

Great articles and instruction ESPECIALLY for young female athletes wanting to know how to gain strength and endurance by using just their body weight!

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I've surrounded myself with the best five coaches!

As of today , having officially completed my first session of beach volleyball with Dave Sorrells I now officially have five coaches.

One of the best ways to be successful in life is to surround yourself with people who are much smarter than you are. (If anything, it really makes you - feel good about yourself, and it kind of makes you look smart too!) Think of the benefits.

Here is my world class team.

Performance Coach - Alfonso DeRose - Mental, Psychological, Behavioral Performance training

Yoga Coach - Bryan Kess - Flexibility  and Conditioning training

Weights and Conditioning - Jan Gable - Olympic Weight Lifting and Core Plyometric/Agility training

Business - Christopher "CJ" Jones - Business Success and Winning Principles

Volleyball - Dave Sorrells - Beach Volleyball

P.S. With Alfonso, I set several goals to achieve and the only way I could achieve these goals was to  educate myself and get around intelligent people who could teach me what I needed to know. So far so good.

I havent learned so much in such a short amount of time since college...this is awesome. 

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Practice

Been taking Yoga twice a week sometimes three times a week for a month now. I love how it strengthens my body, balances my body, creates a cardio base which is amazing and makes me so much aware of my breathing.

Bryan, my instructor demystifies yoga which I love. He makes it fun and amkes it funny. He says that weightlifting is the masculine part of tiness and that yoga is the feminine side of fitness. Everything in life should be balanced. Too much of one thing or the other and you are ...uneven unbalanced.

What's really amazing is what yoga has done for my knees, hips and shoulders!

Amazzzzing!!!!!! I feel so much stronger. My knees aren't sore and most of all Im gaining my flexibility back which is HUGE! For an ex-dancer to lose her flexibility. Omigod! That is what helped this big girl play defense.

What's really impressive is that Im running. Today I did 41 minutes - a little over 3 miles. Nothing but gratitude my friends. It feels great.

This weekend Joe Bokken has a Queen of the Beach tournament going on at Manhattan Beach. Next weekend Sue Postnikoff has a Queen of the Beach in Hermosa on Sunday. Will play in both. Never played in this format before. will be so much fun.

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Taking a risk...

I took the advice of my performance coach (formerly called life coach but that's misleading) and decided to take a risk... to change some things..a big change in some cases in order to reach the goals I set for myself . That's so I can train on the beach during the winter time. Scary...can I survive?

Last week Alfonso had me start to assess - my weaknesses to see/list the things I had to work on for the next nine months before the next beach season starts. Sometimes it can be very well let's ssay "interesting" for lack of a better word to hold a mirror up to yourself and actually take a look at what things need to be fixed.

You have to look at the Spiritual, Emotional, Physical and Mental parts and see what it is that that's less than 100% and determine what it is you have to do -to get everything up to 100% or over. That whole process sometimes can be painful but it doesn't have to be.

One of the things I want/need to improve is my flexibility. I use to dance - ballet, tap, modern dance, hula. I did it for 17 years all through elementary and high school until I had to decide what I wanted to pursue in college. Dancing is great for flexibility which I havent practiced or anything for the last lotta years.

So today I took my first yoga class. It was fantastic. What was pretty cool was learning that alot of the volleyball "stretches" that we do are a basic part of yoga.

I wasn't that bad! The balancing on one leg movements and down dog stuff and floor work wasnt that bad but anything that had to do with sitting on my knees was. THAT's what I will be working on. Sitting cross legged again, sitting on my calves and improving my knee flexibility will be one of my top priorities for the next nine months.

Flexibility today. Speed and Plyometrics tomorrow.

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