Early in 2019 I had the pleasure of working with Lizzi Smith at the WeckMethod Lab for the first time.
If you are unfamiliar with Lizzi Smith Story. She is a Paralympic Silver Medalist and World Champion Swimmer from Muncie, Indiana. Lizzi was born without her left forearm due to a condition while within the womb. Nevertheless being born into a rather large family with 7 other siblings and incredibly supportive parents. Lizzi was encouraged to take on any and all activities that inspired her. From there stemmed her passion for swimming and leads us to her now preparing for this year's 2020 Tokyo Paralympic games.
Lizzi's came to the lab after receiving her very first prosthetic just months prior. Her father Keith is always supportive and always looking for an edge in Lizzi's training caught wind of our RMT® Club and Non Dominant Side Training® emphasis. Right away we set out to fasten the club to her prosthetic to start reaping some of the benefits of Non-Dominant Side Training®. Our first go was rudimentary but effective and got us thinking of a way for them to create an attachment that would wield a club directly to the prosthetic. This was exciting but would have us waiting to explore the club further on her next trip out to San Diego.
This may have been a blessing in disguise, because as we further explored the current attachments she had for the prosthetic . I became aware of a free spinning attachment that immediately had my mind racing on exploring the with RMT® Rope. We regularly talk about how the RMT® Rope allows us to borrow information from our Dominant Side of the body and send that information through the cordage of the rope to our Non-Dominant side of the body. For Lizzi this was essentially like downloading perfect information at lightning speed to the left side of her body. Which at this point had years of imbalance and only a few months of exploration with the new prosthetic. Lizzi is a high level athlete and watching her assimilate the four basic rope patterns into her Non Dominant Side was if nothing else Inspiring and even more so a testament to the power of addressing non dominant behavior.
Lizzi and I have had the pleasure of working together 3 times now over the course of 2019 and early 2020. In our latest training we had the opportunity to take what we have been working on directly to the pool and perform analysis on specific strokes. Here we could see how the Non Dominant behavior directly created imbalance with the body and ultimately her performance within the water. This gave us the information we needed to directly inform the type of work Lizzi would perform during her land based training to further improve athletic performance.
As it stands now we eagerly await to see Lizzi's performance in Tokyo and dearly hope that her busy training schedule allows for her return here to the lab for one last visit before she takes on the Paralympics.
