LaRon Landry's Leg Things
Posted by Matt Terl on August 1, 2010 – 1:29 pm
That’s the back of LaRon Landry‘s legs at practice today. From across the field, those thick black lines looked like some serious new ink — not that far-fetched, given that Landry is already pretty well tattooed — but up close it became clear that it was actually some sort of tape, growing up his calf from his sock like a clinging vine.
Which was helpful as far as it went, but didn’t really give me any clue WHY Landry was wearing it. So after practice ended, I asked him.
Landry was shocked to hear that we had even considered the possibility that they were calf tattoos (“Oh, hell no,” he said), but wasn’t able to be very descriptive beyond that.
“Really and truly, I don’t know,” he said. “You’d have to ask the trainers. I’ve been cramping up, so that’s supposed to be the thing that solves it. It’s not [a] style, nothing like that.” (He’s also not worried about bizarre tan lines. “I’m Honduran and black,” he said. “I take a good tan.”
Not exactly informative, but it did at least tell me who to ask.
“It’s kinesio tape,” assistant athletic trainer Elliott Jermyn told me. (Specifically, it’s the Calf & Arch Spider from Spider Tech.) “It helps to support the musculature, gives feedback to the brain so that the correct muscles are working. But the biggest thing we use it for is to give the person an inherent sense of support to the muscles.”
It also seemed worth asking how Landry had come to be wearing the thing seemingly without a clue as to what it was for. “We were just looking for something different,” said Jermyn. “He had some calf cramping, so we used that. All it is is another modality, another thing to use.”
So far, it’s working. “We’ve used them a lot with hamstrings and calfs,” Jermyn said, “and of the people that we’ve used them on, a significant majority have seen some improvement.”
Two other vaguely relevant pieces of information came out of my conversation with Jermyn:
1) They players who wear the tape actually don’t seem to get weird tan lines, presumably because they’re not in the sun long enough, and
2) I probably should have recognized the kinesio tape from the jump: it’s what Olympic beach volleyball player Kerri Walsh was wearing at the 2008 Olympic Games. Can’t imagine why I didn’t make that connection.
Tags: LaRon Landry, training camp 2010
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