All the way back in 2011, I wrote up a detailed article about the New Balance Minimus, a shoe that had just been released and really caught my attention as the best option in a sea of minimalist sneakers that had flooded the market. That review - alongside my work with professional baseball players - actually led to a consulting deal with New Balance, and it's been a great partnership.
One of the biggest initiatives as part of that collaborative relationship was to find ways to continually improve the Minimus. Over the past six years, Cressey Sports Performance's staff and athletes have provided regular feedback to New Balance to fine-tune the designs - and early last year, they released Version 6, which has been extremely popular. And, last spring, I was psyched to learn that New Balance wanted to pair with us to release a Cressey Sports Performance themed Minimus, the Minimus 20v6 Cressey Trainer.
We've spent the last year fine-tuning the design, and we're excited to announce that it's now available for sale:
This is a very limited edition shoe; only about 500 pairs were produced. With that in mind, if you'd like to pick up a pair, don't delay! You can check them out at the following links:
Back in 2011, Posner et al. published a descriptive study called “Epidemiology of Major League Baseball Injuries”. The researchers reviewed all the injuries reported in MLB from 2002 to 2008 and classified them based on anatomical region. As expected, there was a lot of disabled list time attributed to injuries to shoulders, elbows, hamstrings, low backs, hands, and wrists – and a host of other maladies.
Interestingly, “illness” accounted for 1.1% of all “injuries.” No big deal, right? Players get the flu, food poisoning, and the occasional migraine, so this is actually surprisingly low.
Actually, it’s a very misleading number. You see, as the study authors point out in their “methods” section, “We utilized data only for those injuries that resulted in a player being placed on the disabled list.”
In other words, “illness” was only counted if it landed a player on the 15-day disabled list (now the 10-day IL). I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been sick enough to miss 15 days at work. Even when I got sick as a kid, I was usually back in school within two days because I got sick of watching the same episode of Sportscenter 18 times per day.
Before I digress too much, let me get to my point:
[bctt tweet="Illness is actually remarkably underreported in professional sports."]
Just because a guy is sick doesn’t mean he goes on the disabled list. As an example, take A’s pitcher Sonny Gray’s food poisoning incident in 2015, where he missed a start in the middle of the summer. In 2015, as one of the best pitchers in baseball, Gray was 14-7 with a 2.73 ERA. In the 31 starts he made, he put up a 3.7 WAR (wins above replacement) number, which equates to a WAR of 0.12 per start. According to Fangraphs, each WAR was worth $7.7 million in 2015 – so Gray’s food poisoning cost the team $924,000 – but definitely didn’t count against any disabled list time. Additionally, he was scratched from his opening day start in 2016 for the same reason – and it still wasn’t included in the man games lost total.
Moreover, just because a guy is sick doesn’t mean he even misses a game. I’ve heard plenty of stories of MLB guys praying to the porcelain gods between innings – and games where an entire team gets ravaged by the flu, but still has to go out and play.
What’s the take-home point? The individuals who manage to not get sick are the ones who make better progress over the long haul. Avoiding those 3-4 periods of sickness each year is on par with avoiding tweaking your lower back and missing a month in the gym.
[bctt tweet="The goal is consistency, and injury/sickness are big roadblocks to a consistent training effect."]
Here’s where I’ll toot my own horn a little bit. My wife and I have twin daughters who were born in November of 2014, and a third daughter who arrived in March of 2019. I’ve rarely been sick since they were born. And, this is with co-owning two gyms in two states on top of my normal writing, consulting, speaking responsibilities, and MLB responsibilities, which includes quite a bit of travel. Staying healthy while managing a life’s craziness has somehow become right in my wheelhouse. With that in mind, I think you can break down your ability to stay healthy into three big categories:
1. Sleep Quality
I came across this Tweet a few months ago, and it became one of my all-time favorites:
Go 3 days without your favorite thing. Then go 3 days without sleep. It turns out sleep is actually your favorite thing.
When I get sick, it's usually when I'm really pushing my luck on sleep deprivation and trying to make up for it with extra caffeine consumption. Doing so always saps your immunity in the long run.
Most sleep trackers aren't particularly accurate, but they can give you a good glimpse into when you get into bed and when you wake up. And, when the gap between those two is greater than seven hours, it has a massive positive impact on how I’ve felt in the gym. Normally, my training is terrible in December and January when our busiest seasons in the gym are upon us. This year, I felt strong – and without any aches and pains. Sleep tracking - no matter how basic it may be - can have a dramatic impact on your immunity and, in turn, your performance.
2. Overall Stress
"Stress" means something different to everyone. As an example, I could work 18-hour days for weeks on end without feeling stressed, yet if you ask me to stand on the 4th floor of a building and look over the edge, my cortisol levels would be off the charts. I'm terrified of heights, but not long hours. Other folks are the exact opposite.
One thing we can all agree on, though, is that training is a big stressor - regardless of whether it's higher volume endurance training or higher intensity weight training. If you want to stay healthy, you have to fluctuating that training stress so that you remain in overload and overreach mode without slipping into true overtraining scenarios. I cover this in much more detail in my e-book, The Art of the Deload.
3. Nutritional practices.
A discussion of proper nutrition and supplementation habits to optimize immunity has been the topic of entire books, so I won't even attempt to do the topic justice in a matter of a few sentences (although this article from over a decade ago tested the waters in that regard: Invincible Immunity).
I can speak to personal experience when I say that I feel the best when I hydrate sufficiently, get in enough total calories, and eat plenty of healthy fats and vegetables. I'm also a huge advocate of AG1 (formerly Athletic Greens), which I take religiously every single day. I use it instead of a multivitamin, and also like the fact that it includes some digestive enzymes and probiotics for gut health. Full disclosure: they're actually a podcast sponsor of ours and I invested in the company, but only because I love the product. If you head to https://www.drinkag1.com/cressey, you’ll receive a free 10-pack of AG1 travel packets with your first order.
It's not rocket science, but that's because it doesn't have to be complex. Getting sick is about your ability to fend off stress to your system. Two of these factors - sleep quality and nutrition - are about warding off the stress. The third factor is about managing the amount of stress actually imposed to the system. Critically examine these three broad realms if you want to find ways to stay healthy!
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We're only about a week out from pitchers and catchers reporting, so things are about to quiet down at Cressey Sports Performance for the offseason. I've got lots of new content prepared for the next few months, but for now, here's some good reading material from around the web.
Lindsay Berra on MLB Network on Corey Kluber's Offseason Workouts - Lindsay wrote up a great article at MLB.com last week, and this week, there was a follow-up interview on MLB Network. Here it is:
The Surprising Way Jet Lag Impacts Major League Baseball Performance - Sleep deprivation has a significant impact on performance, and jet lag is a big culprit in professional baseball. This article sums up some research on the subject. West Coast teams, in particular, really need to stay on top of optimizing sleep environments and opportunities for their guys.
Forget the Athletes; I Want to Coach the Everyday Joes - This is an excellent guest post from new Cressey Sports Performance coach Frank Duffy for Pete Dupuis' site. CSP might be best known for our work with baseball players, but Frank writes about why we love our general fitness clients, too.
Top Tweet of the Week
I have many college coaches as friends. None of them prefer to deal w/parents over kids in recruiting process. Write your own emails.
Earlier this week, a crew from MLB.com visited Cressey Sports Performance in Massachusetts for a feature on former Cy Young winner Corey Kluber's offseason training.
It's time for the January edition of Random Thoughts on Sports Performance Training. Before I get to it, though, just a friendly reminder that today is also the last day of the introductory $75 off sale on Cressey Sports Performance Innovations. Don't miss out on this chance to get our popular resource at a great price using the coupon code APRIL2020. You can learn more HERE.
Since my presentation is "Scapular Control: Implications for Health and High Performance," I thought I'd take an upper extremity approach to this month's cues.
1. If you want to relax the neck, talk or exhale.
One of the biggest mistakes I see athletes make when they're doing upper body work is aggressively recruiting the muscles surrounding the neck. In particular, we know that a hypertonic sternocleidomastoid (SCM) and scalenes can be implicated in not only neck pain, but also headaches and thoracic outlet syndrome.
In most cases, simply telling an athlete to relax or repositioning their head/neck will get the job done. However, another strategy you can employ is to have them exhale through the exertion phase, or simply talk during the set. Both the scalenes and SCM are accessory muscles of inhalation and this forces them to relax a bit so that you can build tension where you really want it.
2. When it comes to scapular control, nothing beats kinesthetic awareness coaching cues.
As I've written at length in the past, I'm a big believer in categorizing all athletes by their dominant learning styles: visual, kinesthetic, and auditory.
Visual learners can watch you demonstrate an exercise, and then go right to it.
Auditory learners can simply hear you say a cue, and then pick up the desired movement or position.
Kinesthetic learners seem to do best when they're actually put in a position to appreciate what it feels like, and then they can crush it.
My experience with teaching scapular positioning has been that option #3 - actually putting someone in the position you want - is the quickest and easiest way to teach someone about scapular positioning. This is likely because:
a. The scapula is a unique bone with some unique movements (upward/downward rotation, anterior/posterior tilt) that aren't familiar to most people
b. You're always wearing a shirt when demonstrating drills, which makes it harder to see these subtle movements as they occur.
When in doubt, put a shoulder blade in the position you desire and then ask an individual to hold it and own it.
3. Uncontrolled end ranges are bad for the scapulothoracic joint, just like every other joint.
Here's something to consider...
We know that if you repeatedly flex and extend the spine to its end-ranges, you'll eventually wind up in trouble - whether it's a herniated disc, stress fracture, or some other pathology.
We also know that if you repeatedly hyperextend an elbow, you'll eventually wind up with loose bodies in the joint, early osteoarthritis, or a torn ulnar collateral ligament.
The point is that it's important to have sufficient range of motion - and stability in that ROM - but not excessive ROM. Hanging out at any end range probably isn't a good idea.
Interestingly, though, we overlook the fact that the scapulothoracic joint - the interaction of the shoulder blade with the rib cage - is subject to these rules. In particular, one issue that sometimes emerges is an excessive "military posture" of scapular adduction (toward the midline) and depression when folks are cued "down and back" without understanding what it really means.
These athletes often get neck/upper back flare-ups when they do a lot of deadlifting, carries, or even too much horizontal pulling. The shoulder blades are so far pulled back that it becomes a faulty stabilization strategy instead of a strong base from which to perform.
4. A PVC dowel is a super affordable way to do a lot of great things for your upper body work.
I was looking at a program I wrote for one of our pro guys yesterday, and realized that we used the PVC dowel for three different exercises in a single training day. That's as much as barbells and dumbbells - but you can buy the piece of PVC for around $1. You won't find a piece of training equipment that offers that kind of bang for your buck - and this realization made me think back to this video from a few years ago. These options are really just the tip of the iceberg, too:
Have a great Sunday - and don't forget about the CSP Innovations sale that ends tonight! Just enter coupon code APRIL2020 at www.CSPInnovations.com.
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Today's guest article comes from Cressey Sports Performance coach Tony Bonvechio. Tony is also one of the contributors to the new Cressey Sports Performance Innovations resource, which is on sale for $50 off through this Sunday at midnight. Enjoy! -EC
I wouldn’t break the Internet if I told you that we don’t use the barbell bench press to train baseball players at Cressey Sports Performance.
As a powerlifter, I love the bench press. It’s a solid choice for general fitness folks, too. But by now, it’s widely accepted in the baseball world that the reward of getting really strong on the bench press is outweighed by the risk the exercise poses to the shoulders and elbows. And if you dig a little deeper, there’s some more specific reasoning why the bench press doesn’t show up in most programs at CSP.
1. It Exacerbates Negative Adaptations to Throwing
When you throw a baseball for a living, it’s likely that a handful of things will happen, including:
So basically, you get a shoulder that’s loose in the front and tight in the back, along with an elbow that doesn’t straighten all the way. But what happens at the torso and lower body?
• Decreased scapular upward rotation
• Decreased soft tissue quality (lats, rotator cuff, pec major and minor, among others)
• Abnormal spinal curvature (i.e. lumber and/or thoracic hyperextension)
• Decreased hip rotation (most often loss of hip internal rotation)
Now we have scaps and hips that don’t move well, gritty tissue surrounding the shoulder, and a spine that’s stuck in extension. This paints a grim picture and it’s not as bad as it sounds, but what does bench pressing do to help this situation?
The answer? Nothing. In fact, it feeds into many of these dysfunctions.
Coach someone into a proper bench press setup and what do you get? Global spinal extension, scapular retraction and depression, humeral motion WITHOUT scap motion, and heavy loads placed on the pecs, delts, lats and triceps. The stresses are eerily similar to throwing, albeit at slower speeds and heavier loads.
We spend a lot of time each offseason trying to restore movement quality in our baseball players, which means staying away from many of these gross extension patterns and exercises that lock the scaps in place. You can’t justify strength gains at the expense of movement quality. As Gray Cook says, don’t build strength on top of dysfunction.
2. It’s Not Speed- or Plane-Specific
In order for a movement to transfer to sport, it needs to have some degree of specificity. We have to look at the plane in which the movement occurs (sagittal, frontal or transverse) and where the movement falls on the force-velocity curve.
Granted, simply getting stronger has direct transfer to sport without being specific. Otherwise, strength coaches wouldn’t have jobs. However, research shows us that power development is highly plane-specific and that traditional sagittal plane power exercises (jumps, sprints, cleans, snatches, etc.) have limited transfer to throwing a baseball. We've seen plenty of pitchers with sub-20-inch verticals and 90-mile-per-hour fastballs to back this up. Research from Lehman et al. (2012) backed this up as well.
Rather, frontal and transverse plane movements like Heidens and med ball throws work better. So building a fast, crisp bench press might make a football player incredibly powerful, but it won’t transfer much to baseball.
Also, bench pressing is simply too slow to have much transfer. If you look at the force-velocity curve (also known as the strength-speed continuum), throwing a baseball is all the way at the velocity end. It’s a light load moved incredibly fast. Benching is on the other end: a heavy load moved slowly.
High-load, low-speed lifting might benefit some athletes who have spent their entire training career on the pure velocity end (i.e. the travel team athlete who plays all year and never lifts weights), but we can still “fill in” this gap with push-ups and dumbbell bench pressing. And while we can train our athletes to develop force quickly and move heavy weights with ballistic intent, it’s too far removed from baseball to have much of an impact, especially for athletes who are already pretty strong.
3. It’s Not Very Self-Limiting
In my experience as a lifter and coach, I’d wager that most of the poor decisions in the gym occur on or near the bench press. People are much more likely to overestimate their strength capabilities while benching than they are squatting, deadlifting or lunging. If health and performance are our two top priorities, we need to pick exercises that don’t unleash our athletes’ inner meathead.
An incorrectly performed bench press can put an athlete in some lousy positions. Elbows flared, body squirming with hundreds of pounds hovering over their throat; that’s the LAST place I want my athletes. Sure, any heavy exercise can be risky, but a missed rep on a push-up or landmine press has less potential for disaster. Even the dumbbell bench press requires a light enough load to get into the starting position, making it a more self-limiting choice.
If you coach multiple athletes at once, you won’t see every rep of every set. As hard as you might try, it’s impossible to see everything in a high school or college weight room. That said, picking exercises that are self-limiting while still effective makes for a safer training environment. For our athletes at CSP, that means more push-ups and landmine presses than barbell bench variations.
Conclusion
The exclusion of the bench press in our baseball programs goes beyond “it’s dangerous for your shoulders.” Even if coached and performed perfectly, our athletes won’t get as much transfer from it as they would from other pressing exercises.
If you DO bench press and use it with your athletes, you won’t want to miss our newest product: Cressey Sports Performance Innovations. It’s a collection of 11 webinars from the staff members at CSP with tons of great fitness and business content, including my presentation, “10 Things I’ve Learned About the Bench Press.”
CSP Innovations is on sale for $50 off until Sunday at midnight, so click here to grab your copy now!
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Today's guest article comes from Miguel Aragoncillo, one of the contributors on our Cressey Sports Performance Innovations resource. It's on sale for $75 off through Sunday at midnight with coupon code APRIL2020 at www.CSPInnovations.com. Enjoy! -EC
My contribution to CSP Innovations was on the topic of post-activation potentiation (PAP), and you can't talk about PAP without getting knee-deep in a discussion of plyometrics. That said, there were quite a few "spillover" thoughts on this front that I thought would complement my webinar nicely. Here they are:
1. Change the Environment to Improve Outcomes.
Based on what the athlete or individual needs in his or her sprinting capabilities, a different starting position can be used to help teach a different “lesson.” Whether it is drive in the first few yards, arm swing, or even learning how to manage torso position past 10 yards, there are different tools that can be utilized to improve your sprinting ability.
With sprinting (along with several other forms of plyometrics) the position of the set up will greatly affect the outcome of the exercise. As an example, if you begin a sprint with one knee on the ground, you will need to display greater initial strength in order to overcome gravity in comparison to a sprint that starts after shuffling for five yards.
Further, you can use small hurdles at 12 inches or so in order to elicit a higher knee position, or you may simply or kick the hurdles as you move forward.
Much like attacking your specific weaknesses in your strength training and lifting endeavors, the correct tool must be used at the correct time in order to deliver the most appropriate outcome of efficiency, and in this case, power and force development.
2. Change the Words We Use.
While the above point looks to improve upon the external environment in order to help your athletes and clients to move better, the next point aims to improve how your brain processes this information in order to also move better.
Using words in order to describe a movement, motion, or intention behind a movement are all ways we can alter the outcomes of a movement.
Essentially, you can alter the outcomes of a movement by utilizing two techniques: 1) change your words to reflect the intensity of a movement, and 2) provide an external task to be accomplished.
Using words like tap, boom, and zoom, or using claps, or stomps can help reinforce the concept of moving with intention and speed. The purpose of these words will help to improve the rate of force production, along with force absorption if certain awareness is needed when landing as you perform different drills.
3. Physically Demonstrate Exercises.
As a coach, I am always interested whenever someone presents a faster and more efficient way to coach one or more athletes. With this in mind, the point should be driven further that non-verbal cueing is one of the bigger ways to improve upon a movement pattern.
Sure, there are tons of ways for people to learn. Using all five senses is certainly a way to help improve the learning process, but using smell as a way to teach someone to jump may not be the best course of action.
Sometimes a bounding motion is difficult to describe verbally, but showing it will help demonstrate the movement pattern, and describing the emphasis on the desired “hang time” from leg to leg for the movement will reinforce the intention of staying on the ground as little as possible.
Follow up your demonstrations with one or two words (similar to what was described above) to reinforce your intentions and any small details that may not appear to the naked eye.
4. Improve Maximal Strength Before Looking to Improve Maximal Speed.
The off-season is a time to increase strength, as this is the foundation that can create greater speed for our athletes. At Cressey Sports Performance, we do not shy away from deadlifting or squatting the first week our athletes come back.
While the act of deadlifting may feel like a far cry away from increasing sprint time or even further removed from increasing baseball pitching velocity, the take-home message here is that the details found in lifting heavy will contribute to the whole and not take away from the movement pattern. In fact, improving total body maximal strength will eventually lead to a greater rate of force production, as force production is the name of the game when looking to increase speed for your athletes.
5. Using Overload May Not Be the Best Tool for Athletes.
While this may seem contradictory considering the last point, every athlete will respond differently to various percentages of maximal strength. Some athletes 90% of their 1RM relatively quickly, while others move that weight slowly. When speaking about force production, research from Stone et al. (among many others), saw 30% of 1RM maximal strength in lower body exercises as a “sweet spot” for power output with jumping exercises. Further, stronger athletes have greater abilities to express this force production quality.
From the Stone et al (2003):
“... The strong group had higher values at all percentages of 1RM when compared with the weak group. The strong group had their highest power outputs at 40% of 1RM; the weak group had decreasing power outputs as the percentage of 1RM increased.
“... These correlational findings suggest that jumping power may be increased with improvement of the 1RM squat. The fact that the 5 strongest subjects had markedly higher power outputs than the 5 weakest subjects strengthens this finding.”
In this same vein, when we begin to get more specific with our movement patterns, we will eventually need to express faster and faster motions, following the force velocity curve (or absolute strength to absolute speed continuum) as the off-season transitions to pre-season for our athletes!
6. Where the Head Goes, the Body Follows.
If your head, eyes, or other seemingly small detail is “off,” your ability to deliver a movement to its best potential will be thrown off. To this end, your set-up can affect the execution of your movement.
If you’re performing continuous jumps, try looking straight down, and see how you do. Then perform another set looking straight, and then looking up into the air. See what fits best for you and your athletes, and change it based on your drill. The eye and head position will change based on the focus of the drill.
Specifically, when you are looking to improve your distance in a movement such as bounding in a certain amount of jumps, or jumping to increase vertical force production, focusing on an object or space for your vision is the purpose when precision is the name of the game.
7. Competition can breed better output.
This isn’t so much a lesson in plyometrics, but a lesson in performing plyometrics based on your environment and possible training partners.
Perform a drill by yourself, and you can expect to get a certain result - whether it is up to standard is up for debate. Perform a drill in the presence of 10-15 teammates who are all motivating each other can create a better environment, and you can increase your results tenfold. This does not mean to crush your body to the point of no return and getting injured, but having a team or partner(s) to motivate you can improve your outcomes significantly.
How can this be put into action when you are trying to improve from a maximal speed drill? Next time you are in a training rut, see if you can find a few reliable training partners to hold yourself accountable. Challenge yourself or your friends to a few races at the end of a lifting session, whether it is with jumps, bounds, or chasing whoever is at the top of a leaderboard.
For more plyometric training strategies, be sure to check out Miguel's presentation, "Post-Activation Potentiation: Mechanisms, Methods, and Results." It's available as part of our resource, CSP Innovations. Visit www.CSPInnovations.com to learn more - and enter coupon code APRIL2020 to get $75 off.
About the Author
You can follow strength and conditioning coach Miguel Aragoncillo on Twitter at @MiggsyBogues, and more of his writing can be found on www.MiguelAragoncillo.com.
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The "full can" exercise is a popular shoulder prehabilitation/rehabilitation exercise of which I'm not super fond for a number of reasons. That said, if folks are going to utilize it, I think it's important that they understand exactly how to perform the exercise and where they should feel it. Check out today's video to learn more:
Speaking of shoulder performance, I'm excited to announce that Optimal Shoulder Performance - Mike Reinold and my first collaborative product - is now available for the first time as a digital resource. To sweeten the deal, you can get 20% off by entering the coupon code 20OFF at www.ShoulderPerformance.com through the end of the day Sunday.
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With baseball athletes being the largest segment of the Cressey Sports Performance athletic clientele, it seems only fitting to devote a "Best of 2016" feature to the top baseball posts from last year. Check them out:
This was my first post of 2016, and it turned out to be one of my most impactful. A cool follow-up note on this: one of the suggestions I had to reduce pitching injuries was to push the high school season back in warm weather states, and here in Florida, they actually moved it back two weeks for 2017. I doubt my writing had anything to do with it, but it's nice to see things moving in a positive direction.
The lat strain is becoming far more prevalent in higher levels of baseball as pitchers throw with more and more velocity. In this lengthy article, I discuss mechanisms of injury, diagnostic challenges, prevention strategies, and longer-term prognoses.
I interviewed Jeff Passan around the time of the launch of his popular book, The Arm,and we covered in more specific detail some of the areas he touched on in the book.
This was actually a video blog more than an article, but it was still very popular - but didn't quite crack the top 5 videos of the year because it's more baseball specific.
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I really enjoying creating features with multiple installments because it really allows me to dig deep into a topic that interests both me and my readers. It’s like writing a short book, with each post being a different chapter. That said, here were a few of my favorite features from 2016 at EricCressey.com:
1. Random Thoughts on Sports Performance Training
I really enjoyed writing this series, as I can always build on current events. This year, I drew inspiration from everything from off-season baseball preparations, to the Olympics, to new books and DVDs I'd covered. There's an article for every month:
3. Random Thoughts on Long-Term Fitness Industry Success
While most of my writing folks on the training side of things, I do like to delve into the business side of fitness, too. These posts include various pieces of wisdom for those who make their living in the fitness industry.
