Home Posts tagged "Vertical Jump"

Strength and Conditioning Stuff You Should Read: 2/14/18

Here's a Valentine's Day edition of recommended reading, just because I love my readers so much!

7 Gym Gadgets That Actually Work - I chimed in on this T-Nation compilation that includes some good ideas from coaches from a variety of disciplines in the strength and conditioning field.

Health Hips, Strong Hips - This whopper of a blog post from Dean Somerset includes a ton of great videos. Set aside twenty minutes and go through it; you'll pick up some good stuff.

6 Key Factors for Developing Pitchers - I published this article about a year ago and it was one of my most popular baseball articles of all time. It's worth a read.

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Kelly Baggett: The 5 MOST Common Speed, Quickness and Explosiveness Problems in Athletes: Part 2

Today, we've got part 2 of a great guest blog series from Kelly Baggett.  You can find Part 1 HERE. In the first installment, I talked about several of the common problems athletes have that make them perform more like an oversized truck and less like greased lightning.  In this installment, I’ll give you some solutions to those problems.  Let’s get to it! Problem #1: Bad Feet Solution: Spend Some Time Training Barefoot. One simple thing you can do for bad feet is spend a little bit of time each week training barefoot. Your body won't let you move in a rearfoot dominant posture when you're barefoot because it'll hurt too much. As an experiment, try taking your shoes off and lightly jog a few steps down the street. You’ll probably find the ONLY way you can do it is to get up on your forefoot. Also, pay attention to which muscles you "feel" the movement driven by when you run barefoot.  I don’t recommend training on concrete regularly. but if you have access to a fairly soft surface (grass is ideal and most carpet works fine), don't hesitate to scrap the shoes for a while. Here is a video that clearly shows the difference between running with shoes on and off.

The idea is to do enough barefoot training that your feet strengthen and begin to favor the barefoot posture even when wearing shoes. Even 20 minutes once a week on grass is helpful. If barefoot training isn't an option you can always train in lighter footwear that helps mimick barefoot running. Shoes like Nike Free 5.0 or 7.0 and Vibram 5 fingers can be an option here.

Problem #2: Lack of Glute Dominance. Solution: Really Focusing on Strengthening the Glutes!

In short, if you want glute dominance, you need to spend significant time strengthening the glutes. Try this experiment. Go in the gym, warm-up and knock out a couple of sets of 10 paused manual reverse hyperextensions. If you don't have a dedicated machine, find a bench, hang a dumbell between your shins, and do a couple of sets of 10 reps with a slight pause at the top.

Now that you have a good glute pump, take a casual stroll and see if you notice any differences in how you're walking. You'll likely notice that your strides are longer and you’re better positioned to drive off the balls of your feet when you walk because your hips inherently want to extend more. That's a good thing from a speed perspective!   Strong glutes favor a longer, more efficient, and more powerful stride. They also keep you injury free. Problem #3: Lack of End-Range Strength in the Psoas. Solution: Get Strong at 90 Degrees Hip Flexion or Higher. The key for a strong psoas (and proper knee lift in sports) is strengthening the muscles that lift your knee up to 90 degrees or higher.  Here is an example of that and an exercise for that.

Being strong in 90 degrees-plus of hip flexion also helps ensure optimal femur control, or put simply: it ensures the muscles high on your hip are controlling your thigh bone.

Problem #4: Lack of Mobility in Key Muscle Groups. Solution: Regularly Stretch/Mobilize the Quads, Hip Flexors, and Ankles.

Stretching the quads and rectus femoris turns off what are often tight and overactive muscles controlling the knee - and that promotes better hip dominant movement. The psoas must be strong, as I talked about earlier, but it also must be mobile enough to not negatively impact posture.  An excessively tight psoas will negatively impact gluteal recruitment. If you’ve ever looked closely at a picture of the psoas, you can see the majority of the muscle lies up above your hip joints in more of the deep abdominal region. I’ve noticed many people are both weak and tight in the psoas.  People that are really tight often have adhesions in the upper psoas. The upper psoas is hard to get to and in my experience requires a solid twist of the upper body to reach effectively. When it’s dealt with effectively, it’s not uncommon to hear an audible “pop” in your lower ab region as the adhesions release, followed by an immediate ease in breathing and increased feeling of looseness in the hips. Here is a good all-in-one stretch I recommend for the quads, rectus femoris, and the psoas:

And here is one for the ankles:

Most people should stretch daily and the more extensive your impairments the more frequently you should do so. I've had some people stretch for 20 seconds every hour of the day while others can get away with one short session per day. Many people can improve significantly simply by implementing proper mobility work for these muscles.

Problem #5: Lack of Strength and Power in Relevant Muscles Solution: Give Resistance Training an Honest Effort.

To move like lightning, you have to be able to get lots of force into the ground - and that means you have to have strength in the right places.  That means the hip extensors, knee extensors, and plantarflexors must be strong and powerful.  How do you get them strong and powerful? You must do some form of progressive resistance training.  That means some type of squatting or lunging for the knee and hip extensors, and some type of toe press or plyometrics for the plantarflexors.  You then must take that base of power and apply it into progressive sport-specific movements. Fortunately, all the specific stuff is taken care of in The Truth About Quickness Insiders System. The important thing from a longer term perspective is that you or your athletes spend time developing a base of strength through common strength exercises like squats, Bulgarian split squats, lunges, and deadlifts. That about covers it!  Hopefully you’ve found this short list of problems and solutions beneficial in your training or coaching. Stay strong and good luck with it! As you may already know, Kelly and Alex Maroko just released The Truth About Quickness Insiders System, a resource I highly recommend.  This outstanding product will be on sale at a great introductory price ($40 off) only through this Thursday at midnight.

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Kelly Baggett: The 5 MOST Common Speed, Quickness and Explosiveness Problems in Athletes: Part 1

As promised, today, we've got a guest blog from Kelly Baggett, one of the brightest minds in the field of high performance training for athletes. Today I’d like to talk a little about some of the common problems I see in athletes that prevent them from being as fast, quick, and explosive as they could be. You need a good combination of optimal movement patterns and force. Movement patterns are affected by things like your posture, muscle balance, mobility, and coordination.  Force is affected by your strength and power. You can be strong with the ability to exert lots of force, but if your movement patterns are off you won't transfer that force efficiently, and thus won't move very fast and explosively. You can have great movement patterns, but if you don't have force behind those movement patterns, you wont move very fast and explosively either - so the key is creating the balance. Now that I've talked about the type of problems, let's get to the problems themselves. Problem #1: Bad Feet For years, coaches in a multitude of sports have belabored the key, "Stay on your toes!" Although literally being on your toes is a bit of an exaggeration and is likely to lead to a trucked toe, staying on your toes really means you drive off the balls of your feet and less on your heels. Watch many great athletes when they accelerate or sprint and their heels barely seem to hit the ground. This is without any conscious input on their part. Most people are rearfoot dominant, which means they carry too much weight on their heels when they walk, run, or move in general. Moving more towards the mid and forefoot favors quicker, more efficient, less stressful movement, and also makes it easier to activate the powerful hip extensors, which have the capacity to really make you fly. If you want to be a good athlete, you need to get off your rearfoot and onto your mid and forefoot.

How do you do that? Well, unfortunately you’re unlikely to find much in the way of relevant scientific or laymen’s information specifically delving a great deal into this topic. That doesn’t change the fact that there are no shortage of gimmicks out there that promise this. There are even products like jumpsoles out there designed to make you move on the balls of your feet. The problem is the verbal cues and training aids are relatively worthless because most people don't have the inherent muscular recruitment patterns and strength to move in this posture naturally. If you have to think about it or force yourself to move a certain way it's generally not gonna be very effective. The key is optimizing your muscle development and movement patterns so your body inherently takes an "on the balls of the feet" posture without you having to voluntarily force yourself to get in that position. When that happens it'll feel natural and efficient. I’ll talk about how to do that in the next installment. Now let’s get on to some of the other problems. Problem #2: Lack of Glute Dominance When the hip extensors are strong, they tend to "want" to drive your movements a bit more than someone who's glute deficient. Generally speaking, walking, running, jumping, and most other athletic movements can be driven primarily either from the muscles acting on the hip or the muscles acting on the knee.

When referring to muscles that act primarily at the hip, I'm referring mainly to the glutes and psoas. Muscles that act more at the knee include the quads, rectus femoris, and tensor fascia lata. When movement is primarily generated from muscles acting higher on the hip, it promotes a more efficient and less stressful movement pattern. When movement is primarily generated by the muscles acting on the knee, it tends to promote more rearfoot dominant movement as well as knee pain, hip pain, and a ton of other common problems. Guess which pattern fast and slow athletes favor, respectfully? Have you ever noticed that really fast athletes often hardly even look like they’re trying? They’re quiet and effortless when they move. Slower athletes often sound like a bull when they move. Their feet SLAP the ground like a pancake and you can hear their tension a mile away. A large reason for that discrepancy is one group is using their hips to drive their movements while the other group is using their knees. Knee dominant movement is typically inefficient, loud, and it often hurts. Hip dominant (glute driven) is quiet, fast, and smooth. Problem #3: Lack of End-Range Strength in the Psoas The psoas works in concert with the glutes to control the femur from the hip. A strong psoas promotes optimum hip and foot mechanics. Everyone has heard coaches yell, "High knees, high knees!!" Some athletes inherently run with high knees while others barely lift their feet an inch off the ground. Those who don't do it naturally aren't really helped much by the cue. The psoas is the muscle responsible for raising your knee up to 90 degrees and above from a standing position.

When the psoas is weaker than the rectus femoris and tensor fascia latae you will have a more difficult time getting proper knee lift when you run, and also, due to the influence on the posture of your hips, also be succeptible to overuse injuries like IT band issues, knee pain, and plantar fasciitis. Problem #4: Lack of Mobility in Key Muscle Groups The quads, rectus femoris, ankles, and hip flexors often tend to be tight. This favors improper/faulty movement and prevents the optimum transfer of power through the lower kinetic chain. It also favors common injuries like patellar tendonitis or plantar fasciitis. If you’ve had knee or foot pain, chances are you have at least one of these mobility impairments. Anyone that has considerably increased the muscular development of their thighs will have a tendency to lean towards having tight quads. That's not to say that muscular development of the thighs is a bad thing by any means, but one must pay attention to mobility. Problem #5: Lack of Strength/Power in Relevant Contributing Muscles This is the simplest problem of all - and also the one that will arguably have the biggest impact of all. It encompasses the "force" part of the speed and quickness equation. The more force you exert against an object, the faster you can move that object. In the case of speed and quickness, the moveable object is your body and the object you're applying force to is the ground. The problem is most people are too weak to be explosive and quick. I’ll give you all the information on how to address and fix that and the other problems in Part II of this article series - which will run tomorrow. Tomorrow (Monday) at midnight, Kelly and Alex Maroko will be releasing The Truth About Quickness at a huge introductory discount.  I've reviewed the product and can say without wavering that the information it contains is outstanding; this resource will make for an excellent addition to any coach or athlete's library.  For more information, head over to their early-bird discount page HERE.

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How to Get Quick…Quickly – Talking with Kelly Baggett

Today, I'm psyched to have my old friend Kelly Baggett on-board for an EricCressey.com exclusive interview.  Kelly and I go back about ten years, and to this day, he stands out in my mind as one of the brightest guys in the business of making people more athletic - and he's also a heck of an athlete himself. EC: Thanks for taking the time to jump in with us on this interview today.  Let’s talk first about where the “need” for this product came about; what made you and Alex decide to create it? KB: Several years ago I had started using a particular style of movement work with my athletes designed to boost what I like to call “movement efficiency.” The premise was to rapidly and economically get people moving faster, quicker, and more efficiently on their feet without spending a lot of time doing so.  Each workout would start off with this movement work, which was a short ~10 minute section of the workout. Alex was actually a client of mine back when he was just out of high school. He went through some these workouts and really seemed to benefit from them.   Well, a few years later he’s coaching people himself and is nearly out of college.  He had taken the workouts I’d given him several years before and continued doing parts of them and expounded upon them with an emphasis on really boosting his first step in basketball. I had always believed that quickness and explosiveness weren’t necessarily the same thing. A person can be “quick” without being explosive and vice versa.  Alex was a perfect example of that.  He has some videos somewhere out there of him with a basketball: I don’t know if he’ll ever be all that fast and explosive, but you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone quicker with the ball in his hand on the basketball court. Several years after he was a client of mine, Alex is now a coach himself and has a pretty good training business going.  A little while back, he calls me and tells me how he’d been using these movement progressions with athletes and how well they’ve been working – and, in the process - comes up with the idea of putting the concept into a product based on “The Truth About Quickness.”

The first thing was to address some of the common myths surrounding quickness training and talk about the difference between quickness and explosiveness. The next was to introduce simple progressive quickness promoting exercises that don’t take a lot of time that can be incorporated into any existing program.  The foundation for that were the progressions I had started using several years prior. EC: Let’s talk about your “evolution” as a coach.  What were you doing a decade ago that you thought was high performance training that you realize now just wasn’t cutting the mustard when it came to making people more athletic? KB: When it comes to actual sprint, agility, and plyometric work, nowadays, I’m sort of known as a low volume guy. It’s all about quality over quantity.  However, believe it or not, I used to be one of those coaches who would run guys to death. I spent too much time focusing on sport-specific movements and not enough on foundational training and recovery.  I was one of those coaches who believed that if you wanted to get faster, you needed to do a ton of running.  If you wanted to be more agile, you needed to do a ton of agility and SAQ (speed-agility-quickness) work.  If you wanted to jump higher, you needed to do a lot of plyometrics.  The result was that my programming wasn’t near as efficient as it could be. I guess sometime around the late 1990s, I started discovering by accident that most people could substantially improve sports specific movements without much focus on them.  I’d get these athletes that would come to me and say something like, “Hey I’m not going to play football or basketball anymore, but I still want to look good. I want you to train me to get me big, lean, and strong”.  So, I would.  Then, two months later, the guy goes out and hits a personal best vertical jump and 40 time.

I had experienced that myself in my own progress as an athlete but I always thought I was sort of an anomaly because I wasn’t doing what was considered “traditional” explosive power and speed training. But then I experienced it many, many times with other athletes.   From there things sort of evolved into a challenge of finding the right volumes of movement and strength work, discovering why certain approaches work for some athletes and not for others, and tailoring the approach to the athlete. EC: It doesn’t sound altogether unfamiliar with the approach I took in The Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual, a program that a lot of people worried was too low in “SAQ” volume.  Without getting off topic too much, it’s my humble opinion that the “need” for more and more SAQ work was a provider-induced demand initiated by training facilities that realizes that they could get more young athletes through and make more money by running them ragged and messing around with agility ladders than they could with actually individually assessing kids, addressing imbalances, and getting them stronger.  They traded development for babysitting. But anyway, along those same lines, what are you thinking is a better bet instead for nowadays? KB: Establish proper movement patterns (which include optimizing recruitment/compensation patterns and optimizing coordination), then simply increase the horsepower behind the movement pattern.  You’re obviously one of the masters at establishing proper recruitment patterns and I have a ton of respect for your contributions to the field in those areas.  The recruitment aspects would include anything done with the focus of getting the body to operate more efficiently - stuff like corrective exercise, activation drills and stretches. You then have to engage in enough sport-specific movement training (sprints, agility, jumps etc.) to optimize intra- and inter-muscular coordination in those tasks – and honestly, since those are gross movement patterns, it really doesn’t take a ton of volume.  Then, it’s just a matter of maintaining those things while progressively increasing the power of the relevant contributing muscles – which is easily done through strength training.  Put all that together into a plan that properly addresses recovery between all the elements and you can’t help but get better as an athlete. EC: Just because this is fun, let’s talk about a few things you see in everyday programming from some strength and conditioning coaches that isn’t blatantly terrible (e.g., squatting on stability balls), but rather only marginally effective – and far from optimal? KB:  I guess one of the biggest things is all the complex training I see.  Don’t get me wrong; I like complexes for some purposes (like fat burning and time-efficient training), but I don’t think they should make up the entire workout for athletes looking to build a foundation.  For example, yesterday I saw some people doing step-ups with a curl and press.  The step-up is good, the curl is good, and press is good but when you combine them altogether the effect is rather limited.  My motto is if you’re going  to load an exercise with the purpose of building strength in that exercise (and in the relevant muscles), then put your body in a mechanically advantageous position to do so.

EC: How do your recommendations change from a relatively inexperienced 15-18 year-old athlete versus an athlete who is older and has more experience? KB: The goals don’t change but the focus on the elements does.  For the older athlete, I REALLY focus more on corrective exercise, stretches, and recovery.  Older guys tend to have so many recruitment impairments, flexibility issues, and pre-existing injuries that they can be a disaster waiting to happen unless those issues are addressed.  They not only tend to have more recruitment and compensation impairments than younger athletes, but their tissues also don’t tolerate these issues as well.  While a young athlete can often overcompensate for years and get away with it, older athletes will toast themselves the first trip around the bases at their first weekend softball game. With movement work, I work them into it gradually and also limit the effort.  A young kid can go out and run max sprints or max jumps no problem. But with older weekend warriors,  I like to work them in gradually as far as their rate of perceived exertion goes. EC: This question is more for me than my readers, but I’ll ask it anyway.  Say you’ve got a 14-year-old kid who has never lifted a weight in his life – and he comes to you on his first day of training.  Do you do any sort of sprinting, agility/change of direction, or jump training with him?  Or do you stick purely with resistance training? KB:  The movement work would be VERY limited and would be incorporated into part of his warm-up. It’s the basic concept behind The Truth About Quickness.  The movement part of the workout likely wouldn’t be more than 10 minutes – tops.  It’s enough to warm him up and give him a bit of movement stimulation, but not enough to fatigue him for the rest of the workout.  Short, sweet, and effective. We’ll be back in a few days with a guest post from Kelly in conjunction with the launch of The Truth About Quickness. Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter:

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Random Friday Thoughts: 2/5/10

It's been a while since I've published a Random Friday Thoughts blog.  So, I guess you could say that this is some random randomness.  Enjoy. 1. Anyone who tells you that being a strength and conditioning coach is just about training doesn't realize that it goes far beyond that.  This off-season, we've helped our pro guys out everything from composing a best man's toast to tying a tie.  We've even come full-service to offer haircuts in the office.

2. Jacob Hiler recently interviewed me about vertical jump training; check it out HERE. 3. I got some great feedback on Assess and Correct via email the other day from Jon Hochberg: Just wanted to commend you on your latest product, Assess and Correct (kudos to Mike and Bill as well, of course).  As a purchaser of most all of your products, I found this to be your most mature - not necessarily in terms of content, but in terms of presentation and delivery.  Assess and Correct does not merely list corrective exercises, but outlines an integrated process that each athlete, regardless of level, can navigate through.  From the body photos at the beginning of the manual, to the exercise listings and the demonstrations on the video, the user has a complete road map in front of him that he can use for the rest of his career, especially since you grouped the progressions into sensible categories.  I think the manual in conjunction with the videos is the real key here.  I can read about what I need to do, and if I need a more clear demonstration, I can look it up in the video chapters and watch it for more clarification.  It's nice when someone else puts in the hard work and does the research for the rest of us, so that we have a clear picture of where to go next.

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Thanks to Jon for the feedback.  You can pick up your copy of Assess and Correct HERE. 4. My buddy Jim "Smitty" Smith at DieselCrew.com is doing a great fundraiser for Haiti relief efforts.  Check it out here. It's a great idea for a great cause. 5.  Another easy way to keep track of me is on Facebook, for those of you who have it.  Just consider yourself forewarned that if you post questions on my wall about why your shoulder hurts or ask "what's your biceps workout, bro?," I'll delete you as a friend faster than Tony Gentilcore can say "I love techno."  Life's not fair sometimes; sorry. 6. I don't know what this picture has to do with anything, but I thought that it was great.

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7. Quote of the week: "The higher up you get, the more hot air you encounter."  It rang true when one of my athletes this week informed me that - according to some local trainer (who I've never met, but apparently is a competitor of ours) - I was responsible for a nearby pitcher's elbow injury.  This was remarkable, considering I've never even met or talked with this pitcher, let alone assessed him, programmed for him, or trained him! I know we get a lot of industry up-and-comers reading this site, and perhaps the best career advice I can give you is to ignore what other people say.  Listen to your customers/clients/athletes, your staff, and your family; those are the opinions that matter.  If I spent hours each day arguing on internet forums with my critics, I'd be wasting time that could otherwise be spent with the former three groups: the ones that matter. 8. I'm keeping a diet log this week for the first time in about three years.  I've gotten so accustomed to just maintaining my weight without really thinking about it that I figured I actually ought to check and see just how many calories I'm taking in on a daily basis.  It definitely makes you think about what you eat a lot more! 9. Here's a great little piece about two Cressey Performance athletes - Billy Bereszniewicz and Adam Ravenelle (both of Lincoln-Sudbury) - who have committed to play Division 1 baseball. 10. Short one today, as I've got a bunch to do before the weekend. We've got a full schedule here at CP on Saturday, and then I'm back to my old stomping grounds at Gampel Pavilion at UCONN to watch the basketball team play Depaul.

Then, it's house/condo "shopping" on Sunday.  I'm getting all grown up before your very eyes...

Have a great weekend!

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Atta’ Boy, Tim!

Here's a link to a great aritlce about Cressey Performance athlete and Blue Jays prospect Tim Collins, who just got the call-up to AA.  It's a great story you don't want to miss. Jays Prospect Collins a Surprising Strikeout Machine 99% athlete, 1% pitcher!

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Repetition and The Art of the Deload

Last week, my girlfriend had a big decision to make.  As she finishes med school (optometry) this year, she had two offers on her plate: one for a job in a private practice, and one for a one-year residency.  If she took the job, it meant we'd move out of the city.  Instead, she took the residency - which means that we can stay in our current apartment for another year once our current lease is up on August 15. Now, this might seem mundane to a lot of you, but not for me.  I'm a guy who has moved eight times in the past ten years - including three separate states.  I was 100% supportive of any avenue that she opted to choose, but I had made it clear that if we went anywhere, we were getting a moving company to do it.  After ten years of moving, I was sick of putting my life on hold for 3-4 days at a time to relocate.  It made me think of a quote I read over at T-Nation a few years back: "Stagnancy is often confused with stability." In the strength and conditioning world, status quo is largely understood to be unacceptable.  We always have to be looking to get better.  Maybe a basketball player is looking to push work capacity by perpetually increasing training volume on the court.  Powerlifters rotate max effort exercises each week.  And, bodybuilders may constantly changing programs in hopes of keeping muscles "confused" and growing. However, in the world of "Eric Cressey hates moving more than he hates drunk Yankees fans in center field at Fenway Park," stagnancy is a beautiful thing. This stagnancy in living arrangements gives me stability with my schedule and productivity - so I guess the quote from above isn't always accurate.  And, it makes me think about a few examples from the world of exercise where stagnancy can be a good thing: 1. Activation Drills: I often get asked how to make a scap push-up, scapular wall slide, or other mobility/activation drill harder.  The truth is that you really shouldn't be trying to make them much harder; they're just low-intensity drills designed to be done with perfect technique to get certain muscles "turned on" before you get to the more complex stuff.  So, if you want to make these movements harder, do a bench press or loaded push-up after the scap push-up, or a chin-up after the scapular wall slide (just a few examples). 2. Learning New Movement Patterns: It actually takes a lot more repetitions to ingrain something in your "movement memory" than you might think.  In fact, research has shown that elite athletes have practiced their specific skills over 100,000 times to make them "subconsciously" learned. Let's be clear: I'm not saying that you have to do 100,000 body weight lunges before you can start to load the movement and derive benefit from that training in other tasks.  However, for untrained folks and those returning from injuries, motor (re-)education takes repetition and time.  You can't expect a 16-year old girl to have an ACL reconstruction, then do a session of body weight lunges and be ready to go out and play soccer or basketball safely the next day.  In fact, in this example, "stagnancy" - or consistency in training and gradual progressions - truly does enhance stability in more ways than one. 3. The Biggest Loser - When this TV show is on, it is best for you to leave your remote stagnant on the coffee table and your TV turned off.  This will ensure that ratings go down for NBC and this mind-numbing crap will eventually get yanked off the air. 4. In-Season Athletes - As I wrote in Four Ways to Stay on Track, you have to be very careful with modifying things too aggressively with athletes who are in the middle of their competitive season.  New exercises can bring about delayed onset muscle soreness, which may interfere with performance.  And, increasing training volume and/or loads in-season can inhibit recovery between practice sessions and competition, or lead to overuse injury. 5. Deload Phases - I devoted an entire e-book, The Art of the Deload, to this topic, in fact.  Make no mistake about it: the overwhelming majority of your time in the gym should be focused on getting better.  However, there should always be deloading periods in your training where it's okay to intentionally be "stagnant," as these periods give rise to adaptation that make you better in the long-term.

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These five examples are really just the tip of the iceberg.  Feel free to post your thoughts in the comments section below to add to the discussion for everyone's benefit. New Articles The Seven Habits of Highly Defective Benchers was published at T-Nation last week. A Day in the Life of Eric Cressey was published at Precision Nutrition two weeks ago. Blog Updates Random Friday Thoughts Peak Power or Vertical Jump? The Most Detailed Maximum Strength Feedback To-Date Stuff You Should Read Have a great week! EC
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Peak Power or Vertical Jump?

The answer is both! The question?  "What do you test?" My rationale is this: if you have a skinny athlete who adds 15 pounds during a two-month period, but his vertical jump stays the same, a VJ-only assessment protocol won't tell you that he gained a ton of peak power. As such, we use vertical jump in conjunction with body weight to calculate estimated peak power output using the Sayers equation.  While recent research demonstrates that this equation typically underestimates peak power, the important thing for me is reproducibility (not complete accuracy). As an example, last week, I posted a video of Tim Collins, a Cressey Performance athlete and Toronto Blue Jays prospect who vertical jumped 38.7 inches at his final test of the off-season.

More impressively, he went from 27.9" on October 3 to 38.7 on February 4 while adding six pounds to his frame. Without factoring in the six-pound weight gain, we are looking at a 34.8% improvement in peak power.  When we factor it in, though, it becomes a 37.2% mprovement.  That 2.4% might seem insignificant to some, but the truth is that it's an impressive result for an entire year's hard work for many elite athletes with less window of adaptation ahead of them.

Vertical jump is a measure of relative power.  Peak power is a measure of absolute power.  Both have implications in the world of baseball, as you have to decelerate your body weight on each pitch, and you have to sprint, which is a function of the force you put into the ground relative to your body weight.  Conversely, the push-off during pitching and the hitting motion are all about absolute power.

So, all things considered, you've got to track body weight and vertical jump, then plug them into an equation.

Click Here for the Best Baseball Training Resource Available!

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Random Friday Thoughts: 2/6/09

1. First thing's first: in a newsletter last year, I told you all about Sarah Neukom, who works with the Jimmy Fund in organizing special events.  Sarah raised over $8,000 for cancer research last year in running the Boston Marathon, and a lot of you generously donated to the cause through the mention in this newsletter.  This year, Sarah's running again, and she'd love your support - this time to raise over $10,000 for a lot of people who could really use it.  I encourage you to check out www.SarahSaidSheWould.com and make a tax-deductible donation to the Dana Farber Cancer Institute. 2. Tomorrow, I'm headed back to my old stomping grounds - Storrs, CT - to see my first UCONN men's basketball of the year.  The seniors on this year's squad were freshman when I was last in campus, so I'm still bleeding some Husky Blue.

3. While we're on the topic of big verticals, a lot of our pro guys are wrapping up their off-season training at Cressey Performance before heading out to spring training, so we're doing some post-testing to gauge the progress they've made.  Probably the most impressive of the bunch jumping-wise has been Blue Jays prospect Tim Collins, Baseball America's Low A Reliever of the Year in 2008.  Tim added 10.8 inches to his vertical jump in just four months to get it up to 38.7 inches.

4. Someone asked me yesterday if I felt that it was necessary to be on a caloric surplus on the Maximum Strength program.   My response was, "That'll work, but a big surplus isn't necessarily. You'll actually notice that the resounding them within the book with respect to my own progress over the years is that I've built relative strength, not just absolute strength. So, you could still see excellent results just eating at maintenance - particularly if the volume is lower than your recent programs."

5. If you are near the Philadelphia/ New Jersey area and interested in bodyweight training (and if you are a regular reader of this blog, chances are that you are), consider checking out a great one day seminar given by Beast Skills' Jim Bathurst.  The date is March 1st, and the seminar is actually two parts (one basic and one advanced), so anyone can attend and participate fully.  Jim knows his stuff (check out his impressive YouTube clips on the Beast Skills site) and the seminar will help anyone who wants to develop full body strength and stability.  Check out Jim's site for details.  The seminar is hosted by my good buddy, Shon Grosse, who is a great physical therapist in Colmar, PA.

6. Just a quick happy birthday shoutout to Padres prospect Will Inman.  Will's up in Boston from Virginia to get down with us this off-season before heading out to Phoenix on Monday for spring training.  Everyone give Will some love and check him out at WilliamInman.com.

Have a great weekend!

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Plyometrics and Unstable Surface Training

Two weeks ago, I made it clear that a lot of folks were missing the boat with respect to baseball strength and conditioning by insisting that "plyos are all you need." And, last week, I discussed how strength and reactive ability have interacted in some successful players in professional baseball, and how those qualities should dictate how an athlete trains. This week, though, I'm going to throw you for a little loop and tell you that the static-spring continuum means absolutely NOTHING for a lot of athletes.  Why? You must first understand that each stretch-shortening cycle (SSC) activity involves three distinct phases: 1. eccentric (deceleration, preloading) 2. amortization (isometric, pause) 3. concentric (propulsion) phases. As I discussed in great detail in The Truth About Unstable Surface Training, Komi (2003) outlined three fundamental conditions required for an effective SSC action (1): 1. "a well-timed preactivation of the muscles before the eccentric phase" [we need our muscles to be ready to go to decelerate] 2. "a short and fast eccentric phase" [deceleration has to occur quickly, as the faster the rate of stretch, the more energy the musculotendon complex stores] 3. "immediate transition (short delay) between stretch and shortening (concentric) phases." [if we spend too much time paused at the bottom, the stored energy is lost as heat instead of being used for subsequent force production] So, what I'm really saying is that if you don't have a decent foundation of strength, training reactive ability - or even considering where you stand on the static-spring continuum - is a waste of time.  Weak athletes need to have the strength (and rate of force development, for that matter) to decelerate with control in order to allow for fast eccentric and amoritization phases to occur. I'd estimate that 60% of the young athletes who walk through my door on their first day to train are nowhere near strong enough to derive considerable benefit from "classic" plyos.  Sure, they need to learn deceleration and landing mechanics and pick up some sprinting techniques, but the true progress comes from the resistance training they do. Now, let's apply this to baseball, a sport where good strength and conditioning is still yet to be appreciated - and many athletes go directly from high school to the professional ranks without ever having touched a weight in their lives.  As a result, many baseball athletes don't have the underlying strength to effectively make use of the reactive training that typifies the training presented to them. And, in many cases, it will take a long time to get it during the season in the minor leagues, where they'll have competing demands (games, practice, travel) and limited equipment access.  It's why I've seen several professional baseball players come my way with vertical jumps of less than 20".  As a frame of reference, you need to be over 28.5" to be in the top 13 on my HIGH SCHOOL record board. Pro athletes?  Really? These guys can be conundrums from a training standpoint, as you have to realize that sprinting is possibly the single-most reactive/plyometric training drill there is; we are talking roughly four times body weight in ground reaction forces with each stride - and that's in single-leg stance.  So, we have somewhat of an injury predisposition, but more important, it comes down to training economy.  They aren't strong enough (relative to their body weight) to get much out of the sprinting, and would benefit more from strength training, bilateral jumping variations, and single-leg low hops.  However, they need to jump and sprint as part of their profession, so we've got to prepare them for that as well.

ellsbury-jump

All that in mind, the problem isn't traditional strength and conditioning, in my eyes.  It builds a solid base of strength for many athletes and helps to increase body weight, which in itself is a predictive factor for velocity.  However, the shortcomings of this S&C occur when coaches don't understand how to modify traditional strength and conditioning to suit the needs of the baseball athlete.  And, problems kick in when folks don't appreciate that even just a little bit of strength goes a long way. New Blog Content Random Friday Thoughts Inverted Row Ignorance Maximum Strength Feedback: 1/20/09 Stuff You Should Read: 1/22/09 All the Best, EC References 1. Komi, PV. Stretch-shortening cycle. In: Strength and Power in Sport (2nd Ed.) P.V. Komi, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003: 184-202. Sign-up Today for our FREE Baseball Newsletter and Receive a Copy of the Exact Stretches used by Cressey Performance Pitchers after they Throw!
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