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| For those of you who missed it, there was a great article in the Boston Globe about one of my clients' inspirational preparation for the Boston Marathon. Check it out HERE.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/04/13/loss_fuels_her_resolve_to_make_a_difference/
I'm pleased to say that in spite of a cold, windy, rainy day and a freak ankle sprain early in the race, Steph finished in 4:14:59. On a nice, sunny day, she goes under four hours with no problems - especially if she's got two good ankles working for her!
Perhaps best of all, Steph raised $5,877.20 for the Boston Medical Center's Good Grief Program.
Congratulations on an excellent job, Steph!
Eric Cressey, MA, CSCS
www.EricCressey.com
www.ExcelStrength.com
Technorati Tags:
Boston Marathon, Eric Cressey, Running
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| How to Kick That Spare Tire
On one hand, this article frustrates the crap out of me, as it’s a sign that there are still a lot of people in influential positions spewing garbage information:
“If you've got some weight to lose, say 10 pounds or more, your primary focus should be aerobic exercise, such as running, biking and swimming, which will help lower your total body fat. To get the best results, aim for 30 to 45 minutes of aerobic exercise three to five days a week. Twice a week incorporate anaerobic exercise, such as weight lifting, using eight to 10 different exercises targeting large muscles, Millar says. Overall, your workout should be 75% aerobic and 25% anaerobic, suggests Edward Jackowski, CEO and founder of the motivational fitness company Exude.”
Somewhere Alwyn Cosgrove is weeping – or, more likely, cursing angrily in a thick Scottish accent. He debunked all these myths in two recent interviews in my newsletter and his wildly successful (and effective) Real World Fat Loss.
And, if that wasn’t bad enough…
“Jackowski recommends crunches and reverse crunches; the latter involves pulling your knees toward your chest. A recent study sponsored by the American Council on Exercise says the best at-home abdominal exercises in terms of getting definite results are the bicycle maneuver, where you perform a crunch by touching your knees to your opposite elbows, and the exercise ball crunch, in which you lie back on the ball, thighs and torso parallel with the floor, and raise your torso no more than 45 degrees as you exhale.”
I’m all for reverse crunches, but to lump them together with regular crunches is silly. I mean, one of the things that we emphasized over and over again in our Building the Efficient Athlete DVD set is that crunches are actually doing more harm than good!
At, the other extreme, this article makes me happy. I’ll always have plenty of job security when there are fat people and corrective exercise candidates at my fingertips because they’re following the bogus information these people continue to spread!
Marathon Monday is at-hand; pray for sunshine. Good luck, Steph!
Eric Cressey
Technorati Tags:
Boston Marathon, Eric Cressey, Weight Loss, Fat Loss, Health, Weight Lifting, Alwyn Cosgrove
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| It's always great when a client works hard to achieve his or her goals, but it's even better when that success in the gym is a piece of an even bigger success - in this case for an entire family and a very noble cause. This story ran on the front page of Boston.com and the Boston Globe today:
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2007/04/13/loss_fuels_her_resolve_to_make_a_difference/
Congratulations, Steph!
Eric Cressey
Technorati Tags:
Boston Marathon, Eric Cressey
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| Here's Part 2 of the interview with Alwyn Cosgrove that ran in today's newsletter.
http://ecressey.wpengine.com/newsletter52.html
We've got a ton more quality information like this available in our free weekly newsletter; subscribe and you'll be the first to hear it!
Go Red Sox,
EC |
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| I just thought you'd all like to know that I'll be taking in the Red Sox home opener at Fenway tomorrow afternoon and you won't. Ha!
Fortunately, though, I've got some good new for you, too. John Berardi has recently made the Precision Nutrition forums available to the public for FREE. We're talking 40,000+ posts on a variety of topics, access to the new Precision Nutrition Exercise Database, weekly email updates of new articles, recipes and exercises, and free downloads of two new ebooks: Precision Nutrition Strategies and Gourmet Nutrition Desserts. Not a bad deal, huh? Check it out for yourself:
Precision Nutrition
Enjoy some solid nutrition info while I enjoy the Sox getting the 2007 Fenway season off to a winning start!
EC
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| I thought you might be interested in checking out Part I of the fat-loss interview with Alwyn Cosgrove that we ran in today's newsletter.
Part 2 will be out next week; you can subscribe to the FREE newsletter to be the first to find out when the time comes:
Enjoy!
EC
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With the NCAA tournament final on Monday night, I thought this email exchange I had Sunday morning might be of interest. As a little background, I was recently contacted by a local D3 basketball coach to help with his team’s off-season conditioning. As a little background, this team is a solid D3 program that generally loses in the first round of the NCAA tournament after winning its conference regular season title. I gathered some background information on the team, and even went up to check out a game a few weeks ago. Following the game, we met up, talked shop, and worked out some of the details on what I’d be doing to help them out; it was a go.
Then, I got an email that included the following:
We just met as a staff and when they were down in Atlanta they met with the a couple of coaches from the NYC area and decided to do a three day trip in mid December. Obviously this is a great experience for our players, but this trip cripples our budget. After punchig the numbers we literally have just under $400 dollars so now we have to adjust everything, including working with you. I appreciate the effort you have devoted to us since I first contacted you and I hope we are able to work something out, if not this year, certainly in years to come. When you find the time let me know what you think about situation.”
Honestly, I don’t really need the money, so doing this was going to be more for my own fun – and I liked the idea of helping out some coaches that were enthusiastic and open-minded (or at least I thought they were).
Here was my response:
Thanks for the update.
I have to be very honest with you: you guys are falling in to the trap that a lot of coaches fall into.
When my buddy and I left your game a few weeks ago, we remarked about how your team basically looked like a "good" high school team in New England. The thing is that neither of us really know a damn thing about the tactical aspect of basketball; we were referring to the speed of play, level of aggressiveness, and utter lack of athleticism. Your players were no different from their competition in terms of memorizing plays/defense, shooting, or anything tactically that could potentially differentiate them. They were just slower, fatter, and weaker - poor relative strength with reactive ability that was mediocre at best. Do you think that they remember plays any worse than the guys at Florida or Ohio St? Trust me, tactically, your guys are probably AHEAD of what you see in D1 ball (as evidenced by average scholastic achievement); they just aren't as physically gifted.
These deficiencies are readily trainable - and you get the added bonus of increased team camaraderie and attitude in the process.
Instead, you guys are going to spend more time on the tactical side of things - basically changing the engine on a car with square wheels. And, you're going to do it over three days while ignoring something more valuable that could span 16-20 weeks. Motor learning doesn't happen in three days.
The guys don't need a three-day vacation mid-season. They need to can the permanent vacation they've been on with respect to off-season conditioning and diet and get their act together. I would encourage you to think "different" instead of thinking "better" - otherwise you're just going to be waiting around until someone tells you what you want to hear.
Hope this wasn't too blunt.
Last night, the commentators noted that it would be very interested to see if Greg Oden of Ohio State – likely the most important man on the team – would be able to withstand the outstanding mobility of Florida’s big men. Mobility is a quality that is very easily trained.
Conversely, I didn’t hear anyone questioning whether Florida or Ohio State’s players could remember their defensive schemes or in-bounding plays.
Tomorrow night, when you’re watching the NCAA tournament final, consider who would be better off: the team that did a three-day crash course on the court in-season, or a team that worked the hardest and smartest in the off-season to prepare for the grueling in-season period.
For more information, check out UltimateOffSeason.com
Eric Cressey
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Thought you all might be interested in a local publication I just had:
http://www.townonline.com/parentsandkids/columnists/x2088648457
Have a great weekend,
EC
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| Q: I recently was in attendance at your lecture/hands on session at the Learn-by-Doing seminar in Atlanta, GA. I signed up for your newsletter and have been following your blog ever since- it's great! I have a question for you and would love to hear your thoughts.
I was recently asked by a Physical Therapist about form on a bench press after watching one of my clients training. She wanted to know why I wouldn't put a clients feet up while performing the exercise. She has a theory that when everyone does a bench press (any prone horizontal push for that matter) they should do it with their feet up (as in on the bench)- to take stress off of the lower back. The client I was working with at the time (goal fat loss by his reunion this summer!) was performing dumbbell close-grip bench press with his feet planted on the floor.
Thoughts?
A: Thanks for your email and the kind words.
Most back problems you’ll encounter are extension-based (a tendency toward an excessively lordotic posture, generally secondary to tight hip flexors and weak glutes/external obliques/rectus abdominus). As I recall, Sahrmann has noted that extension and extension-rotation syndromes account for 80% of back issues.
In SOME people with these problems, flat benching pressing with the feet on the floor can pose a problem. In these same people, sleeping on the back ends up being uncomfortable – one reason why I feel it’s valuable to place a pillow under the knees when sleeping in this position. Flatten the lumbar spine out a bit and you ease the extension stress. Unfortunately, benching pressing is a lot different than sleeping!
Benching with the feet up on the bench is, in my opinion, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. When we flatten out the lumbar spine, we also flatten out the thoracic spine. It goes without saying that the loss of thoracic extension is closely related to scapular winging (abduction). And, if you’ve read stuff from myself, Mike Robertson, and Bill Hartman (who made Inside-Out, a fantastic DVD and a manual along these lines), you’ll notice a resounding theme: the shoulders are at the mercy of the scapulae and thoracic spine.* To that end, I don’t feel that benching with the feet up is the best option.
Rather than just criticize without an alternative solution, though, I’ll throw a few out there that I’ve used with great success:
1. Incline Press – Throw in a bit of hip and knee flexion, and you reduce the need for an arch – unless you’ve got a client who uses the “ceiling-humper” style of cheating! Additionally, incline benches tend to be a bit easier in terms of set-up on individuals with back pain.
2. Bent-Knee Floor Presses – On the surface, this sounds like exactly what you get with a bench press with the feet elevated, but in fact, you’re protecting the shoulders by avoiding the bottom position of the movement. We can get away with sacrificing a little bit of scapular stability when we stay away from the more “at-risk” zones.
Some might recommend stability ball dumbbell bench presses, but I think it would be a bit inappropriate right now. I use unstable surfaces very sparingly in training (and almost exclusively in the upper body), but this exercise has some merit in certain cases. Research from Behm et al. demonstrated that muscular activation is maintained with unstable surface training, even if total force production is lower. Essentially, muscles do more work to stabilize a joint than they do to generate torque in the desired direction of movement. In other words, you can get a solid training effect with less external resistance. So, it can be a great thing with bouncing back from shoulder injuries, or just tossing in a lower intensity deload week. Unfortunately, stability balls markedly increase spine load – not something we want to do with those with back pain. For more information, check out The Truth About Unstable Surface Training.
To get back to the feet on the floor versus the bench debate, I think the “on the bench” crowd really overlooks the fact that the bench press is actually a pretty good FULL-body exercise. When performed properly, there is a ton of leg drive and momentum transfer from the lower body, through the thoracolumbar fascia, to the lats and rest of the upper body with the help of solid diaphragmatic (belly) breathing techniques. We aren’t just training pecs, you know?
For more tips on sparing the shoulders and proper upper-body lifting techniques, check out the Optimal Shoulder Performance DVD set.
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I’m back in the US after a great trip to the UK. A huge thanks go out to Dave Fleming and Nick Grantham for all their hard work in organizing the weekend event and to playing such great hosts to me over the course of my visit. Likewise, I want to extend my thanks to Scott White and Daniele Selmi for pulling together an outstanding seminar in Oxford, showing me around town, and all the hospitality. And, above all, I want to thank everyone who came out to the seminars. As I mentioned on more than one occasion during my visit, I’m really humbled by the fact that people across the world actually care about what I have to say! With that said, I really appreciate your continued support and hope that you enjoyed the seminar as much as I enjoyed interacting with you. I look forward to visiting again soon!
These blogs are supposed to be about content, so I’ll come right out and say that I was an idiot for not packing any Greens Plus for the trip. I’ve got a lot of veggies to eat in the next week to try to catch up!
Keep an eye out for some pictures and more thoughts on the trip as soon as I’m caught up on work and sleep.
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