This is precisely why none of my friends dress up in giant socks. If I am going to celebrate something, I want everyone with a 100% unobstructed view (none of this half-ass piggyback stuff).
2. This weekend pretty much wraps up the baseball season for all my high school guys. It's interesting how coaches and athletes' level of excitement about baseball changes over the course of the season - and this is true of all levels. When the season starts, the players are fired up, and the strength coaches are ready for some down-time after a ton of hard work in the off-season. Mid-season, the coaches are always fired up and prepared to get the guys in because they can never get as much training in as they need, but the players are just trying to find a day's rest whenever they can. By the end of the season, the players are tired of baseball and fired up to lift - and the strength coaches are fired up to start building some freaks after not having ideal training scenarios for the previous 6-7 months.
So, I guess you could say that mid-August kicks off the funnest time of the year for everyone. And, I can honestly say that each year, I get more and more excited about the off-season. Coming in to this off-season, we've got five high school guys (four of whom will be juniors this year) throwing over 90mph - and several more who are right on the cusp of it. This is really exciting for me because it's proof in the pudding that if you get guys in a good training program at an early age, you can really expedite their development - and keep them healthy in the process. We're going to have fun this winter!
3. Funny story: as I've mentioned before, I have a Facebook account, and loads of my readers are my internet "friends." A lot of these folks are in the fitness industry, and as you can imagine, I get loads of invites to join these people's groups - whether they're for bootcamps in Istanbul, online education programs, product sales, or training styles. Initially, I was a nice guy and accepted all of the invitations - but over time, I wound up getting so many emails that my inbox was overflowing and I didn't have time to read anything, let alone the good stuff. So, I started being more selective.
Unfortunately, some people don't get the point when I turn down their invitation. Recently, these folks with a new fat loss program for general population folks invited me to join their group, and I declined. Now, six days later, I've received NINE more invitations to join their group. Is that what they call pressure selling?
This is like back in college when you sat down in a big lecture class only to discover that the guy next to you was eating potato chips, coughing non-stop, and taking cell phone calls in the middle of class - basically doing anything he could to make noise. You move to another seat, and he follows you...NINE times.
Really, I'm just not interested, dude. Does that make me a bad person?
4. This week, I started up a new book - and a big one at that. My fiancee looked at me last night like I had two heads, and asked, "Are you reading a textbook?"
My response was, "Yeah, I guess I am."
It's pretty funny that back in undergrad, I hated reading textbooks - probably because they were forced on me (both in terms of content and deadlines). Now, years later, I have blown through a chapter a night simply because I picked the book and I decided when I wanted to read it. I guess it's true that experience yields perspective.
Oh, by the way, it's Clinical Application of Neuromuscular Techniques, Volume 1: The Upper Body, by Leon Chaitow and Judith Delany. So far, it's fantastic. Anyone who has ever questioned the benefits of foam rolling should be forced to read the first chapter, which outlines several benefits that are commonly overlooked (there is a lot more to this than just the "tissue quality" argument). You have to consider the role of the autonomic nervous system and lymphatic system as well.
5. This book was actually recommended to me by Mike Reinold, who actually had a good blog whether or not curve balls are more dangerous than other pitchers for young throwers. It's a great comprehensive look at the topic.
Speaking of Mike, he and I have been throwing around the idea of doing a shoulder-specific seminar - from rehab to high-performance - at my facility this winter at some point. We'd only open it up to 30 people at the absolute most, so there would be a lot of hands-on learning and direct interaction. If you'd be interested, please drop me an email at ec@ericcressey.com.
Here's this week's list of resources to check out:
Risk-Reward in Training Athletes - This old newsletter of mine highlights indivividual physical and situational differences among athletes, and spotlights the work of one Cressey Performance athlete who made tremendous progress with these individual factors playing a key role in how that training was approached. If you play or coach baseball, this is a must-read.
Are Tennis Elbow Straps Effective? - This blog post from Mike Reinold provides a great overview of these commonly used rehabilitation adjuncts.
In the Trenches: Michael Boyle - Mike Robertson's newsletter last week featured this audio interview with Coach Boyle.
Q: As far as the total motion concept goes, is there a certain minimum of total degrees of motion that the "baseline" limb should have? For example, if a right-hand dominant person has fairly limited total motion on the left side and even more limitations on the right, would the goal be to get total motion symmetrical first and then improve both from there?
A: It is definitely population-specific, as overhead throwing, for example, will simply move that total motion to a different range. So, a symmetrical shoulder might be:
Right (dominant): 45° IR + 125° ER = 170° Total Motion
Left (non-dominant): 55° IR + 115° ER = 170° Total Motion
The difference between the two would be attributed to retroversion (bony adaptations - more info HERE). A 10° internal rotation deficit would be completely normal in a unilateral overhead throwing population.
Of course, if you get a freestyle swimmer, thinks get a bit interesting. You have to go a bit more by end-feel, and mandate that they have at least 25° degrees of total internal rotation.
That said, in a "normal" weight training population, I like to have at least 90° of external rotation and 50+° of internal rotation. I wouldn't consider those "good" measurements, but they would be workable (assuming symmetrical total motion).
Now, you are going to have situations here and there where someone has lost total motion in the non-dominant side. My experience has been that this occurs in athletes who spend too much time in computers and those who get "100% shut down" after an injury.
Believe it or not, I once saw a pro pitcher with only 6° (yes, single digits) of internal rotation on his throwing shoulder, and the medical staff's conclusion was to give him a cortisone shot and make him rest completely - no lifting, sprinting, stretching, anything (I wonder if they assigned an intern to him to help him wash his hair in the shower). He basically just charted pitches for two months. This guy lost total motion bilaterally, so the fact that he was forced into inactivity actually made his subsequent evaluation a bit more complex. The good news is that these guys can generally be recognized by their terrible thoracic spine posture and increased body fat levels!
1. I started this week off with a bang with a few good (and goofy) YouTube clips in my newsletter, so there's no reason to shy away from a continuation of the awesomeness in this blog.
2. Tony Gentilcore got the day off from work today. He claimed it was to go see the filming of the next Functional Strength Coach seminar, but we all know it was just a front for his regular ol' "weird ninja dude in the woods" routine. Glad you enjoyed your alone time, big guy.
2. Congratulations to CP athlete and New York Mets minor leaguer Tim Stronach (St. Lucie Mets: High A), who just missed both a perfect game and no-hitter on Wednesday. "Stro" took a perfect game into the 8th inning, and then lost the no-no with one out in the 9th. The wildest part is that Tim didn't even know until the day before that he'd be making the start.
Stronach packed 21 pounds on his 6-5 frame this off-season with loads of hard work at Cressey Performance, and deserves all the success that comes his way. Great job, Tim!
3. I received an email with the following question yesterday: "I play basketball. I watch how guys lose lots of weight and bodyfat preparing for the combine. How do they do that?"
Answer: The overwhelming majority of college basketball players I've encountered live on sugary sports drinks, chicken wings, pizza, and booze. Simply cleaning up their diets for a month or two will work wonders even if training is held constant. Did you expect something more revolutionary?
4. Here's another study showing that swinging a heavy bat prior to regular hitting is an inferior warm-up protocol as compared to swinging the normal bat or an underweighted bat. Researchers "suggested that when preparing to hit, 5 warm-up swings with either a light or normal bat will allow a player to achieve the greatest velocity of their normal bat." This is in complete contrast to the use of weighted baseballs to increase throwing velocity; I love 'em when used with the right population.
5. Huh? What? Come again?
6. I went back through Jim Smith's Accelerated Muscular Development today to check up on how he approaches formatting for e-books (as we prepare some for the upcoming project's release). While I was looking it over, I got to thinking about how it never ceases to amaze me how thorough Smitty is with his products; he just seems to cover everything. I've said it before: this is a great resource; I'd highly recommend you check it out.
Looking at some relatively recent research, you'll find that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that 34% of small business start-ups are no longer in existence two years after their inception. So, the logical assumption is that we're automatically more awesome than at least 1/3 of the small business world (we stole their lunch money and gave them wedgies, in fact).
Kidding aside, you don't just start a business so that you can "not fail." You do it so that you can thrive - and CP has done just that. I owe a huge thanks to our clients and staff for all their dedication to helping making CP what it is today: a place where....
...an Olympic boxer can share a stability ball with Pete in the office while getting awkwardly close to another man's meatloaf lunch
...it's considered perfectly acceptable to foam roll in catcher's gear.
...ladies and 68-year-old men alike bang out pull-ups like nobody's business.
...the average lifespan of a medicine ball is about seven minutes.
...it isn't uncommon for old clients to come back, handcuff Tony, and leave him for dead (out of love, for the record).
Interestingly, we haven't spent a penny on advertising over the two years; the business has grown purely by word of mouth. Is it any wonder when you can see stuff like this almost every time you enter the facility?
Thanks again to everyone involved for making my job so fun and for sharing my vision.
It's been a while since my last dose of Friday Randomness, but when you're got so much intern hazing going on, it's hard to even imagine topping that kind of content!
1. I recently contributed to another T-Muscle feature; check out Advice You Don't Want to Hear: Volume 2 for a little dose of tough love. I'm the last one down.
2. I have to say, I'm pretty proud of myself. My fiancee's been out of town since Monday morning, and while the fridge is just about empty and I'm down to one pair of clean underwear, the place didn't burn down, and I didn't put an eye out.
3. Here's a quick takeaway from a great Elbow Biomechanics talk by Mike Reinold earlier this week...
Obviously, in dealing with loads of baseball guys, I see a lot of elbow issues come through my door. The overwhelming majority of those folks are medial elbow pain, but we also see a fair amount of lateral elbow pain - even though we program for these individuals very similarly, as their inefficiencies are pretty much identical. I've seen it in practice, but never actually gotten the numbers on the forces involved.
The same medial tensile force that can wreak havoc with an ulnar collateral ligament or ulnar nerve also applies approximately 500N on the radioulnar joint during the late cocking (maximum external rotation) phase of throwing; that's about one-third of the total stress on the elbow. This lateral area also takes on about 800N of force at the moment arm deceleration begins (elbow extended out in front). As always, a picture is worth a thousand words:
I always knew it was going on, and always worked to prevent problems in the area, but suffice it to say that it was nice to get some numbers on this. If you see these issues, you've obviously got to look at mechanics, but more importantly, tissue quality, all the common flexibility deficits we see in pitchers, and overall strength of the rotator cuff, scapular stabilizers, core, lower body, and muscles acting at the elbow to provide valgus stability. For more information, I highly recommend you check out the 2008 Ultimate Pitching Coaches Boot Camp DVD set.
4. Bill, Mike, and I film our new DVD next weekend out in Indianapolis, so I'm going to end this one here and get to work on finishing up the script. Stay tuned on this front; we are excited about how thorough this is.
Have a great weekend!
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used by Cressey Performance Pitchers after they Throw!
I've written previously about the many flexibility deficits we see in baseball players (particularly pitchers). One of the biggest issues we face is a loss of elbow extension range-of-motion. This adaptive change most likely occurs because of the insane amounts of eccentric muscle action required to decelerate the 2,500 degrees/second of elbow extension that occurs during pitching. You'll find some serious shortness/tissue restrictions in biceps brachii, brachioradialis, brachialis, and all the rest of the muscles acting at the elbow and wrist.
Unfortunately, it's not an area you can really work on with the foam roller or baseball, as it's in a tough spot. For that reason, we prefer using The Stick - and hold it in place with the j-hooks in a power rack. Here is how it works when rolling out the anterior forearm musculature (this same technique can be utilized on the elbow flexors):
Follow that up with some longer duration holds of this stretch, and you'll get that elbow extension back in no time.
For the entire Cressey Performance foam roller series, click HERE.
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used by Cressey Performance Pitchers after they Throw!
Q&A: Hip Injuries in Baseball
Q: On Sunday, The New York Times published this article that discusses the dramatic increase in hip injuries in Major League Baseball in recent years. I know you work with a ton of baseball players and was curious about your thoughts on the article. Do you agree with their theories?
A: As always, my answer is "kind of" or "maybe." I think they make some great points in the article, but as is the case with mainstream media articles, they're written by reporters with word count limits, so a lot of the most important points get omitted. For example, with respect to the hips, it isn't as simple as "weak or strong." You can have guys with ridiculously strong adductors that are completely overused, balled up, and short - but terribly weak hip extensors and abductors. So, part of the problem is that journalists don't even qualify as casual observers to exercise physiology, so the public only gets part of the story.
(Sorry, but that digression was totally worth it.)
First, I agree that one of the reasons we are seeing more of these issues is because doctors have become better at diagnosing the problems. The "corollary" to this would be that the issues are perceived as more severe because so few physical therapists, athletic trainers, and strength and conditioning coaches are comfortable treating and preventing the problems. That's not to say that hip issues aren't serious in nature; it simply implies that there is a divide between diagnostic capabilities and treatment/prevention strategies.
Second, I agree wholeheartedly that early specialization at the youth levels can lead to injuries down the road. We're dealing with some significant rotational velocities at the hips. In previous analyses of professional hitters, the hips rotated at a velocity of 714°/second. This same velocity isn't the same with little leaguers, but with skeletally immature children, it doesn't take as much stress to impose the same kind of damage. So, I don't see it as at all remarkable that some pro ballplayers have hip problems after they may have played baseball year-round from age 9 all the way to the time they got drafted. They also have bad shoulders, elbows, knees, and lower backs that have taked years to reach threshold. It just so happens that folks are getting better at diagnosing these problems, so we now have an "epidemic," in some folks' eyes.
What I can tell you, though, is that it's borderline idiocy to think that strength training is responsible for these problems. Injuries don't occur simply because you enhance strength. In fact, muscular strength reduces the time to threshold for tendinopathies, and takes stress off passive restraints such as ligaments, menisci, labrums, and discs. Making this assumption is like saying that strength training drills to bolster scapular stability may be the reason we see more shoulder and elbow injuries nowadays. Um, no. Shoulders and elbows crap out because of faulty mechanics, poor flexibility (e.g., shoulder internal rotation ROM), bad tissue quality, and muscular weakness. Granted, the shoulder (non-weight-bearing) and hips (weight-bearing) have different demands, but nobody ever tried to pin the exorbitant amount of arm problems in pitchers on "the advent of strength training."
That said, injuries occur when you ignore things that need to be addressed: pure and simple.
To that end, I can tell you that a large percentage of the baseball players I see - including position players, pitchers, and catchers - have some signficant hip ROM and tissue quality problems. In terms of range of motion, the most common culprints are hip internal rotation deficit (HIRD) and a lack of hip extension and knee flexion (rectus femoris shortness). Pitchers are often asymmetrical in hip flexion, too, with the front leg having much more ROM. In terms of tissue quality, the hip external rotations, hip flexors, and adductors are usually very restricted.
This is has proven true of guys who lift and guys who don't lift. The latter group just so happens to be skinny and weak, too!
Done appropriately, strength training isn't causing the problem - particularly when we are talking about huge contracts that restrict how aggressive programming can be. Trust me; guys with $20 million/year contracts aren't squatting 500 pounds very often...or ever. The risk-reward is way out of whack, and no pro strength coach is going to put his job on the line with programming like that.
However, strength training may be indirectly contributing to the problem by shifting an athlete's focus away from flexibility training and foam rolling/massage. Pro athletes are like everyone else in this world in that they have a limited time to devote to training, but to take it a step further, they have a lot of competing demands for their attention: hitting, throwing, lifting, sprinting, stretching, and soft tissue work. So, they have to pick the modalities that give them the biggest return on time investment and prioritize accordingly in terms of how much time they devote to these initiatives. Some guys make bad choices in this regard, and hip flexibility and tissue quality get ignored.
Baseball is a sport that doesn't permit ignorance, unfortunately, and this is one of many reasons why it has one of the highest injury rates in all of professional sports. We are talking about an extremely long competitive season with near daily games - a schedule that makes it challenging to maintain/build strength, flexibility, and tissue quality. Throwing a baseball is also the fastest motion in all of sports. Rotational sports have the pelvis and torso rotating in opposite directions at the same time. And, as I noted in Oblique Strains and Rotational Power, most professional ballplayers have a stride length of about 380% of hip width during hitting. It is really just a matter of which joint will break down first: hip, knee, or lower back. Taking immobile hips with poor tissue quality out into a long season with these demands is like doing calf raises in the power rack when someone is around with a video camera: you are just asking for a world of hurt.
So, what to do? Well, first, get cracking on tissue quality with regular foam rolling and massage (the more an athlete can afford, the better). Here is the sequence all Cressey Performance athletes go through before training.
In many of our guys, we also add in extra adductor rolling on the stretching table.
Second, you've got to hammer on flexibility. We spend a ton of time with both static stretching and dynamic flexibility. Here are a few of the static stretching favorites (the first to gain hip internal rotation, and the second to gain hip extension and knee flexion ROM):
Third, as Dr. Eric Cobb has written, you use resistance training to "cement neural patterns." This includes all sorts of lower-body lifting variations - from single-leg movements, to glute-ham raise, to deadlifting and squatting variations - and multi-directional core stability drills. And, often overlooked is the valuable role of medicine ball training in teaching good hip (and scap) loading patterns:
For more information, check out my previous newsletter, Medicine Ball Madness, which describes our off-season medicine ball programs in considerable detail.
All taken together, my take is that the increase in hip injuries at the MLB level has everything to do with early baseball specialization and improved diagnostic capabilities. However, when you examine hip dysfunction under a broader scope, you'll see that this joint breaks down for many of the same reasons that lower backs and knees reach threshold: inattention to tissue quality and targeted flexibility training. Strength training works synergistically with these other components of an effective program just like it would at any other joint.
*A special thanks goes out to Tony "Explosive Calves" Gentilcore for being a good sport in the videos in this newsletter.
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I usually write my blog posts a few days in advance - and that's the case with today's blog, which I'm actually writing on Friday night, May 29. It's 10:31PM, and I'm not going to lie: I'm absolutely exhausted (and, I guess it technically should be called "tonight's blog," even if it's published four days after I write it).
My fiancee had a pre-graduation party of sorts to attend with some classmates, and because I was covering the gym until 5:30PM (and Friday traffic in Boston is a pain in the butt), I wasn't home in time to tag along. Since I'm pretty beat and I missed out on my chance to have some fun tonight, I decided to make lemonade out of rotten lemons.
Sure, I wrote a few programs for athletes and answered a few emails, but the "excitement" for my night was a chance to get better as a coach. You see, I delved into the folder I keep on my desktop entitled "Overhead Throwing Journal Articles." Essentially, this folder is full of PDFs of all sorts of studies relating to baseball - from injury prevention, to performance, to characteristics of successful athletes. Call me a dork, but it's a Friday night, and I'm psyched to be reading this stuff.
Why? Well, I want to be the best in the world at developing baseball talent - for my sake, my family's sake, and most importantly, for the athletes who trust their development to me. Baseball players account for 74% of the Cressey Performance clientele, and I feel it's my obligation to them to be as on-top of things as is humanly possible.
I don't want this to come across as a "hooray for me" post, so I'm trying to choose my words wisely - but I can honestly say that I HATE not knowing something. It's a hatred that's driven me to read everything I can get my hands on and make the most of the valuable experiences I've been afforded and relationships I've cultivated with bright minds in related fields of study.
A few weekends ago, during the Q&A section of the Perform Better Summit in Providence, Al Vermeil - quite possibly the best strength and conditioning coach of all time (has won multiple Super Bowl and NBA Championship rings) - came right out and said (paraphrased, as I recall it), "I'm tired of hearing about people in the fitness industry asking about how to make more money. The only thing I ever focused on was becoming a better coach. Get really good at what you do and then you'll make enough money."
It really rang true for me, as my mindset all along has always been to just keep getting smarter and smarter: something that's easy for me to work toward, as I genuinely love what I do. I often get asked how I have accomplished so much by age 28, and the answer is that I really love it, and work has never been about a paycheck. It's been about gathering, interpreting, utilizing, and disseminating information - to my athletes and reading/viewing audiences.
So, I guess you could say that a Friday night with a collection of journal articles isn't such a bad thing. I'm guessing Al Vermeil had plenty of "Journal Fridays" along the way to all those rings. When was the last time you set aside a Friday night (or several of them) to get better in your chosen field?
I turn 28 today, so in hopes of distracting myself from the painful realization that I'm starting to go bald, I thought I'd focus on the positives of my existence in contexts that would appeal to you. Below, you'll find 28 of my favorite things - most of which are at least loosely related to fitness, nutrition, strength and conditioning, and sports.
1. Favorite Nickname: Power Alleys. This seemed like a good starting point, as power alleys are bald spots. Credit for this one goes to Mets pitching prospect Tim Stronach.
2. Favorite Thing About Cressey Performance: The camaraderie among the athletes/clients. I think the hard thing to appreciate about our facility without experiencing it first-hand and being there on a regular basis is that it's as much about the environment and attitude as it is about the expertise and programming. I'm psyched that we've not only created an environment where clients can improve physically, but one in which they can thrive socially, too.
3. Favorite Book I've Read Related to Fitness:Diagnosis and Treatment of Movement Impairment Syndromes, by Shirley Sahrmann. This book got me thinking more about dysfunction and less about pathology. Quality of movement is often far more important than anything a MRI or x-ray can ever tell you.
4. Favorite Book I've Read Unrelated to Fitness: This is a top-up between The Tipping Point and A Prayer for Owen Meany. They might be taken over, however, by one of the gifts I just got for my birthday from CP Client Steph Holland-Brodney.
5. Favorite DVD I've Watched:The Indianapolis Performance Enhancement Seminar DVD Set. Bill Hartman's presentation on "Stiff vs. Short" alone makes this a fantastic resource, and the rest is just gravy. I reviewed it HERE.
6. Favorite DVD I've Co-Created: The Building the Efficient Athlete DVD set. I think I'm most proud of this resource because it's something that provided something I so desperately wanted - but couldn't get - during my college education. Effectively, it's a resource that blends book memorization with real-world practice with a focus on functional anatomy, assessments, and troubleshooting common exercises.
7. Favorite Seminar I've Attended:The Perform Better 3-Day Functional Training Summit. Each year, they get better and better. Check out Chicago or Long Beach this year if you missed Providence.
8. Favorite Athlete of All Time: Barry Sanders. I can't imagine an guy with better kinesthetic awareness, body control, or ability to turn a complete disaster of a play into a 90-yard touchdown run - while carrying two defensive linemen on his back.
9. Favorite Athlete of All-Time that you've probably never heard of: Jerry Sichting. He played for the Celtics from 1985 to 1988, and I'll always remember the night Sichting - at a heigh of 6-1 - got in a fight with 7-4 Ralph Sampson during the 1986 NBA Finals. At the time, I was a five-year old shadow boxing in my living room yelling at the top of my lungs.
10. Favorite Place to Visit: Fenway Park
11. Second Favorite Place to Visit: Gampel Pavilion at the University of Connecticut. It's an incredible environment in which to watch college basketball, and it's also where I spent just about all my time from 2003 to 2005.
12. Favorite Exercise: was this ever in question?
13. Favorite Sites I Visit Just About Every Day: T-Nation.com, MinorLeagueBaseball.com, ESPN.com, Sports.Yahoo.com, WilliamInman.com, 38Pitches.com, ShawnHaviland.Blogspot.com, MetrowestDailyNews.com, StrengthCoach.com, MikeReinold.com, RobertsonTrainingSystems.com, BillHartman.net, AlwynCosgrove.Blogspot.com, DieselCrew.com, PrecisionNutrition.com, BrianStPierreTraining.com, Tony Gentilcore's Blog, Boston.com, BarstoolSports.com, Facebook.com, EricCressey.com.
14. Favorite Kind of Injury to See (weird category, I know): Labral Tears (SLAP lesions), or really any kind of shoulder or elbow pain in pitchers. You've got so many potential causes that it's kind of fun (for me, not the athlete) to go through a process of elimination to see what combination of factors caused it. There are all the classic flexibility deficits in pitchers, plus scapular instability, poor thoracic spine mobility, plus faulty mechanics, plus inappropriate training volumes, plus weak lower bodies. It's kind of like peeling back the layers on an onion to see what shakes free. It's also a great scenario to illustrate what I talked about with respect to diagnostic imaging in #3 from above. All of these guys will have labral fraying and rotator cuff partial thickness tears at the very least; it's our job to fix them up and make them work efficiently in spite of these structural deficits in situations where surgery isn't warranted.
15. Favorite Class I Took in School: Gross Anatomy. Yes, I cherished the semester I spent with a bunch of cadavers.
16. Favorite Healthy Food: Apple-Cinnamon Protein Bars from John Berardi's Gourmet Nutrition Cookbook. Admittedly, I often just eat the batter before it ever gets cooked. Not good, I know.
17. Favorite Piece of Equipment We Have at CP: Giant Cambered Bar. Along with the safety squat bar and front squat set-up, this bad boy has allowed me to keep squatting even though my right shoulder decided a long time ago that traditional back squats weren't a good idea. It's also a great asset for working with overhead throwing athletes who should avoid the externally rotated, abducted position under load.
18. Favorite Thing About Having a Blog: I can write a lot more casually than in my newsletter, which tends to be more geeky. And, I can post videos of this kid rocking out:
19. Favorite Mobility Drill: Walking Spiderman w/Overhead Reach. I love this drill because you're covering so many things at once. You'll get thoracic spine extension and rotation from the reach, and hip flexor and adductor length in the lower body from the lunge angle. Keep an eye out for more new movements along these lines in the months to come as we film the sequel to the Magnificent Mobility DVD.
20. Favorite Pastime I Had to Give Up: Fantasy Baseball/Basketball. During my sophomore year of undergrad, I finished fourth in the world in NBA.com's Virtual GM contest. Long story short, if you want to be really good at fantasy sports with that kind of set-up, you've got to put a lot of time into it - and realize that it won't make girls like you. You'll also find yourself watching games in which you'd otherwise have absolutely no interest. I couldn't do it half-ass (aside from the CP Fantasy Football League), so I gave it up.
21. Favorite Inedible Toy: Rubber Steak.
Suffice it to say that Fire & Ice wouldn't allow us to eat a birthday cake inside their restaurant on Saturday night in celebration of my awesomeness. So, in celebration of their suckiness, none of us (16 in all) will ever eat again - and I was reduced to gnawing on dog toys.
22. Favorite Birthday Excitement: Apparently, it's going to be taking my car in to get work done, buying a new laptop, and then coaching 'em upat CP. There will also be a dominant upper body lift at CP that will undoubtedly feature Kevin Larrabee missing 300...again...and again).
24. Favorite Strength and Conditioning Coach Who is Having Surgery on my Birthday: Josh Bonhotal, Chicago Bulls. I talked with Josh yesterday and he informed me that he was finally having his ACL fixed today in celebration of my birthday. Nothing says "Happy Birthday, Buddy" like taking a chunk out of your patellar tendon and turning it into an anterior cruciate ligament. It's kind of like planting a tree on Earth Day. What a nice gesture.
25. Favorite Article Series I've Written:A New Model for Training Between Starts (Part 1and Part 2). These articles were actually picked up by Collegiate Baseball Magazine as front-page features, and I received a lot of great feedback about them. If there is one thing I do before I retire, it's convincing the world of the evils of distance running for pitchers. I'd put the Shoulder Savers series in a close second
26. Favorite Supplement: Fish Oil. It's followed closely by Vitamin D. You need both - and probably a lot more than you think. I'm a simple guy when it comes to this stuff.
27. Favorite Random Website a Buddy Texted to Me Last Week: www.EasyCurves.com. This thing is hilarious. A special thanks goes out to Jesse Burdick for making me just a little bit dumber with that.
28. Favorite Sign of Athlete Dedication for the Month: We have two college pitchers up here fromPennsylvania for the month to work on getting bigger, stronger, faster, and more flexible in hopes of a nice velocity jump on the mound, and the obvious injury prevention benefits of such training. That's all well and good - until you hear that they got an unfurnished apartment in Hudson, MA. These guys are sleeping on mattresses on the floor, and all they brought were a few lamps, a TV, some books, and a whole lot of enthusiasm and motivation. That's committment to training - and just the kind of guys we like to have around Cressey Performance.
What kind of sacrifices are you making to get better and move closer to your goals? I'm not sure that sleeping on a mattress on the floor is necessary, but it says a lot.
With that in mind, I'm not taking today off. There is work to be done and I love to do it, birthday or not.
