In case you haven't already heard, I'm running my spring sale right now, with four of my products for sale at 40% off. Just enter the coupon code SPRING (all CAPS) at checkout to apply the discount. The discount runs until tonight (Tuesday) at midnight. You can learn more at the following links:
It's time for the January edition of Random Thoughts on Sports Performance Training. Before I get to it, though, just a friendly reminder that today is also the last day of the introductory $75 off sale on Cressey Sports Performance Innovations. Don't miss out on this chance to get our popular resource at a great price using the coupon code APRIL2020. You can learn more HERE.
Since my presentation is "Scapular Control: Implications for Health and High Performance," I thought I'd take an upper extremity approach to this month's cues.
1. If you want to relax the neck, talk or exhale.
One of the biggest mistakes I see athletes make when they're doing upper body work is aggressively recruiting the muscles surrounding the neck. In particular, we know that a hypertonic sternocleidomastoid (SCM) and scalenes can be implicated in not only neck pain, but also headaches and thoracic outlet syndrome.
In most cases, simply telling an athlete to relax or repositioning their head/neck will get the job done. However, another strategy you can employ is to have them exhale through the exertion phase, or simply talk during the set. Both the scalenes and SCM are accessory muscles of inhalation and this forces them to relax a bit so that you can build tension where you really want it.
2. When it comes to scapular control, nothing beats kinesthetic awareness coaching cues.
As I've written at length in the past, I'm a big believer in categorizing all athletes by their dominant learning styles: visual, kinesthetic, and auditory.
Visual learners can watch you demonstrate an exercise, and then go right to it.
Auditory learners can simply hear you say a cue, and then pick up the desired movement or position.
Kinesthetic learners seem to do best when they're actually put in a position to appreciate what it feels like, and then they can crush it.
My experience with teaching scapular positioning has been that option #3 - actually putting someone in the position you want - is the quickest and easiest way to teach someone about scapular positioning. This is likely because:
a. The scapula is a unique bone with some unique movements (upward/downward rotation, anterior/posterior tilt) that aren't familiar to most people
b. You're always wearing a shirt when demonstrating drills, which makes it harder to see these subtle movements as they occur.
When in doubt, put a shoulder blade in the position you desire and then ask an individual to hold it and own it.
3. Uncontrolled end ranges are bad for the scapulothoracic joint, just like every other joint.
Here's something to consider...
We know that if you repeatedly flex and extend the spine to its end-ranges, you'll eventually wind up in trouble - whether it's a herniated disc, stress fracture, or some other pathology.
We also know that if you repeatedly hyperextend an elbow, you'll eventually wind up with loose bodies in the joint, early osteoarthritis, or a torn ulnar collateral ligament.
The point is that it's important to have sufficient range of motion - and stability in that ROM - but not excessive ROM. Hanging out at any end range probably isn't a good idea.
Interestingly, though, we overlook the fact that the scapulothoracic joint - the interaction of the shoulder blade with the rib cage - is subject to these rules. In particular, one issue that sometimes emerges is an excessive "military posture" of scapular adduction (toward the midline) and depression when folks are cued "down and back" without understanding what it really means.
These athletes often get neck/upper back flare-ups when they do a lot of deadlifting, carries, or even too much horizontal pulling. The shoulder blades are so far pulled back that it becomes a faulty stabilization strategy instead of a strong base from which to perform.
4. A PVC dowel is a super affordable way to do a lot of great things for your upper body work.
I was looking at a program I wrote for one of our pro guys yesterday, and realized that we used the PVC dowel for three different exercises in a single training day. That's as much as barbells and dumbbells - but you can buy the piece of PVC for around $1. You won't find a piece of training equipment that offers that kind of bang for your buck - and this realization made me think back to this video from a few years ago. These options are really just the tip of the iceberg, too:
Have a great Sunday - and don't forget about the CSP Innovations sale that ends tonight! Just enter coupon code APRIL2020 at www.CSPInnovations.com.
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Today's guest article comes from Cressey Sports Performance coach Tony Bonvechio. Tony is also one of the contributors to the new Cressey Sports Performance Innovations resource, which is on sale for $50 off through this Sunday at midnight. Enjoy! -EC
I wouldn’t break the Internet if I told you that we don’t use the barbell bench press to train baseball players at Cressey Sports Performance.
As a powerlifter, I love the bench press. It’s a solid choice for general fitness folks, too. But by now, it’s widely accepted in the baseball world that the reward of getting really strong on the bench press is outweighed by the risk the exercise poses to the shoulders and elbows. And if you dig a little deeper, there’s some more specific reasoning why the bench press doesn’t show up in most programs at CSP.
1. It Exacerbates Negative Adaptations to Throwing
When you throw a baseball for a living, it’s likely that a handful of things will happen, including:
So basically, you get a shoulder that’s loose in the front and tight in the back, along with an elbow that doesn’t straighten all the way. But what happens at the torso and lower body?
• Decreased scapular upward rotation
• Decreased soft tissue quality (lats, rotator cuff, pec major and minor, among others)
• Abnormal spinal curvature (i.e. lumber and/or thoracic hyperextension)
• Decreased hip rotation (most often loss of hip internal rotation)
Now we have scaps and hips that don’t move well, gritty tissue surrounding the shoulder, and a spine that’s stuck in extension. This paints a grim picture and it’s not as bad as it sounds, but what does bench pressing do to help this situation?
The answer? Nothing. In fact, it feeds into many of these dysfunctions.
Coach someone into a proper bench press setup and what do you get? Global spinal extension, scapular retraction and depression, humeral motion WITHOUT scap motion, and heavy loads placed on the pecs, delts, lats and triceps. The stresses are eerily similar to throwing, albeit at slower speeds and heavier loads.
We spend a lot of time each offseason trying to restore movement quality in our baseball players, which means staying away from many of these gross extension patterns and exercises that lock the scaps in place. You can’t justify strength gains at the expense of movement quality. As Gray Cook says, don’t build strength on top of dysfunction.
2. It’s Not Speed- or Plane-Specific
In order for a movement to transfer to sport, it needs to have some degree of specificity. We have to look at the plane in which the movement occurs (sagittal, frontal or transverse) and where the movement falls on the force-velocity curve.
Granted, simply getting stronger has direct transfer to sport without being specific. Otherwise, strength coaches wouldn’t have jobs. However, research shows us that power development is highly plane-specific and that traditional sagittal plane power exercises (jumps, sprints, cleans, snatches, etc.) have limited transfer to throwing a baseball. We've seen plenty of pitchers with sub-20-inch verticals and 90-mile-per-hour fastballs to back this up. Research from Lehman et al. (2012) backed this up as well.
Rather, frontal and transverse plane movements like Heidens and med ball throws work better. So building a fast, crisp bench press might make a football player incredibly powerful, but it won’t transfer much to baseball.
Also, bench pressing is simply too slow to have much transfer. If you look at the force-velocity curve (also known as the strength-speed continuum), throwing a baseball is all the way at the velocity end. It’s a light load moved incredibly fast. Benching is on the other end: a heavy load moved slowly.
High-load, low-speed lifting might benefit some athletes who have spent their entire training career on the pure velocity end (i.e. the travel team athlete who plays all year and never lifts weights), but we can still “fill in” this gap with push-ups and dumbbell bench pressing. And while we can train our athletes to develop force quickly and move heavy weights with ballistic intent, it’s too far removed from baseball to have much of an impact, especially for athletes who are already pretty strong.
3. It’s Not Very Self-Limiting
In my experience as a lifter and coach, I’d wager that most of the poor decisions in the gym occur on or near the bench press. People are much more likely to overestimate their strength capabilities while benching than they are squatting, deadlifting or lunging. If health and performance are our two top priorities, we need to pick exercises that don’t unleash our athletes’ inner meathead.
An incorrectly performed bench press can put an athlete in some lousy positions. Elbows flared, body squirming with hundreds of pounds hovering over their throat; that’s the LAST place I want my athletes. Sure, any heavy exercise can be risky, but a missed rep on a push-up or landmine press has less potential for disaster. Even the dumbbell bench press requires a light enough load to get into the starting position, making it a more self-limiting choice.
If you coach multiple athletes at once, you won’t see every rep of every set. As hard as you might try, it’s impossible to see everything in a high school or college weight room. That said, picking exercises that are self-limiting while still effective makes for a safer training environment. For our athletes at CSP, that means more push-ups and landmine presses than barbell bench variations.
Conclusion
The exclusion of the bench press in our baseball programs goes beyond “it’s dangerous for your shoulders.” Even if coached and performed perfectly, our athletes won’t get as much transfer from it as they would from other pressing exercises.
If you DO bench press and use it with your athletes, you won’t want to miss our newest product: Cressey Sports Performance Innovations. It’s a collection of 11 webinars from the staff members at CSP with tons of great fitness and business content, including my presentation, “10 Things I’ve Learned About the Bench Press.”
CSP Innovations is on sale for $50 off until Sunday at midnight, so click here to grab your copy now!
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It's time for this week's list of recommended strength and conditioning reading. With this week's launch of Cressey Sports Performance Innovations($50 off through Sunday at midnight), we're going with a CSP staff theme here.
Believe It Or Not, CSP Isn't a One-Man Show - Pete Dupuis authored up this great post about how to build up a multifaceted fitness team instead of just a one-man show. It's a great read for anyone who aspires to own a facility one day (or already has one).
Technique Tuesday with Tony Bonvechio - You might not know that CSP coach Tony Bonvechio posts a thorough technique video each Tuesday morning on the CSP-MA Facebook page. Here's this week's:
