I hope you all had a great 4th of July weekend. I'm a bit behind on things in light of the holiday festivities, so we're going to kick this week off with a list of recommended strength and conditioning reading for the week:
Preventing Lower Back Pain: Assuming is Okay - This post of mine discusses why what you see on a spine MRI doesn't always depict exactly what's going on.
When the Hips and Core Call BS on the Foot - I enjoyed this post from Charlie Weingroff, who continues to kick out quality information on a regular basis.
Pick Your Deadlifting Poison - This is a good blog from Mike Robertson on picking your assistance exercises based on where you miss your deadlifts.
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a deadlift technique tutorial!
I haven't published much strength and conditioning randomness of late, so here goes.
1. Here's a research study that demonstrates relationships among a variety of scheduling and recovery factors and injury rates. The part I found most interesting was that researchers observed that sleeping fewer than six hours the night prior to a competition led to a significant increase in fatigue related injuries.
Additionally, while it wasn't specifically observed in the study, my anecdotal observations are that kids who play 14 games in a weekend are more likely to hate their sports, have too many insignificant trophies, and live in their parents' basement until age 35 because they have a weird sense of entitlement and absolutely no idea how to interact on a social level with anyone who isn't on their AAU teams.
2. Speaking of young athletes, interval training works better for them, too. There's absolutely no reason for a young soccer player to be running miles and miles at a steady-state. Kids need to get strong and learn to run fast before they try to run fast for a long time. Interval training is a nice "bridge" between the two when applied correctly during the off-season period.
3. Here's an excellent study with a biomechanical analysis of the hex/trap bar deadlift technique as compared to the conventional deadlift technique. It backs up a lot of the comments I made last month with my deadlift series from last month, which you can find at the following links:
How to Deadlift: Which Variation is Right for You? - Part 1 (Conventional Deadlift)
How to Deadlift: Which Variation is Right for You? - Part 2 (Sumo Deadlift)How to Deadlift: Which Variation is Right for You? - Part 3 (Trap Bar Deadlift)
4. Here's an interesting article in Radiology Today about the use of MRI in college athletes as a pre-screening tool - and potentially even an aid in optimizing strength and conditioning programs.
Because a lot of the observations on MRI may be "subclinical" (meaning they are findings that occur without the presence of symptoms), there may be merit (albeit at a big cost) to using screens like this as part of an initial (or on the fly) evaluation of an athlete to dictate a training or "prehab" program. For instance, observing a subclinical patellar tendinopathy may mean you do more soft tissue work around the knee and more heavily emphasize glute activation and minimize quad dominant squatting (among other things) to keep that tendon from reaching a symptomatic threshold.
There are, of course, some significant drawbacks. For starters, MRIs are expensive and time consuming, so not everyone could get them. How do you decide who deserves it - especially in the era of Title IX?
Second, you're assuming that strength and conditioning coaches are qualified and capable to organize programs around what's found on a radiology report. Generally speaking, there isn't a ton of individualization in collegiate strength and conditioning because coaches have so many athletes assigned to them and it isn't feasible. It makes me wonder if you could prevent more injuries if you simply hired 3-4 more strength and conditioning coaches for what it would cost you to get an extra radiologist and imaging technician.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, there are a lot of "false positives" on MRI. I've written about this quite in the past and covered it in our Optimal Shoulder Performance DVD set, but you are headed down a very slippery slope when you start treating the image rather than the athlete. In other words, how one moves and feels is far more important than how one's MRI looks. I can guarantee you that the overwhelming majority of my overhead throwing athletes have labral fraying, partial thickness supraspinatus tears, and a host of other "normal" findings for this population. If I immediately contraindicated a ton of exercises in my program because I knew this, I'd likely be setting them back with regressions in their programming when they actually needed progressions.
What are your thoughts on this final issue? If you had the resources, would you MRI every athlete in a college athletic program? How would you pick which region to MRI?
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a deadlift technique tutorial!
A few months ago, I decided that 2011 was going to be the year for me to learn to play golf. Considering that my grandmother actually beat me on nine holes last year, and that I have a world record in the deadlift, yet didn't really use my hips when I golfed, I had a big window of adaptation ahead of me.
To that end, I've been taking golf lessons with a great pro around here every Wednesday morning for the past six weeks. I'm a very type A personality and ultra-competitive, so you can bet that I've been practicing a ton and thinking about it a lot.
This past weekend, I had my re-match with Gram in our first golf outing of the year. While I narrowly edged her this time around, I shot a 59 over 9 holes - including a 10 on the 4th and a 12 on the 8th - so I didn't exactly end up with bragging rights. In fact, if a trophy had been awarded, I would have still received this one:
The funny thing is that my swing is dramatically improved and I can easily identify what I've done incorrectly when it doesn't come off the club the way that it should. About 80% of the time, I'm putting them straight-ahead. The only problem with that 80% statistic is that it's based on nice, flat, turf tees at driving ranges, and not what really happens in golf when you're on the side of a hill with leaves, divots, and a tree directly between you and the hole.
In other words, all my golf practice thus far has been closed loop, while the nature of golf is much more open loop in nature. What do I mean with these terms? Rather than reinvent the wheel, he's an excerpt from my e-book, The Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual, that describes open and closed-loop drills:
The overwhelming majority of agility drills fall into the category of closed-loop drills; very simply, they’re predictable tasks. Closed-loop drills are extremely valuable for teaching proper technique in sprinting, changes of direction, and other sport mechanics, and should therefore comprise the overwhelming majority of the drills utilized in the general off-season period.These “conscious” efforts in the general off-season give rise to integration of appropriate mechanics subconsciously in the late off-season and in-season phases. By these phases, the athlete has become conditioned to act efficiently without thinking about how to react to a given stimulus. Ideally, this occurs completely prior to the integration of open-loop drills that challenge the athlete’s ability to accommodate unpredictable external stimuli.
Eventually, both open- and closed-loop drills can be integrated into metabolic conditioning schemes to enhance sport-specific conditioning. We encounter both planned and unplanned movement challenges in athletics, so it is logical to prepare for both. Examples of open-loop movement training are mirror drills, 5-10-5 drills where the athlete moves in the direction that the coach points, and tennis ball drills (where the athlete races to retrieve a tennis ball a coach has thrown in an unannounced direction).Resistance training has traditionally been comprised of closed-loop challenges; this underscores the need for significant variety in exercise selection when programming for athletes. For this reason – especially in the general off-season – coaches should use different bars, dumbbells, kettlebells, cables, medicine balls, body weight exercises, grip widths, ranges of motion, points of stability (e.g., lunges vs. squats), and other varying stimuli to expand athletes’ overall motor pools through rich sensory environments.
Such variety is especially important when it comes to dealing with young athletes. The richer their proprioceptive environments, the better their overall development, and the easier they’ll pick up complex challenges down the road.Coaches should allow for enough repetition and frequency of a given drill to allow for adaptation, but at the same time look to insert variety to programming as often as possible. Beyond simply improving overall afferent (sensory) function, variety in exercise selection will also markedly reduce the risk of injury due to pattern overload, muscular imbalance, and movement dysfunction.
What’s the take-home message from this length quote? Never expect true carryover from your strength and conditioning programs to the “randomness” of your daily life unless you implement more unpredictable challenges in those strength and conditioning programs. Conservatively, that might mean doing more strongman style training and utilizing more asymmetrical loading.
More assertively, it might mean getting out to play in a soccer, softball, or ultimate frisbee game to make sure you aren’t getting stagnant because of the predictability of your “workout routine.”
In other words, I'll be getting out to simply golf more, as it'll teach me how to swing under predictable conditions and make good decisions in those scenarios. Likewise, in my practice sessions, I'll be getting off the mats a bit more to golf on less-than-optimal terrain.
Maybe it'll get me to a 58 next time.
To learn more about how open- and closed-loop drills are integrated in a comprehensive program, check out The Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual.
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a deadlift technique tutorial!
Here are some recommended strength and conditioning reads to kick off the week:
Perfecting the 1-leg RDL - My business partner, Tony Gentilcore, troubleshoots this commonly-screwed-up exercise in a video blog with lots of great coaching cues.
An Intelligent Answer to a Dumb Question - This blast from the past talks about the value of single-leg training and reviews Mike Robertson's great product, The Single-Leg Solution.
The Fibroblaster IASTM Tool - This post from Jacob Fey on Mike Reinold's site describes the Fibroblaster, a new instrument-assisted soft tissue mobilization tool, that was actually designed and manufactured by Fey himself. Jacob's a buddy of CP's own Chris Howard, and as a result, we've had a chance to experience the Fibroblaster first-hand in the manual therapy that's done at Cressey Performance. It's a fantastic implement with a promising feature, for sure.
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a deadlift technique tutorial!
Earlier this week, I received an email from a reader who was wondering whether deadlifts executed in perfect technique could be all one needs for correcting “bad posture.” It got me to thinking about just how ideal the deadlift really is. Working from the ground up: 1.You’re teaching folks to keep their weight back on their heels, and (ideally) executing the lift in minimalist or no footwear – thereby increasing dorsiflexion range-of-motion. 2. You increase stiffness in the hamstrings and glutes, which extend the hip and posteriorly tilt the pelvis.
3. You get a great co-contraction of all the muscles of the core to effectively handle all shear and compressive forces on the spine. In the process, you lock the rib cage to the pelvis and establish a solid zone of apposition (learn more here) for the diaphragm to function optimally. 4. You establish stiffness in the thoracic erectors, thereby minimizing a thoracic kyphosis. As I noted a few weeks ago, stiffness can be a great thing. 5. You pull the scapulae into retraction and depression, thereby increasing stiffness in the lower trapezius. 6. You pack the neck, ingraining the ideal cervical posture.
It’s no surprise that the deadlift is an outstanding strength exercise when it comes to correcting bad posture. However, is it enough? I don’t think so. Why? Well, first, you have to remember that postural considerations must be multiplanar. Just because we’re moving in the right direction in a bilateral, sagittal plane motion doesn’t mean that we’re ironing out issues in the frontal and transverse planes. Is there adequate control of femoral internal rotation and adduction by the hip external rotators/abductors? Do you see a big rib flair on the left side and a low shoulder on the right? Does an individual have adequate thoracic rotation to match up with the thoracic extension that’s been improved?
We really never work in a single plane during functional activities; life is a combination of many movements. Bad posture – to me at least – isn’t just characterized by how someone stands in the anatomical position, but how he or she is gets into specific positions. In other words, “posture” isn’t much different than “mobility.” Very simply, these terms imply stability within a given range-of-motion. Second, consider the law of repetitive motion, where “I” is injury to the tissues, “N” is the number of repetitions, “F” is the force of each repetition as a percentage of maximal strength, “A” is the amplitude (range of motion) of each repetition, and “R” is rest. To reduce injury to tissues (which negative postural adaptations can be considered), you have to work on each of the five factors in this equation.
You perform soft tissue work – whether it’s foam rolling or targeted manual therapy – on the excessively short or stiff tissues (I). You reduce the number of repetitions (length of time in poor posture: R), and in certain cases, you may work to strengthen an injured tissue (reduce F). You incorporate mobility drills (increase A) and avoid bad postures (increase R). Deadlifts certainly work in some of these capacities, but to say that they alone are enough overlooks the fact that adequate “abstinence” from poor postures is essential to making things work. To easily appreciate this, just ask: “Which is easier to address, an anterior pelvic tilt or a thoracic kyphosis?” The answer is unquestionably “thoracic kyphosis.” Why? It’s a lot easier to adjust your upper extremity posture than it to change the way your pelvis is positioned during weight-bearing. Every step re-ingrains faulty posture and “cancels out” your deadlifts unless you’re really careful. At the end of the day, deadlifts are arguably the single-most effective out there for correcting bad posture. However, in isolation, they simply aren’t enough, as you need everything from multiplanar mobilizations and strength exercises, to manual therapy, to breathing drills in combination with avoidance of bad posture during your daily life. These additions take “effective” and make it “optimal.”
I'm a little too busy to write a blog today, but the good news is that we were about due for a cute puppy video, anyway. This one is actually from the archives; it was taken over the winter, but I just discovered it in the videos on my laptop. You'll recognize Tank's partner in crime as Kansas City Royals pitcher Tim Collins.
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a deadlift technique tutorial!
Here's some recommended reading to kick off your week:
How to Use Less Plastic - While he was working with us at Cressey Performance, Brian St. Pierre really did a good job of bringing to light the problems with using a lot of plastic in packing and storing one's healthy food options. In this post, he talks about how to reduce the amount of plastic you use.
The Difference Between the Location of Symptoms and the Source of Dysfunction - This Mike Reinold blog highlights how the site of the pain isn't always the origin of that pain.
Value: The Key Ingredient to Fitness Business Success - Pat Rigsby really "gets it" when it comes to building fitness business up the right way, and posts like this show exactly why. I know a lot of fitness professionals read this blog, and this is must-read material for all of you.
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a deadlift technique tutorial!
Q: I know that you work a ton with baseball players and that medicine ball workouts are an integral part of their training at Cressey Sports Performance. However, I'm not a baseball player - or a competitive athlete in any discipline, for that matter - and I'm wondering if I should still consider adding medicine ball workouts to my strength and conditioning program. Are there benefits that I can't get from a traditional strength training program with comprehensive mobility drills?
A: This is a great question - and I'll start off by saying that we actually have quite a few athletes at Cressey Sports Performance who aren't baseball players. Plus, we firmly believe that everyone has an athlete in them, so our training mandates a functional carryover to the real world for everyone. Integrating some medicine ball workouts - even if the volume and frequency aren't as high as in our rotational sport athletes - can definitely add some benefits to a strength and conditioning program. Here are seven of those benefits:
1. Real World Transfer - Regardless of how effectively a strength and conditioning program is designed, it'll usually be very sagittal plane dominant. Integrating some rotational medicine ball training immediately increases the number of movements from which you can choose in the transverse and frontal planes.
2. Low-Impact Fat Loss Medleys - Look at all of the fat loss programs out there, and the overwhelming majority of them require a lot of impact - whether it's from sprinting/jogging, jumping rope, or taking step aerobics. Performing medleys of various medicine ball throws not only allows you to increase volume in a program while minimizing stress on the lower extremity, but also affords some much appreciated variety in a program that might otherwise be dominated by a lot of boring cardio equipment.
3. Better Integration of the Core -With a correctly executed rotational med ball throw, the power should come predominantly from the lower half - which means that it should be transmitted through a stable core so that the energy will be appropriately utilized with thoracic rotation to get to the arms and, in turn, the ball. This sequencing is no different than lifting a bag of groceries, swinging a golf club, or going up on one's tip-toes to grab something on the top shelf. If you move in the wrong areas (lumbar spine), you'll eventually wind up with back pain - but if you've handled the rotational challenges of medicine ball workouts with perfect technique, you'll be protected in the real world.
4. Improved Ankle, Hip, and Thoracic Spine Mobility - When performed correctly, medicine ball exercises serve as an outstanding way to "ingrain" the mobility you've established with a dynamic warm-up prior to training. Additionally, we utilize mobility and activation "fillers" between sets of medicine ball drills to not only slow people down between sets, but also address issues they have that might warrant extra attention.
5. A Way to Train Power Outside of the Sagittal Plane - Research has demonstrated that the biggest problems with folks as they grow older are not just the loss of strength, muscle mass, and bone density, but the loss of power - or how quickly they can apply force. It's this reduction in power that makes elderly individuals more susceptible to falls. We can't always train power "optimally" in some older adults because of ground reaction forces being too stressful, but most can learn to apply a significant amount of force to a medicine ball - whether it's rotationally or with an overhead stomp/throw variation. Everyone should obviously build a solid foundation of strength and mobility before undertaking these options, but when the time is right, they are great additions. On a related note, here's a video I filmed a while back that shows how medicine ball workouts fit into our overall approach to developing power in athletes.
6. Reduction of Asymmetry - Most of us are very one-side dominant, and while I have no aspirations of ever expecting folks to be completely symmetrical, I think that training with rotational medicine ball drills can go a long way in ironing out prominent hip and thoracic spine asymmetries. This has been one reason why they comprise such an integral part of our off-season baseball training programs; these players spend their entire lives in an asymmetrical sport.
7. A Way to Blow off Some Steam - Lifting weights is great for letting out some aggression after a bad day, but throwing a medicine ball is on a whole different level. In most cases, I encourage folks to try to break the medicine balls on every single throw. As you can see, we've broken quite a few...
When we integrate medicine ball workouts with our adult fitness clients, it's usually a matter of three sets two times per week between the mobility warm-ups and strength exercises. If it's used for fat loss, though, we'll include medleys at the end of the strength training programs.
As for a specific brand of medicine balls that we use, we've now made the switch to the Perform Better Extreme Soft Toss Medicine Balls. I've found that the rebound is optimal on these, and they still provide great durability (which has been an issue with not only other "padded" options, but also other rubber models that are using more filler materials). This is what our preferred option looks like:
With all that in mind, how many you break will be heavily dependent on how much you incorporate medicine ball workouts and how powerful your clients are. The medicine ball lifespan will be a lot longer in a facility catering to middle-aged women than it will be at Cressey Performance, where 85% of clients are baseball players executing 240-360 medicine ball throws per week during certain portions of the year.
If you're looking for a lot more detail on the specific medicine ball exercises and workouts we do with our clients, be sure to check out my Medicine Ball Master Class.
Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a deadlift technique tutorial!
When we first got him, my wife and I didn't allow him to come upstairs, as we wanted him to gradually adjust to the downstairs of our house and slowly introduce him to more space. Accordingly, to him, upstairs became the "great beyond," a place where unicorns played and milkbones rained down from the heavens. He would try like crazy to get up there when we took our eyes off him.
Then, one weekend in January of 2011, my wife and I were out of town to visit friends in Florida, so one of my minor leaguers and his wife watched Tank and the house. With us gone, he barked and cried at night - so they let him come upstairs to sleep with them in their bed. When we returned home, there was no turning back; he now sleeps in our bed - a change that he's made very clear is for good.
What's more interesting, though, is the fact that he's still infatuated with the upstairs portion of the house. He'll go up and take naps on the bed when my wife and I are downstairs, and if either of us goes upstairs to grab something, he'll race up after us to ensure that he doesn't miss a unicorn sighting or the opportunity to score a treat. Meanwhile, all the cool stuff - food, treats, his toys, cool scents of other people, stuff to chew, things to pee on, space to run around (including the door to the back yard) - are all still downstairs. If I was a dog, upstairs would be pretty boring - and the downstairs would be "where it's at." Puzzling, huh?
In case you couldn't tell from the title of this piece, there is a strength and conditioning parallel to this story. A lot of lifters start with the basics (the downstairs) and make great progress - only to abandon the "staple" strength exercises in favor of something new, unproven, and gimmicky (the upstairs). Then, even when they realize that the flavor-of-the-week stuff isn't all that it's cracked up to be, they don't go back to what worked in the first place. Why? They've convinced themselves that novelty is more important than efficacy, and that it's easier to do the fun new stuff than it is to get good with the basics. It's the kind of logic that makes me wonder if a lot of people eat paint chips.
The question, of course, becomes "How can we 'sell' the basics to a beginner who appreciates variety and novelty?" My response would simply be that variety and novelty can be synonymous with progression. I'll give you an example.
On the first day at Cressey Sports Performance, just about every new client learns the trap bar deadlift (assuming no injury that would contraindicate the exercise). As I outlined previously, it's an entry-level teaching progression that best allows lifters to grasp the concepts of hip hinging, vertical shin, neutral spine, and optimal hip extension patterning in spite of their mobility restrictions. It's the basic arithmetic before we get to calculus.
Once they've sufficiently learned the lift and progressed in the weight they've lifted, we can transition them to other deadlift variations, including sumo deadlifts, rack pulls, and trap bar with chains. Then, eventually, they may graduate to conventional and snatch grip deadlift technique. This set of progressions and regressions are combined with other strength training program variables - sets and reps, training frequency, exercise pairings, and the like - to give them the novelty they need - but without compromising the training effect.
I've seen football strength coaches who use the squat, bench press, and clean as their primary lifts for years on end. Do kids get stronger? Absolutely. Do they get bored as hell and absolutely disinterested in their less-than-optimal training programs? Absolutely. And, do they miss out on the rich proprioceptive environment that all young athletes should have? Absolutely.
So, there is a balance that must be discovered. On one hand, you need to stick to the basics so as to not compromise the training effect. On the other hand, you need to implement variety so as to not bore folks to death. The solution is to use variations of the basics.
To that end, at CSP, we change the strength training program every four weeks to modify exercise selection, regardless of a trainee's age and experience level. In our eyes, it provides the best balance of the basics and the novelty to keep folks motivated and progressing in their strength and conditioning programs.
I just received this feedback from a very happy customer and thought I'd share it with you:
Hi Eric,
I just completed Show and Go last week and tested my lifts yesterday. I thought you'd like to see the results.
Broad jump: 80" to 84"
Front box squat: 240 to 265
Bench press: 190 to 210
Trap bar deadlift: 310 to 340
Chin-up 3RM: 220.2 to 234.7
My body composition stayed pretty constant.
Show and Go followed Maximum Strength. Putting the two together, here are the results from the last 8 months (i.e., pre-Maximum Strength vs. post-Show & Go):
Broad jump: 77" to 84"
Front box squat: 155 to 265
Bench press: 150 to 210
Trap bar deadlift: 240 to 340
Chin-up 3RM: 197.8 to 234.7.
Not a bad way to spend eight months, especially at almost 43 years old and only 170 lbs. Thanks to you, I can, for the first time in my life, bench press more than my weight, front squat more than 1.5 times my weight, and deadlift almost twice my weight.
Thanks for producing these workout plans. I look forward to following the next program you release.
Best,
Scott Garland
As you can see, Show and Go makes for a great follow-up strength and conditioning program to Maximum Strength. If you haven't checked out both, I (like Scott) would encourage you to do so!
Maximum Strength: Get Your Strongest Body in 16 Weeks with the Ultimate Weight-Training ProgramShow and Go: High Performance Training to Look, Feel, and Move BetterSign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a deadlift technique tutorial!
