We use the 3D Strap a ton with our athletes, so I encouraged Cressey Sports Performance - MA coach Ethan Dyer to record a few of his favorite drills to share with a larger audience. Here they are (and I'll be chiming in with a second installment of this article myself very soon).

Also, if you haven't started using the 3D Strap with your athletes, I'd strongly encourage you to do so; they add a ton of options to your training bag of tricks. Definitely check them out at www.WhatsThatStrap.com and enter coupon code CRESSEY at checkout for free shipping on your order.

Enjoy! -EC

1. 3D Strap Lateral Sled Drag: One of the most notable benefits of the 3D Strap for baseball and softball athletes is that it doesn’t require any gripping. This means we can load up activities like reverse and lateral sled drags without having to worry about the neural and local fatigue associated with frying our grip and forearms, particularly in-season.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/rN3eWdUqnNs

2. 3D Strap Lateral Rotation: This is a piece of equipment that allows for significant tactile and sensory feedback while executing certain drills, like this lateral rotation. The helical, compressive forces and leading effect that the strap provides is unique and gives us plenty of ‘feel’ based options for our rotational athletes.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/zPc3c-3emb8

3. 3D Strap-Assisted Bowler Squat: The 3D Strap provides a ton of value for loaded single leg activities like this bowler squat. In addition to the previously mentioned ‘feel’ based input we get, we’re able to add significant loading to exercises where we might be looking for resisted or assisted range of motion.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/hXWuLpEPCS0

4. Split-Stance 3D Strap-Resisted Row w/Alternate Arm Reach: Even in post-surgical contexts, we can drive rotation through the upper body without needing to do any gripping. This may be less significant loading than an actual cable row, but if we’re looking to restore / maintain range of motion at the ribcage post-surgery, this kind of activity can be an excellent choice.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/v9Iq6CfAmPE

5. 3D Strap-Resisted Heiden with Stick: The strap isn’t a band, meaning it’s non-elastic. Because of this we can get more out of activities like resisted jumps for certain athletes. When we yank on the strap the force is applied over a very small amount of time, which should bias getting into and out of the cut with greater velocity. This cannot be done to the same extent with a band, making the 3D Strap a useful tool while programming for change of direction or return to run progressions.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/zNCIR4VxFEU

As you can see, this is an awesome piece of equipment that can really yield a variety of training benefits. We'll be back soon with more of our favorites, but in the meantime, you can check it out at www.WhatsThatStrap.com and enter coupon code CRESSEY at checkout for free shipping.

About the Author

Ethan Dyer serves as a Strength & Conditioning coach at Cressey Sports Performance. He started as a client at CSP and eventually went on to intern at CSP-MA. Following another internship at Indianapolis Fitness and Sports Training, Ethan joined the CSP-MA team. He was a pitcher at the College of the Holy Cross before transferring to Endicott College to complete his undergraduate work with a major in Exercise Science and minor in Psychology. A Certified Strength and Conditioning Coach through the National Strength and Conditioning Association, Ethan has been a volunteer with both the Miracle League and Special Olympics, and has a passion for working with young athletes to help them fall in love with training while avoiding injury. You can follow him on Instagram at @Ethan___Dyer.

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I've already highlighted the top articles I put out at EricCressey.com in 2022, so now it's time for the top guest posts of the year. Here goes…

1. Exercise of the Week: Barbell Drop Split-Squat - Cressey Sports Performance - MA coach Ethan Dyer introduced a single-leg progression that delivers some extra benefits over classic lunges and split squats.

2. 5 Warm-up Options to Improve Hip Extension - The ability to access hip extension while the opposite hip flexes is crucial in sprinting, throwing, hitting, and a myriad of other athletic endeavors. In this article, Cressey Sports Performance - Florida coach Dylan Lidge outlined a few dynamic ways to challenge hip extension in a warm-up.

3. 5 Drills for Dynamic Trunk Deceleration - Cressey Sports Performance - Florida coach Eduardo Valle shared five deceleration drills that are helpful for just about any type of athletes, but especially in the rotational realm we live in on a daily basis.

4. 4 Training Principles to Make the Most of Your Speed Work - There's a heavy bias toward contralateral pressing and rowing in today's strength and community world, and as Ethan Dyer (again!) shared in this article, we need to give ipsilateral options some love.

5. Wall March Variations for the Win - Wall marches are drills that have been used commonly over the years in the strength and conditioning and track and field communities. Unfortunately, many coaches don’t appreciate how much you can build on the basic wall march to teach a number of different movement competencies. In this article,  Dylan Lidge shared some of our favorite variations on this classic drill.

I'll be back soon with more highlights from 2022.

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Today's guest post comes from Cressey Sports Performance coach, Ethan Dyer. 

The Bear Push-Up is an upper body movement we’ve been using with our athletes who struggle to find effective shoulder internal rotation and traditional protraction during push-ups from the floor or certain cable presses.

Generally, in throwers, we see the gradual loss of gross internal rotation over the course of a career and sometimes over the course of a season. This is largely due to bony adaptations (humeral retroversion), but also due to adaptations to the eccentric stress they encounter at the arm during a throw - especially on the mound. While a loss of external rotation in throwers is typically more problematic than a loss of internal rotation, really any loss of motion should be addressed - and this drill (as part of a comprehensive program) can help offset the gradual loss of IR we might see.

When we place the athlete in a position of flexion at the hip and knee, we’re pulling them away from what we’d traditionally think of as anterior pelvic tilt and gross extension. We’re giving them a better chance to capture some traditional flexion through their upper back in a way that should allow for as much internal rotation and protraction as possible through the press.

There’s even more value here - in wrist extension, some throwers lack the requisite internal rotation through their distal forearm and hand needed to perform effective push-ups from the ground. By using a barbell, we can mitigate this issue while simultaneously biasing additional internal rotation at the shoulders due to the pronated grip.

All of this comes together to make the bear push-up a great choice for throwers who need to drive a little more internal rotation at the shoulder, while getting in some pressing volume with an accessory-type movement. If your push-ups just don’t look right, or they struggle to find good scapular movement around the rib cage even when cued up, give these a shot. Depending on the rest of the day, you’re looking at 2-3 sets of 12-15 or something like 3-5 sets of 6-8.

About the Author

Ethan Dyer serves as a Strength & Conditioning coach at Cressey Sports Performance. He started as a client at CSP and eventually went on to intern at CSP-MA. Following another internship at Indianapolis Fitness and Sports Training, Ethan joined the CSP-MA team. He was a pitcher at the College of the Holy Cross before transferring to Endicott College to complete his undergraduate work with a major in Exercise Science and minor in Psychology. A Certified Strength and Conditioning Coach through the National Strength and Conditioning Association, Ethan has been a volunteer with both the Miracle League and Special Olympics, and has a passion for working with young athletes to help them fall in love with training while avoiding injury. You can follow him on Instagram at @Ethan___Dyer.

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Today's guest post comes from Cressey Sports Performance coach, Ethan Dyer. 

The current sports performance training meta as it pertains to unilateral pressing and rowing exercises is to lean on contralateral variations as the default. This is because contralateral activities generally allow for greater force production due to the extension bias associated with those movements.

A problem with this is that cable exercises will always be harder to load than most pressing and rowing where dumbbells or kettlebells (and, of course, barbells) are involved. So, if 90% of the time we assume that cables are a poor choice when prioritizing load, what can we really use a cable press or a cable row to accomplish? I would argue that putting a dent in hip range of motion to allow for improved on-field movement is the best answer.

With a split-stance contralateral cable row, for example, the concentric portion of the movement is going to bias external rotation at the front hip. The actual activity of rowing is pulling us away from our front side. The flip side of this is when we find internal rotation on our front side during a split-stance ipsilateral row; the preponderance of concentric activity pulls us into our front hip.

The same logic applies to pressing. During a contralateral split-stance cable press, for example, the activity carries us into our front hip (IR), whereas an ipsilateral press is going to carry us out of our front hip (ER).

Now that we’ve established what we can accomplish with these movements in terms of rotation, we can make programming decisions based on the athlete we have in front of us. It’s important that we base these decisions on their task and performance as opposed to strictly looking at table range-of-motion measures (which may or may not tell us how they’re going to move on the field).

If we have a left-handed pitcher who struggles to find IR at their glove-side hip after front foot strike, a left-side only contralateral press and a right-side only ipsilateral row can be useful weapons. If we have a receiver or an attacker who struggles to juke and change direction at higher sprint speeds, leaning on contralateral rowing and ipsilateral pressing to get/keep them out of a hip can be a useful strategy.

Besides the obvious programming implications here, there is an important overarching rule that should be appreciated as well. It’s fine to have multiple priorities - qualities that you are training for - within a program, but we get in trouble when we try to use an exercise to target multiple or all qualities at once. Cable rows and presses are perfect examples.

[bctt tweet="When we use an exercise to improve both force production and range of motion, we end up doing neither to the extent that we desire. We'd be wise to learn from the Latin writer Syrus, who said “To do two things at once is to do neither”."]

About the Author

Ethan Dyer serves as a Strength & Conditioning coach at Cressey Sports Performance. He started as a client at CSP and eventually went on to intern at CSP-MA. Following another internship at Indianapolis Fitness and Sports Training, Ethan joined the CSP-MA team. He was a pitcher at the College of the Holy Cross before transferring to Endicott College to complete his undergraduate work with a major in Exercise Science and minor in Psychology. A Certified Strength and Conditioning Coach through the National Strength and Conditioning Association, Ethan has been a volunteer with both the Miracle League and Special Olympics, and has a passion for working with young athletes to help them fall in love with training while avoiding injury. You can follow him on Instagram at @Ethan___Dyer.

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Today's guest post comes from Cressey Sports Performance coach, Ethan Dyer. 

The Barbell Drop Split Squat is a lift we’ve been using with some of our stiffer athletes this time of year (transition from spring to summer season) at CSP. While it can be done with a safety squat bar, goblet set-up, or back squat position, this video depicts the anterior loaded (front squat grip ) version:

A majority of the high level arms we see are stiffer through their lower bodies, especially in terms of internal rotation. This is usually fine if they have adequate external rotation elsewhere - allowing enough range of motion on the mound to get into and out of positions and produce velocity/spin, ideally without mandating undesirable consequences up the chain (i.e., excessive spine or shoulder motion).

The athlete in this case doesn’t have the ROM to get into the bottom of a split squat or reverse lunge without discomfort or suboptimal mechanics, so we use the drop squat instead. By momentarily unweighting the pelvis on the front side (relative to the backside), he finds a position of IR at the bottom that he otherwise wouldn’t be able to. This is a great example of how we can still work on traditional output qualities without compromising on positions.

An ancillary benefit here is finding a jump from eccentric to concentric orientation and from ER to IR as quickly as possible, which we otherwise don’t see a ton of in the gym - especially with classic "lower body" lifts. Additionally, an athlete has to work to quickly develop force - which typifies the front hip pull-back that takes place with hitting and pitching.

All of this comes together to make the drop split squat a great choice for baseball players this time of year. We can effectively work around dramatic ROM issues that would otherwise take months to clean up (save it for the offseason), while keeping our guys athletic and letting them get into and out of important positions with load/velocity in the gym. If you have someone who’s in-season or a few weeks out, stick to 3-4 sets of 3-4 reps per side.

About the Author

Ethan Dyer serves as a Strength & Conditioning coach at Cressey Sports Performance. He started as a client at CSP and eventually went on to intern at CSP-MA. Following another internship at Indianapolis Fitness and Sports Training, Ethan joined the CSP-MA team. He was a pitcher at the College of the Holy Cross before transferring to Endicott College to complete his undergraduate work with a major in Exercise Science and minor in Psychology. A Certified Strength and Conditioning Coach through the National Strength and Conditioning Association, Ethan has been a volunteer with both the Miracle League and Special Olympics, and has a passion for working with young athletes to help them fall in love with training while avoiding injury. You can follow him on Instagram at @Ethan___Dyer.

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Today's guest post comes from Cressey Sports Performance - MA coach, Ethan Dyer.

The Half-Kneeling Wall-Press 1-Arm J-Band Trap Raise is a new variation we’ve been using a lot with our more hypermobile (loose jointed) and/or younger athletes here at CSP. We get the same value as a traditional J-Band trap raise, but with a small tweak that can be a huge difference maker for certain athletes.

Important Coaching Cues:

Make sure we nail our half-kneeling position. Any postural issues down the chain will create interference up the chain. Undue lumbar extension and/or "hip hike" on one side needs to be taken care of before we can worry about the rest of the exercise.

Our wall press needs to be aggressive enough to make a difference. This is what separates this exercise from a standard J-Band trap raise or "Y." By actively reaching with our off hand, we push our rib cage back - allowing for better scapulothoracic (shoulder blade on rib cage) congruency and ideally more effective retraction/upward rotation. Reaching against a hard surface gives us even more stability in that position, and this is particularly useful for our looser, floppier guys (you know who you are).

As we perform the trap raise we need to be careful not to lose our initial posture. If we allow compensatory movement in the lower extremity or the torso, we are no longer isolating the desirable posterior tilt and upward rotation and end up performing what is essentially a full-body exercise.

To progress this, stand the athlete up (short-split or split-stance). Removing the wall will make this more difficult but may dramatically change the stimulus depending on the athlete.

We love the J-Band "Junior" resistance for this exercise; the traditional resistance J-Bands will bury a lot of people here. As with other J-Band drills, we get a lot of value without asking our athletes to grip anything (think high throwing volume or return-to-throw).

This variation is probably most useful in the 8 to 12 rep range, with a varying number of sets depending on its location in a program (part of a warm-up or movement day, or accessory work during a lift).

About the Author

Ethan Dyer serves as a Strength & Conditioning coach at Cressey Sports Performance. He started as a client at CSP and eventually went on to intern at CSP-MA. Following another internship at Indianapolis Fitness and Sports Training, Ethan joined the CSP-MA team. He was a pitcher at the College of the Holy Cross before transferring to Endicott College to complete his undergraduate work with a major in Exercise Science and minor in Psychology. A Certified Strength and Conditioning Coach through the National Strength and Conditioning Association, Ethan has been a volunteer with both the Miracle League and Special Olympics, and has a passion for working with young athletes to help them fall in love with training while avoiding injury. You can follow him on Instagram at @Ethan___Dyer.

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