As many of you know, Bill Hartman, Mike Robertson, and I are very close to releasing a new product. In fact, we spent the weekend going through edits on the footage and pulling together the tag-along manuals.
This new product includes a lot of our newer perspectives on assessment and corrective exercise. Many of the drills we outline actually piggyback on those we outlined with our previous DVDs, Magnificent Mobility and Inside-Out. There is even a bit of overlap where we discuss how the "older" drills fit into our up-to-date progressions.
So, while the MM and I/O DVDs might be a few years old, the good news is that the human body hasn't evolved dramatically since then - so these drills are still highly effective. However, with new products, older products sometimes get forgotten - and that's why we figured we'd throw out this opportunity to grab up these two previous products at a big discount.
Here's the deal...
30% off on Magnificent Mobility and Inside-Out from Monday, August 31 through Wednesday, September 2. All you need to do is head over to the RobertsonTrainingSystems.com Products Page and add the item(s) to your cart. At checkout, enter the coupon code "FALL09" (all caps, no quotation marks) and the discount will be applied.
Don't miss this last chance to get two great products at a great discount!
Here I sit at my desk on a Friday morning in an empty, 100% quiet Cressey Performance. I'm not sure that's ever happened before - and it won't last long, as clients start rolling in about 23 minutes from now. In other words, there goes my opportunity to create a well thought-out, organized, and relevant blog post. Let the randomness begin.
1. Here's an interesting journal article looking at those with functional ankle instability also presented with delayed trunk reflexes. In other words, if you've had an ankle sprain without thorough rehabilitation, it relates to a later onset of trunk muscle activation. This closely parallels a lot of the stuff I covered in The Truth About Unstable Surface Training E-Book, as unstable surface training has been tremendously effective in correcting the proprioceptive delay we see in the peroneals following ankle sprains.
I guess you could say that this is one more "yea" vote in favor of the whole kinetic chain concept. Mess up an ankle and you very might be dealing with a knee, hip, or lower back issue sooner than later.
2. For the second year in a row, I'll be speaking at Fantasy Day at Fenway Park. If you're looking for a good time to benefit a great cause (The Jimmy Fund), click here for more information. The event is July 18.
3. Random fact: when preparing for the new DVD, Mike Robertson and I realized that Magnificent Mobility has sold in over 50 countries. Apparently, the Norwegians and Indonesians really dig Mike's smooth Midwestern drawl.
4. Speaking of Mike, check out this great blog post from him: The Starving Artist
That's all for this week. Have a great weekend!
I have the normal weekly newsletter posted below, but first a quick announcement: Mike Robertson, Bill Hartman, and I just filmed a new DVD set! Those of you who have enjoyed all of our products individually can now see what happens when the three of us collaborate. For more information, check out today's blog post: A Sneak Peak at the New Project.
The Law of Repetitive Motion: Part 2
In last week's newsletter, I talked about the first three component of the law of repetitive motion: "I" (injury/insult), "N" (number of repetitions), and "F" (the force of each repetition, expressed as a percentage of maximal strength).
This week, I'll discuss the "A" and the "R" of this equation. To begin, amplitude, stated simply, is range of motion. If we spend our entire lives in limited ranges of motion, we run into problems.
Obviously, this refers to those who sit too often and too long - particularly in poor postures. I'm a big believer that the best posture is the one that is constantly changing, so I always encourage people to try to get up and move around every 20-30 minutes whenever possible. If not, I love the idea of simply "shuffling" positions at your computer. Complement this constant fluctuation of posture with some good training to open up the hips and thoracic spine, and strengthen the upper back and glutes, and you'll find that being stuck in a job with a small amplitude is a "manageable" problem.
Amplitude can also refer to only doing certain exercises in the gym, particularly those who exercise through a partial range of motion. It might be people who simply press too often and pull too infrequently, or those who perform a lot of bilateral exercises, but nothing unilateral. We aren't just talking about ranges of motion at the joints; we are also talking about the muscles recruited and type of muscle action - concentric, eccentric, isometric - that takes place.
Lastly, working at a specific task for extended periods of time can be a huge issue for some. Just ask musicians, factory line workers, and even baseball pitchers. These issues can all impose huge asymmetries that must be addressed both directly (soft tissue work, flexibility training) and indirectly (training the contralateral side, or just exposing the individual to a broader excursion of movement outside this specific task).
So, all that in mind, improving amplitude is all about increasing range of motion in one's daily life. Of course, this must be specific range of motion. You wouldn't, for instance, want to increase lumbar spine range of motion in most back pain patients, but you would want to optimize hip and thoracic spine mobility.
Rest, the "R" in our equation, is pretty straight-forward: if a tissue is angry, you need to give it time to settle down. However, just stopping all exercise isn't always the best bet.
Often, it's simply a matter of keeping the stress on the tissue below its capacity for loading. As a great example, a lot of manual therapists with whom I've worked actually like people to go out and lightly load tissues that have just been worked in order to teach the tissue to "deform" properly. For instance, I got a little "Graston Loving" on my biceps a while back, and spent the rest of the day lightly loading the tissues and doing some prolonged stretching sets. It worked like a charm.
Taking it a step further, though, much of the time, it's about redistributing stress. For instance, someone with anterior knee pain may not be able to do a more quad-dominant squat, but instructing that same lifter to sit back into the glutes and hamstrings more can markedly take down the stress on the anterior knee. Sure, it changes the muscular recruitment of the exercise, but the lifter derives great benefit and keeps the loading on the affected tissues below capacity. And, in this particular case, he's strengthening the posterior chain muscles that almost always help to prevent anterior knee pain in the first place.
That wraps up our look at the law of repetitive motion. It's certainly not an exhaustive review, but my hope is that it got you thinking just enough to consider how this law applies to the issues you see on a daily basis, as well as those you want to prevent from ever reaching threshold. For more information, check out the Building the Efficient Athlete DVD Set.
I got this question the other day and thought I'd share my response:
Q: When significant improvements in flexibility are either desired or needed, do you have any general suggestions with regard to what method(s) and type of schedule set-up (frequency, duration of session, etc.) would help accomplish this in the most timely and efficient manner possible?
A: As always, my answer would be "it depends." And, more specifically, it depends on whether you are talking about short or stiff tissue.
If a tissue is legitimately short - meaning that it has lost sarcomeres due to chronic immobilization - longer duration holds are ideal. Bill Hartman and Mike Robertson go into great detail in covering this in the Indianapolis Performance Enhancement DVD Set, as I noted HERE.
If you are dealing with someone with capsular issues (outside the scope of practice of the personal trainers and strength coaches out there, in most cases), then you might just leave them alone with 15 minutes of low-load passive stretching (e.g., theraband wrapped around a DB to hold the shoulder in external rotation after a period in a sling). Going back to our "loss of sarcomeres" scenario, if you're dealing with something more muscular-only issues, the least you'll want is five 30s holds throughout the day, in my experience. Or, if feeling bold, you can have people set up for 3x5min holds or 1x15min hold. In both cases, total duration over the course of the day is likely more important than duration per stretch.
If it's stiff, in order to get it to relax, you likely need to train an adjacent tissue that acts as a synergist. A good example would be strengthening the lower traps to take the stress off chronically overused upper traps and the stiff neck that follows. Or, we have activating the glutes to take the stress off the lumbar erectors and/or hamstrings and adductor magnus. Here is a great blog post from Bill Hartman that closely illustrates the point that you don't necessarily have to stretch a muscle to reduce its stiffness.
Of course, you can never go wrong with integrating a good dynamic warm-up program prior to exercise, as this option challenges both range-of-motion and stability to provide a comprehensive training effect in a matter of minutes.
So, in the end, it's different strokes for different folks - at different times, with different issues. Keep an eye out for an upcoming project from Bill, Mike, and I that really delves into this in great detail. It'll be the most comprehensive resource out there for self-assessment and corrective exercise.
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 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.
Q: How should I warm up properly before sprinting sessions? Back in the day when I did sports my quads were always prone to injuries. Funny thing is I haven't had any problems when doing squats of any kind. Recently I decided to involve some alactic work in my workout and immediately pulled a quad doing sprints. It's obviously something wrong with my warm-up!
A: Saying "pulled quad" might be a little bit too general. In reality, most of the time, you're looking at a rectus femoris strain. While it is one of the quadriceps, the rectus femoris is also active as a hip flexor. So, as the picture below shows, it crosses two joints.
The rectus femoris is responsible for both hip flexion and knee extension. So, as you can imagine, it is placed on a huge stretch when an athlete goes into a position of hip extension and knee flexion - kind of like this:
You're asking the rectus femoris to go on a huge stretch there - and under very high velocities. With a squat, you're not putting it on full stretch, as the hip and knee are both flexed. So, with that in mind, it's not surprising at all that sprinting would bother your "quad" when squatting doesn't - especially since we know the overwhelming majority of folks out there are tight in the rectus femoris. Why?
Well, first, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to know that, as a society, we sit far too much. Second, though, is the fact that most people never really get above 90 degrees of hip flexion in anything that they do. Mike Boyle has done a great job of outlining how we can develop imbalanced hip flexion patterns; essentially, we never use our psoas, the only hip flexor active above 90 degrees of hip flexion. The picture below is kind of rudimentary (and somewhat awkward), but it shows what I'm getting at with respect to the advantageous attachment points for psoas with respect to hip flexion above 90 degrees:
How many of the folks at your gym are getting 90+ degrees of hip flexion with their treadmill, stairclimber, and elliptical work? None. So, we underuse psoas, and overuse rectus - and it shortens up over time. Take a short muscle through a maximal stretch at high-velocities, and it's going to hate you. So, what to do?
Well, first, I'd recommend running through some warm-ups from Assess and Correct, and that'll cover a lot of the fundamentals (especially if you go through the assessments to figure out what else is going on). One important thing that'll cover is activation work for psoas; Kevin Neeld demonstrates one option here:
Second, just add in some targeted static stretching for the rectus femoris a few times a day using this stretch (don't start using it until the "pulled quad" has settled down, though).
Third, and most importantly, ease your way into sprinting. Not everyone is prepared to just jump right in full-throttle. I discuss this in further detail in my contribution to the most recent Mythbusters article at T-Nation. Basically, just get out there twice a week and do some 60-yd build-ups at 80% of your best on a grass field.
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In Part 1 of this series, we outlined several crucial prerequisites to understanding the nature of lower back pain.
In this installment, I've got a few more thoughts in this regard, and then we'll get to work on strategies for preventing these problems in the first place, and working around them once they're in place. You don't need me to tell you that back pain - any chink in your armor, for that matter - will prevent you from making progress in the gym.
Continue reading...
Rethinking Interval Training
I love interval training, but one of the problems we commonly run into - particularly if someone isn't prepared physically to sprint, or doesn't have a place to do it because of weather restrictions - is that repetitive, low-amplitude motions are our only options. In other words, it has to just be cycling, elliptical, or stairclimber. While slideboard work, medicine ball medleys, barbell complexes, and sled pushing definitely help to work around these problems, when it comes down to it, many of them still don't give certain folks the variety they need in their exercise programming.
In our Building the Efficient Athlete seminar, Mike Robertson and I spoke about the law of repetitive motion: I = NF/AR
In this equation, injury equals the number of repetitions multiplied by the frequency of those repetitions, divided by the amplitude of each repetition times the rest interval. While you can attack each of these five factors differently (and I will in a future newsletter), the take-home point with respect to today's discussion is that simply increasing the amplitude - or range-of-motion - in one's daily life can reduce (or eliminate) the presence or severity of overuse conditions.
For that reason, I often substitute one or both of two different training modalities for client's interval training.
The first is dynamic flexibility circuits with little to no rest between sets. In this scenario, we program 2-3 different mobility/activation drills for each inefficiency the athlete displays, and then combine them in a series of drills. Ideally, as many of these drills are done in the standing position as possible. Let's say a client has poor thoracic spine mobility, a horrific Thomas test, bad glute function, and poor hip external rotation. Here's what his circuit might look like:
a) 1-leg supine bridge
b) wall hip flexor mobilizations
c) 3-point extension-rotations
d) cradle walks
e) overhead lunge walks
f) walking spiderman with overhead reach
g) yoga push-ups
h) 1-leg SLDL walks
(you can find videos of many of these exercises in the Assess and Correct DVD set, and I'll have more information on the rest down the road)
Is this circuit going to completely "gas" an athlete? Absolutely not. However, it is going to make him/her better in light of the inefficiencies I outlined above - and you don't have to leave the gym exhausted to have improved.
The second option is to simply take a series of resistance training exercises with a corrective emphasis (sometimes integrates with the drills outlined above) and put them in a series of supersets. For these exercises, the load utilized should only be about 30% of 1-rep max. I outlined this option a while back in my article, Cardio Confusion. Here's an example I used with an online consulting client recently:
A1) Overhead broomstick walking Lunges (3x10/side)
A2) Push-ups (3x12)
B1) Face pulls (3x15)
B2) Body weight only reverse lunges (3x10/side)
C1) 1-leg SLDL Walk (2x6/side)
C2) Band external rotations - arm adducted (2x15/side)
D1) Behind-the-neck band pullaparts (2x15)
D2) Bowler Squats (2x10/side)
This series is preceded by foam rolling and a dynamic flexibility warm-up, and can be followed by more "traditional" interval training.
Like I said earlier, I'm still all for both traditional and non-traditional interval training. Initiative like I outlined above, though, can serve as a nice change of pace and work in corrective exercise while keeping the heart rate up. Be as creative as you'd like and you'll see great results; the sky is the limit in terms of the combinations you can use.
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