Here is just a small taste of what you can expect with the Optimal Shoulder Performance DVD set:
For more information on the product and to order, check out www.ShoulderPerformance.com.
I'm thrilled to announce that Mike Reinold and my new project, Optimal Shoulder Performance: From Rehabilitation to High Performance, is now available. This four DVD set blends the world of rehabilitation and strength and conditioning like no other product on the market. For more information on the product and to order, check out www.ShoulderPerformance.com.
The introductory price will not last long, so don't delay!
A few weeks ago, I gave you a quick peek at an excerpt from one of my presentations in our new Optimal Shoulder Performance DVD set. Today, I thought you might like to check out a bit from Mike Reinold, my collaborator on the project. This DVD set should be out soon, so be sure to subscribe to my FREE newsletter if you want to be among the first notified.
Happy St. Patrick's Day! I was actually going to take today off - not just in honor of my Irish heritage, but because I was hoping to work from home and catch up on work. As it turns out, I went in to the facility for our staff in-service (given by Brian St. Pierre, who is featured below), some coaching of a dozen or so of our in-season baseball guys, and a quick training session of my own. Long story short, my "day off" turned into six hours at the facility, plus almost three hours in the car thanks to Boston traffic and a bunch of detours due to flooding after all the rain we've received.
Long story short, all this means that I didn't get around to writing a blog today - but fortunately for me, a few other bright minds did:
The China Study Fallacy - This is a great piece from Brian St. Pierre on how flawed the perspectives of many "experts" is when it comes to interpreting the results of the China Study. It's an awesome read.
Measuring Humeral Retroversion - This blog from Mike Reinold will interest those in the crowd who are (like me) shoulder geeks. If you train overhead throwing athletes, you definitely better understand retroversion. It's a concept Mike and I spend considerable time on in our new Optimal Shoulder Performance DVD set.
The Proactive Patient - This is definitely one of the articles that I enjoyed writing the most, as it teaches people to be advocates for themselves during the process of trying to get/stay healthy.
1.I spent about 2.5 days in Las Vegas earlier this week to present at the NSCA Personal Trainers Conference. I really enjoyed the event, as it was a chance to interact with a lot of new people (I don't speak out west very often) and hopefully help some enthusiastic, up-and-coming trainers add to their skill sets. In my last presentation, Shoulder Assessment and Corrective Exercise, (to about 50 people), when I asked who had heard of scapulohumeral rhythm, not a single hand went up. I was very surprised that this was something that hadn't been covered sufficiently in undergraduate curricula or the certification process, as it's really important, in my eyes.
The good news, however, is that Mike Reinold and I covered this topic (and many others) in great detail in our Optimal Shoulder Performance DVD set. We'll be making the final revisions in the next few days, and it should be available within 2-3 weeks. If you want to be among the first notified of the awesome one-week only pre-sale price, definitely subscribe to my free newsletter HERE.
2. If you're looking to have some fun and help CP athlete Kevin Youkilis raise some money for a great cause, check out the "Facial Hair Frenzy" fundraiser at Youk's Hits for Kids. For each dollar you donate, you get one vote for which facial hair style - Goatee, Mustache, Clean Shaven, or Fu Manchu - Youk rocks on opening day.
3. All my "guinea pigs" for my new project are completing Phase 1 today/tomorrow, and will be embarking on phase 2 on Monday. The feedback has been great thus far, and I'm pretty excited for the June/July release of the comprehensive program (which, unfortunately, still remains unnamed). The beginning of each new phase means that I have to do about 45-50 exercise demonstrations, and that fun 90-minute task was yesterday.
4. In What I Learned in 2009, I alluded to the fact that we're doing more ground-to-standing transitions in our training, and mentioned that Rollover Get-up and Go Starts were one of those drills. Unfortunately, the video was accidentally omitted from the article, so I thought I'd feature it here. Thanks to Blue Jays prospect Tim Collins for the demonstration.
5. We're picking out the color schemes for all the rooms in our new house this week, and I have to be honest here. While I'm unbelievably excited about moving into a new house, I am likely going to jab a hot poker in my eyes if I have to stare at a color sample for another 20 minutes to determine the difference between "nantucket fog" and "james river gray." The humor in all of this is that my fiancee is an optometrist and has come right out and said that she believes me to be partially color blind - which means that I shouldn't even be allowed to have an opinion on the matter in the first place!
Up next, picking out a refrigerator and mailbox. And here I was thinking that I'd get a mini-vacation now that the baseball season was underway!
This week has been a busy and exciting one, to say the least.
1. There's no more fitting way to start this list of random thoughts off than with a huge congratulations to CP athlete and Team USA bobsledder Bree Schaaf, who finished 5th at the Olympics on Wednesday night. I first started working with Bree in July of 2007 when she was working her way up the ranks as a skeleton competitor for the US National Team (she was as high as 12th in the world at one point) after her collegiate volleyball career ended. A few months later, Bree decided to make the switch to bobsled - and just two years later, wound up in the Olympics.
The whole Cressey Performance "Extended Family" is incredibly proud of her hard work and how far she's come.
To check out videos of Bree's four runs, head over to nbcolympics.com.
2. My fiancee and I had an offer accepted on a house this week as well, so between negotiations/offers and making arrangements for mortgage stuff, a home inspection, appraisal, and dates for the P&S and closing, it's been a hectic week. It'll all be worth it, though, as the move will substantially reduce my commute time (by at least 80 minutes per day!) and, obviously, improve my productivity and our quality of life. Needless to say, we are really excited about how things are developing and love what will be our new house.
3. I'm experimenting with some Underarmour Performance mouthwear right now in my training, thanks to a generous gift from CP client Dr. Jeff Tocci, who fits dozens of these each week for athletes and non-athletes alike.
There is actually quite a bit of research supporting these initiatives, so thanks to Jeff, I get to put it to the test while I'm lifting heavy stuff this week to see how I respond. So far, so good.
4. Mike Reinold and I are working hard to put the finishing touches on our new DVD set, Optimal Shoulder Performance. We definitely plan to have it up and running sometime in March.
5. No surprise here, but pitchers who throw harder are more likely to develop elbow issues. You can look at this transiently in the context of the faster arm speed placing more stress on both the active and passive restraints. However, more chronically, if you consider that the arm is moving faster, you'll realize that the deceleration-imposed adaptations (more specifically, the muscle shortening that comes from repeated eccentric exercise exposures) can lead to chronic adaptations (loss of elbow extension and shoulder internal rotation) that can place more stress on the elbow. Likewise, stud pitchers who throw the crap out of the ball are more likely to get overused - so it's really a triple whammy working against you if you throw hard.
That said, I'd rather throw 100mph with a higher risk of injury than throw 76mph and get shelled in some beer league.
Here is this week's list of recommended reading:
Final Phase Fat Loss - As a quick follow-up to our interview with John Romaniello earlier this week, just a reminder that today is the last day to get the low "Grand Opening" price on this great fat loss resource. It's among the best I've seen.
The college coach of one of our current pro baseball players was asking me about the rotator cuff program he's doing with us now, and I figured I'd turn it into today's topic. We take a bit of a different approach with it than you'll see with a lot of guys in the industry, and it's basically dictated by three assertions/assumptions:
1. The true function of the rotator cuff is to stabilize the humeral head on the glenoid (shoulder socket). While external rotation is important for deceleration of the crazy internal rotation velocity seen with throwing, it's stabilization that we're really after. As you can see, the humeral head is too large to allow for great surface area contact with the glenoid.
My feeling is that the bigger muscles - particularly scapular stabilizers, the core, and the lower half - will decelerate the crazy velocities we see as long as mechanics are effective and the deceleration arc is long enough.
2. The shoulder internally rotates at over 7,000°/s during acceleration; that's the fastest motion in all of sports. There's no way that the rotator cuff muscles alone with their small cross-sectional area can decelerate it. And, to take it a step further, there isn't much that some rubber tubing is going to do to help the cause (aside from just promoting blood flow - although I'd rather get that in a more global sense with full-body flexibility circuits, as I discussed HERE).
More important than blood flow is getting range of motion (ROM) back (particularly elbow extension and shoulder internal rotation) after a pitching outing. In my experience, losses in ROM get guys injured faster than weakness, in my experience. I've seen quite a few people come to me who have healthy shoulders, but test poorly on classic rotator cuff strength measures. Why? Perhaps they are very strong in their scapular stabilizers, core, and lower half and have become efficient enough to handle more of the deceleration demands in areas other than the rotator cuff. Or, they may just be lucky; rotator cuff strength is still important!
3. We've mocked on the conventional bodybuilding community for training muscles and not movements: chest day, quads day - you get the picture. Meanwhile, the baseball community is devoting five days a week to training muscles with cross-sectional areas smaller than any of these!
I've had multiple discussions with Mike Reinold that reaffirm this indirectly; he emphasizes that one should never train the rotator cuff to failure, as that's not how it works in the real world. Our job is to enhance not just its strength, but also its proprioception and rate of force development. If we chronically abuse it with training on top of the crazy demands of throwing, we never really know how strong the rotator cuff actually is. It makes you wonder how many guys in the baseball world actually have exhausted and chronically overtrained rotator cuff muscles as opposed to weak rotator cuff muscles!
With these three assertions in mind, most of our guys in the off-season will have four days of rotator cuff work spread out over two "types" of training. Days 1 and 3 (say, Monday and Thursday) would be more rhythmic stabilization drills similar to this (although the options are really only limited by your imagination):
The other two days are more classic rotator cuff work that prioritizes external rotation and horizontal abduction (we never do empty cans). I do a lot of work with cables here, plus a lot in the side-lying position (EMG activity for the cuff is highest here).
We'll also do a lot of manual resistance external rotation stuff, as it kind of "blends" conventional cuff work with rhythmic stabilizations due to the unstable load. Here's one option:
Later in the off-season, we'll throw in some one-arm medicine ball deceleration catches and external rotation tosses to the wall to get the thoracic spine and hips ready for the full-body demands of throwing.
Keep in mind that - as I noted - rotator cuff exercises are just one piece of the puzzle. These are one component of a larger overall plan that addresses not only scapular stability, but also total body strength and mobility, soft tissue quality, medicine ball work, movement training, and the actual throwing program.
Just wanted to give you all a heads-up that Joe Heiler is following up last year's successful Sports Rehab to Sports Performance Teleseminar with a 2010 installment. I'm thrilled to be one part of an incredible lineup:
Gray Cook
Shirley Sahrmann
Robert Panariello
Stuart McGill (bonus interview with Chris Poirier from Perform Better)
Craig Liebenson
Clare Frank
Mike Reinold
Greg Rose
Mike Boyle
Gary Gray
(and Eric Cressey)
In all, it will be nine awesome interviews. The teleseminar series will begin on January 27th and Joe will play one interview per week (Wednesday nights at 8 pm). If you can't catch them that night, don't worry; he'll be putting them up on his site for another 48 hours.
For more information, check out the Sports Rehab to Sports Performance Sign-up Page.
