Sleep and Training: The Ultimate Balancing Act - This was a solid guest post from Tim Hendren for Tony Gentilcore's blog. He provides five actionable items you can employ to get more high-quality sleep. I especially liked the point about getting your pets out of your bed, as this little monster has been waking my wife and me up for years.
How Should Relief Pitchers Warm Up? - In light of the nasty weather nationwide early in this baseball season, I've had several questions about how I recommend guys handle cold weather warm-ups at this time of year. My recommendations aren't much different from what I recommend for relief pitchers at any time of year. Get warm, then never cool off. This old post of mine goes into detail on it.
Top Tweet of the Week
Trying to improve shoulder range-of-motion, cuff strength, and scapular control during the baseball season is like trying to change the tire on a car that's still moving. In other words, April is the time when a lot of players realize how inferior their offseason preparation was.
Yesterday, a high school coach died while shielding students from bullets. The next time you claim a teacher or coach “has it in“ for your child, remember that the overwhelming majority of them are wonderful, well intentioned people who’d do anything to help (and protect) kids.
Happy Monday! It's been two weeks since my last recommended reading compilation, as I took a little blog hiatus last week in light of some travel and the chaos that is the professional baseball offseason. The good news is that it gave me time to stockpile some good content for you. Here goes...
Tinkering vs. Overhauling - and the Problem with Average - One of our interns asked me about my thoughts on the "average" range of motion at a particular joint, and it got me to thinking about this article I wrote last year. There are big problems with using averages in the world of health and human performances, so I'd encourage you to give it a read to learn more.
Using extra conditioning to make up for poor diet is a definite path to continuing to use extra conditioning to make up for poor diet for a long time. Slippery slope. You're better off plugging the leak in the roof (diet) than you are buying more buckets to collect the water.
I hope you all had a great weekend and are enjoying these World Series games. You can't beat playoff baseball!
Here are some recommended resources for the week:
10 Daily Habits of Healthy Lifters - I contributed a few paragraphs for this compilation at T-Nation, and the end result included several excellent recommendations.
Bored and Brilliant - I had the long car ride from Massachusetts to Florida last week, and this is one of the audiobooks I covered to pass the time. Manoush Zomorodi took an outstanding look at how technology impacts our lives in negative ways. While it wasn't written from a strength and conditioning perspective, I could totally see how to apply its lessons to the fitness realm.
Happy Tuesday! We're a day late with this recommended reading/listening/viewing list, as yesterday was a crazy one in light of the High Performance Handbook sale and a full day of evaluations at Cressey Sports Performance. Then, we wrapped up the day with our annual "Night with the Pros" event.
CSP Fall Seminar Live Tweeting - Frank Duffy was kind enough to live Tweet our annual fall seminar on Sunday, and you can see the "play by play" at this link.
A Roundtable of Rants - This was a compilation of responses from a collection of T-Nation contributors in response to the question, "What's pissing you off right now in the world of fitness or lifting?" As you'll see, my answer was in stark contrast to the rest of panel.
Happy Monday! The MLB regular season ended yesterday, so you could say that this is yet another reminder that the Cressey family "inseason" has begun. Our craziness starts when all the players' lives slow down a bit. Here's a little recommended reading for you:
Dr. Andy Galpin on How to Unplug from Tech and Social Media - This was a fascinating podcast with Dr. Galpin from Mike Robertson, where they critically review the role of technology and data collection in the training process. The points on the need to unplug from technology and social media really hit home for me, too, and I'll be checking out his book soon!
My Body Let Me Down...Again - This was a great article from Gray Cook on all the potential causative factors for why we may hurt. Many people default to the explanation that their bodies simply fail them, when in reality there were likely a lot of things "missed" on the path to that declaration. Aside from trauma, injuries are rarely just "happenstance."