Home Posts tagged "Muscle Imbalances"

3 Coaching Cues for Strength and Conditioning Programs – Shoulder Edition

Since this series was so popular this year, I figured I'd try to squeeze in just one more collection of suggestions before the 2012 wraps up. Here are three more coaching cues for your strength and conditioning programs:

"1. Pull the elbows to your hips."

As I discussed a while back in my Cleaning Up Your Chin-up Technique post, you want to be careful about extending the humerus past neutral at the top position of a chin-up. If the elbow moves behind the body In this position, the humeral head can glide forward, irritating the biceps tendon and anterior capsule. Additionally, the thoracic spine becomes excessively kyphotic, and the scapula may anteriorly tilt, closing down the subacromial space and exacerbating impingement on the rotator cuff tendons. Here’s what the bad looks like:

I’ve found that encouraging athlete to pull the elbows to the hips prevents this excessive humeral extension, and it also makes athletes stricter with their technique; they have to get the chest to the bar instead of just reaching with the chin and creating a forward head posture.

Conversely, if you encourage many young athletes to “just get your chin to the bar,” you get some garbage kipping concoction that looks like Quasimodo on the monkey bars with his pants on fire.

"2. Keep the biceps quiet."

Piggybacking on our previous point, just like excessive humeral extension can create anterior (front) shoulder stress, uncontrolled external rotation can be equally problematic, as the humeral head will once again want to glide forward if it isn’t appropriately controlled by a combination of rotator cuff recruitment and scapular stability.

If an athlete feels external rotations in the front of his shoulder even in what appears to be the correct position, he’s performing them without monitoring humeral anterior glide. If this occurs, I’ll have him place his opposite hand on the front of the shoulder to monitor any kind of anterior glide of the humeral head, and encourage him to “keep the biceps quiet.” I’d say that 90% of the time, athletes are good to go once this correction takes place. In the other 10% of cases, we’ll regress the athlete to supine and prone external rotations, as well as manual resistance “holds” at the 90/90 position.

"3. Try to touch your butt to the ceiling."

The yoga push-up is one of my favorite push-up variations. Just like all other push-up variations, it gives our shoulder blades freedom of movement, which is important when you consider that they’re essentially stuck in place during bench press movements.

I especially like the yoga push-up because it doesn’t just combine protraction/retraction, but also involves near-full humeral flexion. By elevating the humerus further, we force athletes to work on getting more scapular upward rotation.

If you tell an athlete, “Push your butt away from the floor,” you get greater recruitment of serratus anterior and upper trapezius to really get that last bit of scapular upward rotation – and, at the same time, get some good thoracic spine extension.

That wraps up this installment of cues.  If you like what you're reading, I'd encourage you to check out the Muscle Imbalances Revealed - Upper series, which features a collection of outstanding webinars from some really bright guys in the industry.  Rick Kaselj, who organized the collaborative effort, has the product on sale at a great discount with a 60-day money-back guarantee.  You can check it out here for yourself.


 

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The Best of 2011: Product Reviews

I've already featured the top articles at EricCressey.com from 2011, and now it's time to highlight the top product reviews I did at this site in the last year. 1. Metabolic Cooking - This was the most popular product review I did on the year for a very simple reason: everybody needs to eat!  And, the folks reading this site prefer to eat "clean" - and Dave Ruel did a great job of making this easier and tastier with an outstanding recipe book to which I still refer every week.  I made two posts about the product: Metabolic Cooking: Making it Easier to Eat Clean with Healthy Food Options A Must-Try Recipe - and My Chubby 4th Grade Pics! (this is the best chicken fingers recipe in history; try it!)

2. Muscle Imbalances Revealed - Upper Body - This was the sequel to the popular lower-body product that was released by Rick Kaselj et al. in 2010.  I went through and highlighted each presenters contributions to the product via four posts: Muscle Imbalances Revealed Review - Upper: Part 1 (Dean Somerset) Muscle Imbalances Revealed Review - Upper: Part 2 (Dr. Jeff Cubos) Muscle Imbalances Revealed Review - Upper: Part 3 (Tony Gentilcore and Rick Kaselj)

3. Lean Hybrid Muscle - As the review below will demonstrate, this program offered me a nice change of pace from my "normal" training when I needed to shake things up earlier this year.  It's a nice follow-up to Show and Go.  Here's my review: How I'm Breaking Out of My Training Rut: The Lean Hybrid Muscle Strength and Conditioning Program

4. Post-Rehab Essentials - Based on the fact that Dean Somerset has now gotten two shout-outs in my top product reviews of 2011, you might think that I have somewhat of a man-crush on him.  The truth is that I think Dean relates complex terms in simple terms and "teaches" about as well as anyone in the fitness industry.  Check out this post that touches on why his product has merit: 4 Reasons You Must Understand Corrective Exercise and Post-Rehab Training

There were certainly some other great products I encountered this year, but these four reviews proved to be the most popular with my readers, based on hosting statistics. We'll be back soon with the top features of 2011. Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a four-part video series on how to deadlift!
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The 6 Characteristics of a Good Dynamic Warm-up

The dynamic warm-up is an extremely important component of a strength and conditioning program.  In addition to reducing the risk of injury while enhancing subsequent performance in a variety of contexts, it's also a great place to implement corrective exercise drills to address underlying muscle imbalances. With that in mind, to get the most out of your dynamic warm-up, keep in mind these six characteristics of an effective pre-training program. 1. A good dynamic warm-up should be preceded by soft tissue work. Every one of our clients at Cressey Performance goes through the following foam rolling series (at the very least) prior to their first warm-up drills.

For a bit more on the rationale behind foam rolling, check out this post of mine from a few months ago.  Needless to say, it's important - and will make your dynamic warm-up far more productive. 2. A good dynamic warm-up should progress from ground-based to standing. When I write a warm-up, I want athletes to do all their ground-based activation and mobility drills first, rather than mix them in with standing exercises.  This works not only for the sake of convenience, but also in terms of facility logistics: traffic throughout the gym is more predictable.  As an example, I might use a wall hip flexor mobilization to improve hip extension range of motion before I'd get an athlete up to do lunge variations in the standing position.

I like to see things progress from ground-based, to standing in-place (e.g., scapular wall slides, bowler squats), to standing and moving.

3. A good dynamic warm-up should progress from single-joint to multi-joint movements.

We might do a rocking ankle mobilization or quadruped extension-rotation early in the warm-up to work purely on ankle mobility and thoracic spine mobility, respectively, but once the warm-up progresses and one becomes upright, all the joints need to be working together in an appropriate balance of mobility and stability.  Just count how many different pieces are in place on this drill:

4. A good dynamic warm-up addresses mobility at the ankles, hips, and thoracic spine.

Even if people just worked on these three areas (to the exclusion of everything else) and then moved on to the rest of their strength training programs, the world would be a much healthier and high-performance place.  Throw on restrictive footwear and sit hunched over a desk all day, and these are the areas that will suffer the most - so make sure you've got drills for each in the warm-up.  Keep in mind that while one drill each for the ankle and thoracic spine mobility will be sufficient for most, it'll likely take several to take care of the hips, as they need to be moved in all three planes of motion.

5. A good dynamic warm-up should take into account joint laxity.

This is something I have to keep in mind all the time, as many of our baseball pitchers have considerable congenital joint laxity.  Their joint ranges of motion are already so good that we don't need to do much (if at all) in terms of mobility work.  Rather, we do substantially more low-level activation drills during the warm-up period to teach them how to stabilize joints prior to more intense exercise.  Conversely, if you have someone who is as tight as a drum, chances are that you can be more aggressive with mobility drills, knowing the subsequent stability will come more easily to them.

6. A good dynamic warm-up should actually increase body temperature.

I see a lot of people who drag their heels going through a warm-up, thinking too much or simply wasting time along the way.  You don't need to do 20 different drills, but rather select 8-10 drills and do them at a pace that allows you to get your body temperature and joint range of motion up sufficiently to be prepared for a more specific warm-up (e.g., light deadlifts).  If you take it too slowly, it just won't have the same effect.  While everyone is different when it comes to perspiration, I like to see athletes sweating a little bit by the end of the warm-up.

These are just a few quick and easy guidelines I like to keep in mind when writing the dynamic warm-ups in our strength and conditioning programs.  Of course, each client has unique needs - from actual physical limitations to space/equipment limitations - that one must take into account as well.

To learn more, I'd encourage you to check out Assess and Correct: Breaking Barriers to Unlock Performance.  This two-DVD set provides 27 assessments and 78 corrective exercises that can serve as the foundation for effective dynamic warm-ups in your strength and conditioning programs.

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