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.
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.
Q: One of my favorite (insert generic sarcastic look here) things to watch in the weightroom is my pitchers getting under the rack for bench presses. It's not the fact that they're benching that upsets me, but the "Beach Body" mindset that is behind it. What's the most efficient way for a pitcher to work on his bench, and more importantly, what should he be trying to gain by performing the bench press correctly?
A: Okay, let's get right to opening this can of worms.
With any exercise, we look for carryover to the functional demands of our sport. However, we accept that general strength gains transfer in most cases. As an example, we know that we can improve throwing velocity with a variety of training initiatives, but training specificity like this is stupid:
Now that we've all gotten a bit dumber, let's continue...
As it relates to pitching, the fundamental problem with the conventional barbell bench press (as performed correctly, which it normally isn't) is that it doesn't really train scapular movement effectively. When we do push-up variations, the scapulae are free to glide - just as they do when we pitch. When we bench, though, we cue athletes to lock the shoulder blades down and back to create a great foundation from which to press. It's considerably different, as we essentially take away most (if not all) of scapular protraction.
Additionally, the closed-chain nature of push-ups is much more shoulder friendly, even if pitching is an open-chain exercise. In fact, most rehabilitation progressions - regardless of the shoulder issue in question - will begin with push-up variations before any open-chain pressing exercises.
With dumbbell benching, we recognize that we get better range-of-motion, freer movement of the humerus (instead of being locked into internal rotation), and increased core activation - particularly if we're doing alternating DB presses or 1-arm db presses. There is even a bit more scapular movement in these variations (even if we don't actually coach it).
With a barbell bench press, you don't really get any of these benefits - and it's somewhat inferior from a range-of-motion standpoint. While it may allow you to jack up the weight and potentially put on muscle mass a bit more easily, the truth is that muscle mass here - particularly if it leads to restrictions in shoulder and scapular movement - won't carry over to throwing the way the muscle mass in the lower half and upper back will. I've seen a ton of guys with loads of external rotation and horizontal abduction range-of-motion throw the crap out of the baseball, but can't say that I've ever seen any correlation - in the research or my anecdotal experience - between a good bench press and throwing velocity.
That said, I recognize that there are still a lot of "wannabe meatheads" in the pitching world, so we do our best to meet our athletes halfway and please the bench press gods. Most of the time, dumbbell bench pressing and push-up variations will be sufficient, but we will sometimes us the multipurpose bar with our pitchers because it puts them in a more shoulder-friendly neutral grip.
Add some chains to the bar, and you have a great stabilization challenge that works the true function of the rotator cuff.
That said, if you absolutely feel like you need to do traditional benching, keep the volume down, keep the elbows tucked, and keep the shoulder blades stable underneath you. And, be sure to recognize that your ego probably isn't doing much for your success on the mound - as there are training initiatives with better returns on investment. Remember that pitchers have loads of competing demands - from throwing, to mobility training, to soft tissue work, to fielding practice, to movement training - so what you do in the weight room has to highly effective to justify its inclusion. I just struggle to consider bench pressing "highly effective" for pitchers.
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.
As you read this, I'm presenting at the Ultimate Pitching Coaches Bootcamp in Houston, TX. As such, it seems fitting to devote today's blog to some pitching content.
A question I get pretty often is what I think of light band work for pitchers the day after pitching. The truth is that I'm pretty apathetic about the use of bands, but I am adamant about the inclusion of post-throwing stretching to regain lost flexibility. Research from Reinold et al. demonstrated that pitchers lose both elbow extension and shoulder internal rotation range of motion (ROM) over the course of a competitive season, and it's no surprise, given the huge eccentric (deceleration) stress those arms encounter during the throwing motion. Anecdotally, my experience has been that they also lose hip internal rotation and knee flexion on the front leg. So, you don't just want to take care of shoulder range of motion; you also want to attend to hip ROM.
Here's the side-lying cross-body stretch, one of my favorite self-stretches for improving shoulder internal rotation. I tend to use it more than the sleeper stretch nowadays because it's generally a lot tougher to butcher the form. It's important to stabilize the scapula down and back before the cross-body pull. This should not be an aggressive stretch! If you are gentle but consistent with it, the ROM will come around in time.
You can find more ways to both identify and address shoulder and hip rotational imbalances in Assess & Correct.
So, flexibility is a must, but light band work may have a place as well. There's a lot of muscular damage, and some very light bloodflow work may assist in rotator cuff recovery, as it tends to have a poor blood supply. I go into more detail on how we train our pitchers after an outing in A New Model for Training Between Starts: Part 2.
For more information, check out Optimal Shoulder Performance.
1. I got an interesting surprise the other day when I all of a sudden noticed that Cressey Performance had pictures like this posted all over the place:
It turns out that CP athlete and boxer Danny O'Connor had posted pictures of world title belts all over the facility as motivation. You've got to love a guy who makes sure that the goal is never out of sight!
2. On a semi-related note, the only thing more dangerous than a professional boxer might be a West Virginia Ninja (as promised, Ryan and Evelyne):
3. For those who missed it, I contributed on a pretty cool new compilation over at T-Nation. Check out In the Trenches: Volume 1.
4. I came to a bit of a shocking realization the other day about just how many so-called experts in the field - those writing books, giving seminars, and making television show appearances - actually train few (if any) actual clients. As I thought about it, this would never work for me (regardless of how many years of experience I'd have accumulated by that point) simply because I view interaction with athletes as one of my primary means of continuing my education. Simply coaching athletes, getting their feedback on things, and watching the adaptation process take place is a great way to enhance one's perspective.
Right now, I'm out there coaching about 35 hours per week, and it'll pick up a bit more as our pro baseball training group fills up in the next few weeks - and that will last through the third Monday in March. Interestingly, this kicks off the time of year when my writing is always the most creative and prolific. In other words, as I digest those 5-6 months of training, it's very easy to put a lot of new ideas on paper.
Had I just been sitting at a computer that entire time, there's no way I'd have that perspective. Just some food for thought: the next time you are about to buy a book, DVD, or attend a seminar, ask yourself whether the "expert" in question actually interacts with athletes/clients/patients on a weekly basis.
5. After Wednesday's blog post about shoulder health drills, I got several questions from folks asking what I thought the best few shoulder education resources were. Here are my top three (the first two are for the more geeky of you out there, and the third is more readily usable drills):
