Things have been a bit quieter on the blog of late, as I'm working with the Team USA 18U baseball squad for the World Cup. I'm actually in Osaka, Japan now, and while the days have been very full, but it's been a fantastic experience on a number of fronts. And, it's gotten me to thinking a lot about athletic development in many contexts - some of which I'll touch on with this August edition of Random Thoughts on Sports Performance.
1. Nutrition is still king.
While my official title is "strength and conditioning coach," you can't possibly expect to do a good job in this role unless you're also willing to be an advocate for proper nutrition with your athletes. Especially with teenage athletes, though, it's important to meet them where they are - and address the most pressing issues first. If a kid is only getting in 1,500 calories/day and has been losing weight all summer, it'd be silly for me to hone in on his fatty acid balance and nitpick that he chose pasta over rice. Rather, the first step is to figure out how to conveniently get in some healthy calories in his day.
Nutrition can get incredibly complex over time, but it doesn't need to be early on. If you overwhelm young athletes by throwing too many changes at them early on, they'll tune you out and nothing will be accomplished. I'll often have an athlete focus on three habits for 21 days before we move on to the next three. It doesn't overwhelm them, and you can quickly build on previous successes.
2. Learn to "bias" exercises toward individual needs.
The bench t-spine mobilization is one of my favorite exercises. We typically use it for folks who have a shoulder flexion deficit or lack thoracic extension.
What a lot of people don't understand is that you can quickly take good exercises like the bench t-spine mobilization and make them great by adding in subtle changes. In this example, if someone has stiff/short adductors, we can have them move the knees out wider for a groin stretch. If someone is really lordotic (heavily arched lower back posture), we can have them exhale before they descend to get a bit more anterior core activation to pull the ribs down and pelvis into posterior tilt.
Obviously, this is just good coaching - but it illustrates the need for assessment. If you're not assessing, you're just guessing on which "quick fixes" can make a good exercise into a great exercise.
3. With overhead athletes, stick with the overhand grip on the dominant side during alternate grip movements.
The typical pitcher's long head of the biceps tendon gets a lot of abuse during the throwing motion. At the lay-back position, it's helping out the rotator cuff and anterior capsule by working as an anterior and superior stabilizer of the glenohumeral (ball and socket) joint.
Then, at ball release, it's continuing these stabilizing functions, but also in more of a compressive role to keep the humeral head from distracting from the joint - and this is happening while it's trying to help slow elbow extension.
With this in mind, my rule of thumb is to always try to take stress off the biceps tendon in our training. One way we can do so is to avoid using the "underhand" grip on the dominant side with deadlifts. If you're going to use the alternate grip, keep that dominant hand as the "over" hand (or just pull with a double overhand grip, or use the trap bar). It's also important to take the slack out of the bar so that the biceps isn't aggressively stretching from a flexed-to-extended elbow position at the initiation of a deadlift.
4. Work capacity is incredibly important for teenage athletes - possibly even more than with college and professional athletes.
In the high school years, athletic development should be linear improvements with the occasional "flat line" of progression, but there should never be noteworthy falloffs in fitness qualities. This is the case because young athletes have a larger window of adaptation and can be very responsive to even minimal doses of training. They're also more resilient and can bounce back quickly from session to session, making it possible to do more work during the in-season period - particularly in a setting that may be more developmental (junior varsity) than competitive (playoffs).
Once athletes have a solid training foundation, it becomes impossible to maintain every fitness quality throughout the competitive year, which obviously gets more and more grueling in college and professional sports. We have to learn how to prioritize fitness qualities throughout the year, and just as importantly, we need to appreciate how to optimize recovery so that athletes can best display these qualities from day to day.
Revisiting the high school athlete, though, the linear progression "ideal" that we seek is heavily dependent on an athlete building an appreciable level of work capacity in the "true" off-season that exists. In a baseball model, if the athlete has the initial work capacity to "fall back on," we can get in more quality work in July and August to at least preserve the "flat line" or even gain a small amount of fitness. If that work capacity was never there, pushing an athlete - even if it's just a little bit - can set back performance substantially. In short, it's much easier to impose fatigue on someone who's never experienced enough fatigue to get desensitized to it.
This point illustrates why working with the 18U National Team has been a good challenge. All the players are 16-17 years old, so we have a wide variety of training experience - and certainly different starting levels of work capacity. Some pitchers have thrown twice as many innings as other ones. We have some two-way players (pitch and play the field). Different athletes come from different climates (this is very significant, given how hot and humid it is in Asia right now). Needless to say, determining who needs to be pushed and who needs to be held back from day to day is a solid challenge. I'm really enjoying it - and it's definitely gotten me back to my roots of pushing rest, recovery modalities, and quality nutrition and hydration.
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It Won't Kill You to Grill - With yesterday being the "unofficial start to summer," Brian St. Pierre's article for Precision Nutrition is very timely. He discusses how to grill without any concern for health risks.
Memorial Day Musings on Player Development - Cressey Sports Performance pitching coordinator, Matt Blake, shares some great stories on success in spite of adversity, and highlights the importance of long-term views on development.
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Durability on Decline for Today's Players - This MLB.com feature brings to light some pretty crazy numbers on how injury rates have gone up in professional baseball - both due to change in the game, and how players prepare.
35 Ways to Transform Your Body - As always, the folks at Precision Nutrition come through with practical advice for those looking to improve their nutrition and training programs. Here, they highlight lessons from their most successful clients.
Finally, just a friendly reminder that we're ten days out from the early-bird registration deadline for the Alex Viada seminar at Cressey Sports Performance in Hudson, MA. This will surely be a great event you won't want to miss. You can get more details HERE.
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Good morning, gang. I hope you all had a great weekend. We're going to kick off the week with some recommended strength and conditioning reading from around the 'net:
Settling the Great Grain Debate - My good friend and former Cressey Sports Performance coach Brian St. Pierre did a fantastic with this review for Precision Nutrition.
It's been a busy week, so I've gotten a late start to putting out new content. Fortunately, I came across some good reads from around the 'net. Check these out:
Common Arm Care Mistakes: Installment 5 - I published this article last year right around this time, and I think it's a good reminder for athletes who are both pitchers and position players. Managing weekly scheduling can be tough, and this article provides some thoughts on how to best accomplish it.
Teaching Humility and Success - Todd Hamer is an old friend of mine in the strength and conditioning world, and I loved this post from him on building character in our athletes.
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Here are some good reads from the past week in the strength and conditioning world:
Forget Calorie Counting - Brian St. Pierre and Ryan Andrews present a great perspective on portion control and meal planning for Precision Nutrition.
Left Out - I thought this was a really well written piece from Andrew McCutchen for The Players Tribune. While I don't agree with the notion that you have to do the travel ball circuit and attend every tournament to get noticed as an up-and-coming player, I do think his message of improving baseball development opportunities in underprivileged areas is incredibly important.
I hope everyone's week is going well. It's a bit late, but here is a collection of recommended strength and conditioning reading for the week:
How and Why to Make the Perfect Super Shake - We're big fans of "super shakes" for getting in healthy calories in a convenient way, especially if you're a teenage athlete who hates waking up early for breakfast. Check out this great "how to" infographic on the topic from our friends at Precision Nutrition.
Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers - This is a book I should have read a long time ago, but for some reason, I never got around to it. I'm now halfway through listening to it, and I regret not doing so sooner. It could have made my education regarding stress and the autonomic nervous system a lot more efficient!
Baseball Injuries: What to Expect in the Next Few Months - Football season is over, so it's time for baseball! Pretty soon, you'll be hearing about how "Player X is on the disabled list with Injury Y." In this article from a while back, I discuss exactly why this is the case.
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I hope everyone is having a great week and is excited for a great Thanksgiving. It might be a holiday week, but it's still super busy at the new Cressey Sports Performance facility in Jupiter, FL. Luckily, I've got some great content from around the web to share with you.
The Cost of Getting Lean - The Precision Nutrition crew gives you the cold hard facts on what it takes to get to and maintain the body composition you desire.
How to Fit Core Stability Exercises into Strength and Conditioning Programs: Part 1 and Part 2 - I wrote this two-part article back in 2011 when Mike Reinold and I released Functional Stability Training of the Core, the first in the three-part FST series. Since they're all on sale for 25% off this week, it seemed like a great time to bring these posts back from the archives.
For more information on this sale, check out www.FunctionalStability.com. It wraps up this upcoming Monday at midnight.
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It was a big "catch up on work" weekend for me, so the new content will be out later this week. In the meantime, here are some great reads from around the 'Net for you:
Traumatic Brain Injuries - Cressey Sports Performance athlete Sam Fuld wrote up this great guest post for Gabe Kapler's website. Sam had a concussion this year after a collision with the outfield wall, and here, he discusses his recovery. It's yet another example of how we can't view concussions as "just another athletic injury."
How to Fix a Broken Diet Infographic - Precision Nutrition created this awesome resource to demonstrate how to quickly "clean up" one's nutritional program for optimized outcomes.
Inside Man: The Veteran - This is an excellent interview with the CEO of TRX, Randy Hetrick, who was also a Navy SEAL for 14 years. I love the fact that the TRX story is a good example of how many successful companies emerge because the founder tried to "solve a problem" instead of just trying to "start a successful company." Whether you're an entrepreneur, fitness buff, or both, this is a great read.
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Happy Monday, everyone. I hope you had a great weekend. We're hard at work getting Cressey Sports Performance's new facility in Jupiter, FL ready. As such, I haven't had time to do any blogging, but I do have some great content from around the web to recommend for you. Check it out:
Crawling Your Face Off- I recently wrote a post about how I'm a big fan of bear crawls. Here, Dean Somerset introduces some great progressions you can incorporate on this front once you've master the basics.
Fish Oil and Omega-3 Fats: How to Be Safe with Your Supplements - The folks at Precision Nutrition do a great job of discrediting a review suggesting that fish oil is useless and may actually be harmful. Just as importantly, though, they make some excellent recommendations on ensuring that you have high quality fish oil.
