I'm excited to announce that new Cressey Performance employee Greg Robins is going to be helping me out with this series moving forward.  Greg brings a unique skill set to to the table, and I think that the two of us together will kick out some great content in this weekly post moving forward.  With that said, here are five quick and easy ways to feel and move better to get you week off on the right foot:

1. Focus on less.

Too often I see people make the mistake of doing too much in the gym. Additionally, many folks jump from strength and conditioning program to program, or change strength exercises too often. Make it a point to do two things.  

First, pick a few big movements that you can execute correctly, and continually work to become great at them. Second, settle on a specific outcome for your training. Are you trying to lose fat, gain muscle, or get strong? While your approach may have elements that address all of these, prioritize one or the other for an extended period of time. Allowing yourself time to get better with movement, and eliminating competing demands from your program, are both great ways to maximize your efforts. 

2. Declutter your life.

"Spring cleaning" is a hackneyed expression, but that doesn't mean it isn't an incredibly worthwhile project to undertake!  Let's just say that I filled a trunk with trash from my home office last week.

Considering that my home office is only 13'x13', I expect my productivity to increase quite a bit.  Think about ways you can "declutter" your life; it should help you focus on the task at hand.

3. Carry heavy stuff with friends.

Dan John has put out some great content with respect to how valuable carrying variations can be.  They are easily learned, don't make you ridiculously sore, and provide a great whole-body training effect.  One thing we like to do as a staff is set up our farmer's walks in a group format.  Our turf is 40 yards long, and each set is either one or two trips.  One person goes, then the next person goes, and so on until everyone has finished all their sets.  It keeps you accountable to strict rest periods, builds in the motivation of competition (who wants to be the one guy who can't finish his trip?), and distributes the loading/unloading responsibilities among several people!  Here's an old video of us on this front:

4. Get every rep.

Nobody makes progress by missing lifts. Check your ego at the door, and take a more patient approach to your training. The most beautiful lesson in training is one of delayed gratification. To succeed in the gym, you need to do what is necessary in the training session in order to make the subsequent training sessions beneficial. Nobody can set personal records for themselves every day, so focus on executing each and every rep smoothly. Over time, add to the bar, add a rep, or do a little more work in the same time period. It will all add up, and a year from now you will marvel at what you accomplished. However, if you choose to blow it out every session, in a year, you will be lucky to have made minimal progress.

5. Spend less time down at the bar.

It drives me bonkers when lifters spend too much time down in the bottom position of a deadlift.  I always encourage people to get their minds right while they're standing around, and then get right to it when they get up to the bar.  Spending too much time in the bottom position of your deadlift technique means that you'll lose any benefit of the stretch-shortening cycle, and run the risk of becoming an overly pensive, weak schmuck.

Co-Author Greg Robins is strength and conditioning coach at Cressey Performance in Hudson, MA. Check out his website, www.GregTrainer.com, for more great content.

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One of the biggest concerns players have when it comes to in-season strength and conditioning programs is whether or not a particular exercise will make them sore.  It's a valid point, when you consider the profound effect soreness can have on a baseball athlete's performance - both physically and mentally.  As such, it's important to select exercises that provide a great training effect, but won't necessarily create a lot of soreness for a player.

The first important point to recognize is that strength exercise familiarity will minimize soreness.  In other words, if an athlete has already done an exercise in the previous 7-10 days, it shouldn't make him very sore (if at all).  This is one reason why I like to introduce new exercises in the week prior to the start of the season; we can "ride out" those exercises through the first 4-6 weeks of the season without worrying about soreness.

Of course, once you get past that initial stage, it's a good idea to change things up so that athletes will continue to progress and not get bored with the strength training program.  One way to introduce new strength exercises without creating soreness is to minimize eccentric stress; so, essentially, you're selecting exercises that don't have a big deceleration component.  This is tricky, as most athletic injuries occur from poor eccentric control (both acutely and chronically).  So, we can't remove them completely, but we can shoot for a 50/50 split.  To that end, we'll typically introduce our more intensive lower-body eccentric strength exercises (e.g., Bulgarian Split Squats) on a day when an athlete can afford to be sore (e.g., the day after a pitcher starts) for a few days.  If that isn't a luxury, we'll simply go much lighter in that first week.

To that end, here are five "general" strength exercises I like to use in-season with many of our athletes.

1. Step-up Variations - I'm normally not a big fan of step-ups for off-season programs because they don't offer a significant deceleration component, but they can be useful in-season when you're trying to keep soreness out of the equation.  Anterior-Loaded Barbell Step-ups are a favorite because they still afford you the benefits of axial loading without squatting an athlete.

2. Deadlift Variations - It goes without saying that I'm a huge fan of the deadlift (check out this tutorial if you need suggestions on How to Deadlift), as deadlift variations afford a host of benefits from strength, power, and postural perspectives.  They're also great because there isn't much of an eccentric component unless you're doing stiff-leg deadlift variations.  With that in mind, we utilize predominantly trap bar and sumo deadlift variations in-season.

3. Sled Pushing/Dragging - A lot of people view sled training as purely for metabolically conditioning guys, but the truth is that it actually makes for a great concentric-only strength exercise while helping to enhance mobility (assuming you cue an athlete through full hip extension on forward pushing/dragging variations).

Just make sure to keep the load heavy and distance short.

4. 1-leg Hip Thrusts off Bench - This is a great "halfway" exercise with respect to eccentric stress.  For some reason, even if you lower under a ton of control and with additional load (we drape chains over the hips), this exercise still won't make your posterior chain sore. A big shout-out goes out to Bret Contreras for bringing it to the forefront!

5. 1-arm DB Bulgarian Split Squats from Deficit - The asymmetrical load to this already asymmetrical (unilateral) exercise allows you to get a training effect without a ton of resistance (especially with the increased range of motion provided by the deficit).  It'll still create some soreness, but it's another one of those "halfway" exercises where the soreness isn't as bad as you'd expect, especially if you phase it in a bit lighter in week 1 of the new strength training program.

These are just five of my favorites, but a good start, for sure.  Of course, we still need to do a better job of educating "the masses" about how important it is to even do an in-season strength training program!

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As I've written in the past, though, after you transiently reduce stiffness in a tissue, you want to build some stability through that newfound range-of-motion.  Unfortunately, it isn't exactly easy to load folks up in the frontal plane, and some folks still won't be able to get in to a lateral lunge position without pitching forward.  Enter the Dumbbell Goblet Lateral Lunge, which borrows the "counterbalancing" benefits we see with a traditional goblet squat to allow us to get back "into" the hip and build some longer-term mobility in the frontal plane.

I don't worry about folks really loading this up; in fact, form tends to break down a bit if you go heavier than 40 pounds with the dumbbell.  We'll usually include it as the last exercise on a lower-body day, for 2-3 sets of 8-10 reps.

We spend a lot of time focusing on building strength and power, but a lot of times, movement quality gets overlooked.  Here's an exercise that helps you to improve the latter without forgetting the former.  Give it a shot and let me know how it goes!