Happy Sunday - and month of May - to you. Let's get the week started with some recommended reading:
The End of Average - I just finished this (audio)book from Todd Rose, and found it to be fantastic. It really makes you reconsider how we really evaluate success - or even competency or fit in job applicants.
This will be a light content week at EricCressey.com, as I'm on a "pseudo" vacation. After a few days visiting family in Florida, I'm now out in Arizona checking on some of our guys at Spring Training. The good news is that I've got some friends around the 'Net who have provided some excellent content recently:
Lessons Learned - This is an outstanding post from former US Women's Soccer athlete and gold medalist Lori Lindsey. I was fortunate to work with Lori a bit during her career, and it's awesome to see her doing great things in the fitness industry now that she's retired from soccer.
What Were You Doing a Year Ago Today - Cressey Sports Performance coach Tony Bonvechio authored this excellent post to remind us that progress may not always be linear or rapid, but when you look back, it's progress nonetheless! It's okay to take some time to smell the roses.
4 Things We Did Before Worrying About Brand Development - My business partner, Pete, just published the other day, and he included some interesting numbers on our early business days. To be honest, I had no idea that our facility was actually in business for 293 days before we had a functioning website. This will be a good read for the fitness business folks out there.
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We're wrapping up the week with some good recommended strength and conditioning material. Check these reads out:
Can Eating Too Little Actually Damage Your Metabolism? - This was an absolutely outstanding article on energy balance from Brian St. Pierre for Precision Nutrition. Suffice it to say that it's much more complex than "calories in vs. calories out."
We're very excited to announce that on Sunday, September 13, we’ll be hosting our fourth annual fall seminar at Cressey Sports Performance. As was the case with our extremely popular fall event over the past three years, this event will showcase the great staff we're fortunate to have as part of our team. Also like last year, we want to make this an affordable event for everyone and create a great forum for industry professionals and fitness enthusiasts alike to interact, exchange ideas, and learn.
Here are the presentation topics:
Pete Dupuis -- Empowering Your Fitness Team
This presentation will serve as an introduction to the Cressey Sports Performance method for leveraging each coach's unique skill-set in an effort to create a superior training experience. In this presentation, Pete will discuss the importance of cultivating distinctive assessment skills, personal brand development, and the importance of employing a broad spectrum of personality types on your fitness team.
Greg Robins -- What Matters Most
One of the characteristics that makes the fitness industry special is the variety of approaches. However, it can also be a bit noisy. Constant access to new ideas and the plethora of free information may leave trainers, coaches and clients a bit confused. In this presentation, Greg will reflect on what he has found to matter most, both in getting you and your clients where you want to be.
Chris Howard -- Referred Pain: What is it and what does it tell us?
Practically every fitness professional has encountered an athlete or client dealing with referred pain whether they knew it or not. In this presentation, Chris will discuss what referred pain is, what it tells us about our clients, and training modifications to alleviate our client’s pain. Whether you are a strength coach, personal trainer, physical therapist or athletic trainer, this presentation will provide a new perspective on your client’s pain.
Tony Bonvechio -- Creating Context for More Efficient Coaching
Coaches put endless focus into what they say, but this presentation will illustrate the importance of how they say it. Creating context with your clients goes beyond internal and external cueing, and the ability to create "sticky" teaching moments will get your athletes moving better and more efficiently. Tony will discuss different cueing approaches, how they resonate with different learning styles, and how to say more with less to help your clients learn new movements with ease.
Tony Gentilcore -- Spinal Flexion: A Time and Place
Spinal flexion is a polarizing topic in the fitness world. Spine experts have illuminated the risks associated with loaded spinal flexion, leading to crunches and sit-ups getting labeled as taboo. In this presentation, Tony will discuss when encouraging spinal flexion - specifically on the gym floor - can address pain and dysfunction in our athletes and clients while also improving performance.
Miguel Aragoncillo – Cardio Confusion: A Deeper Look at Current Trends
Designing the cardiovascular aspect of a comprehensive exercise program often leaves us with more questions than answers: Is it helpful for body composition or performance? Should you run or should you sprint? Are there other ways to improve cardiovascular fitness? In this presentation, Miguel will discuss the trends and evaluate existing research of various conditioning methods. Finally, he’ll offer practical strategies for immediate application with your Monday morning clients.
Eric Cressey – Bogus Biomechanics and Asinine Anatomy
The strength and conditioning and rehabilitation fields are riddled with movement myths that just never seem to die. Drawing heavily on case studies, scholarly journals, and what functional anatomy tells us, Eric will “bust” some of the common fallacies you’ll encounter in the strength and conditioning field today. Most importantly, he’ll offer drills and strategies that can be utilized immediately with clients and athletes in place of these antiquated approaches.
**Bonus 2:30PM Saturday Session**
George Kalantzis and Andrew Zomberg-- The Method Behind CSP Strength Camp Madness
Group training is rapidly overtaking one-on-one training as the most profitable fitness service. However, an effective group fitness system is often difficult to create and sustain. In this session, George and Andrew will take participants through an actual CSP strength camp. The training session will be accompanied by a brief presentation and handouts that dive into the components of programming, coaching and marketing strategies to drive new business and client retention within a group training model.
Location:
Cressey Sports Performance
577 Main St.
Suite 310
Hudson, MA 01749
Cost:
Regular Rate – Early Bird $129.99, Regular $149.99 Student Rate – Early Bird $99.99, Regular $129.99
The early bird registration deadline is August 13.
Date/Time:
Sunday, September 13, 2014
Registration 8:30AM
Seminar 9AM-5PM
**Bonus session Saturday, September 12 at 2:30pm.
Continuing Education:
0.8 National Strength and Conditioning Association CEUs pending (eight contact hours)
We’re really excited about this event, and would love to have you join us! However, space is limited and each seminar we’ve hosted in the past has sold out quickly, so don’t delay on signing up!
If you have additional questions, please direct them to cspmass@gmail.com. Looking forward to seeing you there!
PS - If you're looking for hotel information, The Extended Stay America in Marlborough, MA offers our clients a heavily discounted nightly rate of just under $63.00. Just mention "Cressey" during the booking process in order to secure the discount. Their booking phone number is 508-490-9911.
It's Monday, so let's get right to a week of content with some featured posts from around the 'net.
10 Conversations to Have Before Signing Your Gym Lease - My business partner, Pete Dupuis, did somewhat of a "brain dump" for all the potential gym owners out there. Be sure to read this if you're considering opening your own place.
Technique Tuesday with Tony - We've started some new weekly features on the CSP-MA Facebook page, and on Tuesdays, Tony Bonvechio goes over some coaching cues with a 2-3 minute video. This week, he talks about how to keep your elbows under the bar while squatting.
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Today's guest post comes from Cressey Sports Performance coach, Tony Bonvechio.
Social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk said, “Content is king, but context is God.” He was talking about Internet marketing, but the same holds true for coaching.
Our goal as coaches is to get our athletes into the right positions as quickly and safely as possible. There are many ways to do this, but the best ways all use context to flip on the metaphorical light bulb deep within an athlete’s brain. Much like marketing, the content of our coaching is only as good as its ability to create context for our athletes.
Cueing and Context
There’s lots of buzz about internal versus external cueing (with most coaches agreeing the latter trumps the former), but without context, it doesn’t matter how precise your coaching cues are. It doesn’t matter if you tap into your athlete’s auditory, visual or kinesthetic awareness. If your coaching cues don’t conjure up a somewhat familiar position or sensation, your coaching will be ineffective.
People love context because they love familiarity. It’s the reason why we leave a familiar song on the radio even if we don’t actually enjoy it. It’s why we always order the same meal at a restaurant or buy the same car, if only a model year newer. It’s not so much brand loyalty as it is the confidence we feel in a familiar scenario. And when athletes are confident, they perform at their best.
But for many, strength training is anything but familiar. Throw a new athlete into a new environment with new coaches and new movements, and everything is, well, new. Context is painfully hard to find. It’s our job as coaches to create it.
This goes beyond internal versus external cueing. When’s the last time a young athlete had to push his butt back to the wall or spread the floor outside of the weight room? Yes, these are useful cues, but they pale in comparison to referencing movements and sensations they’ve experienced over and over. Your athletes have stockpiled heaps of complex movements while playing their sport(s), so use them as bridges to new movements in the weight room.
Coaches must constantly challenge themselves to refine their coaching skills and become more efficient. Striving to provide context in every coaching interaction will help you do just that. Here are three reliable ways to create context while communicating with your clients.
Relate to an Exercise
A well-designed training program will build upon itself from exercise to exercise. The warm-up creates context for power development, which builds context for strength training, which builds context for conditioning. Fellow CSP Coach Miguel Aragoncillo often calls this the “layering” effect, where we gradually introduce athletes to layers of a movement to make it easier to learn and retain.
For example, we use positional breathing drills to get the ribs and pelvis in position for proper inhalation and exhalation. Then, we use exercises like dead bugs and bird dogs to teach athletes to brace while moving their extremities. Then, when we hit our first strength movement of the day, whether it’s a deadlift, lunge or press, we can refer to the warm-up for context on proper technique.
Context becomes especially useful when progressing athletes from low-speed movements to high-speed ones. The faster the movement, the more concise your cues must be.
For example, you’d be hard pressed to get athletes to think about what’s happening while landing from a jump. Which cues are processed more easily?
“Hip hinge! Tripod foot! Externally rotate your femurs!”
Or…
“Land where you jumped from!”
If you’ve done your job as a coach by teaching a good take-off position, the second option should happen almost automatically. Not coincidently, this position will come up during many other exercises, providing context for all of them.
The entire training session should create material for you to call upon later, so don’t gloss over the little things early on.
Relate to a Sport
Working with baseball players after playing baseball for the majority of my life gives me a distinct advantage. I speak their language. I’ve walked in their cleats. I can create context by relating many of our exercises to familiar movements on the baseball diamond. Similarly, if you relate anything in the gym to an athlete’s sport, you’ll win them over quickly.
Recently, I was working with a young athlete who was struggling to do a trap bar deadlift. No matter how I cued him or physically put him in position, he couldn’t get there on his own. Just as I was about to regress to a simpler exercise, I took a shot in the dark. Our conversation was as follows:
Me: What position do you play in baseball? Athlete: First base. Me: So what do you do when the third baseman throws the ball too high? Athlete: I do this. (Goes to do a countermovement jump) Me: Stop! Athlete: (Paused in a perfect hip hinge) What? Me: Right there! Grab the bar.
He proceeded to do a set of five textbook deadlifts and nailed every set after that. Where internal and external cues failed, context prevailed.
You can duplicate this scenario for almost any sport.
Basketball: “How do you guard the ball handler?” Football: “How do you take the snap from under center?” Tennis: “How do you wait for the serve?” Hockey: “How do you take the faceoff?”
The list goes on. With athletes, context is everywhere. Get to know their sport and speak their language. And if you can help them understand how their workouts will make them better at their sport, you’ll gain their trust and get their best effort.
Relate to a Feeling
Perhaps the best way to make your coaching cues last a lifetime is to get in touch with your athletes’ feelings. Before you dismiss me as some Kumbaya-singing hippy, let me explain myself.
Many coaching cues are transient. Sure, cores brace, glutes squeeze and necks pack whenever we ask them to, but as soon as we turn our backs, things often go awry. Even the best lifters sometimes miss a key point on their pre-lift checklist of body parts to organize, and one weak link in the chain can lead to suboptimal (and even dangerous) movement.
If you simply take the time to implant a crucial feeling into an athlete’s mind (i.e. “Feel that? That’s what I want you to feel when you squat.”), they won’t soon forget it. It’s often easier to navigate one’s way to a feeling than think about multiple body parts at once.
I consider myself a decent bench presser, but when I set up, I don’t go from head to toe, double-checking if I’m retracted here or extended there. I know what I’m supposed to feel so I just feel it and lift. That’s how mastery occurs and eventually gets us to the coveted state of unconscious competency, as described by psychologist Thomas Gordon in his four-stage approach to learning. Miguel recently drew the four-stage matrix on our whiteboard during a meeting with the interns:
Basically, we aim to go from being incompetent while thinking about it to being competent without thinking about it. We don’t want athletes to constantly think about their movement on the field. They need to move automatically or they’ll get left in the dust. Similarly, we need to coach them in the weight room with the intention of movements and exercises becoming automatic.
This is where taking 5 to 10 minutes of a single 90-minute training session can pay huge dividends down the road. Rather than hastily resorting to a regression when an athlete is struggling, create context and get the athlete to feel the right position. Get your hands on them. Ask, “What do you feel?”
Whether it’s pulling the bar away from someone during a deadlift to get their lats turned on (“Don’t let me take the bar from you. Feel that?”) or doing lateral mini-band walks to prevent knee valgus during squats (“Feel that? That’s what I want you to feel during squats.”), these extra steps are always worth the extra coaching effort.
It’s akin to the proverb, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” Are you giving fish by always hand-holding athletes into position? Or are you teaching them how to fish by helping them discover the answer so they’ll always be able to access it?
Conclusion
Familiarly allows an athlete to let his or her guard down and perform to the best of their ability. Creating context with your coaching cues puts them in a familiar setting and opens the door for better movement. Instead of simply relying on internal and external focus cues, strive to create context wherever possible. I’m confident your athletes will move better and learn faster.
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I'm a day late with this week's recommended strength and conditioning reading, as we were hosting another one of our Elite Baseball Mentorships at Cressey Sports Performance. I've still got some good reads for you, though:
Minimizing Key May Risk While Scaling Your Business - Pete Dupuis, my business partner at Cressey Sports Performance, recently started his own website, which focuses on the business side of fitness. This is his most recent post, and includes some great lessons for fitness entrepreneurs. I'd add this website to your regular reading list.
Probiotics and Depression - The folks at Examine.com offered this free preview of their Research Digest resource. I always enjoy these updates and would recommend them if you're looking to stay on top of up-to-date research in the world of nutrition and supplementation.
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It's Marathon Monday here in Massachusetts, but just in case you're not here to experience the excitement (or marathons don't excite you, anyway), here's some good reading to atone for it:
EliteFTS Sports Performance Podcast - I was interviewed for this last week, and we covered a host of business and training topics. Hope you enjoy it!
No More Pulled Hamstrings! - My good buddy Mike Robertson shares five points on preventing hamstrings injuries. If you're looking for a quick introduction to the Postural Restoration Institute school of thought, this is a good teaser.
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This installment of quick tips comes from Cressey Sports Performance coach, Tony Bonvechio. Enjoy! -EC
1. Avoid over-tucking your elbows when performing the bench press.
It’s widely accepted that to bench press more weight and protect your shoulders, you should tuck yours elbows tightly to yours sides and touch the bar low on the chest. This may reduce the range of motion you have to press, but unless you’re a 300-pound powerlifter with a huge belly, your elbows may still drift too far past the midline of the body if you tuck too much. This can add unwanted stress on the shoulders and make the front of the shoulder cranky over time.
It’s similar to tucking the elbows too tight to the body during rowing variations - it makes it easy to let shoulder slip into too much extension. That’s why we coach athletes to row with a bit more space between the armpit and the elbow. You limit anterior humeral (upper arm) glide while still getting full scapular (shoulder blade) retraction.
Instead, keep the elbows about 45 degrees away from the body and touch the bar somewhere around the nipple line. This also reduces the moment arm between the shoulders and the bar, limiting the horizontal distance the bar needs to travel and making it easier to keep your elbows under the bar for a smooth lockout.
2. Optimize your leg drive to make the bench press more shoulder-friendly.
On that note, using proper leg drive can spare the shoulders by accelerating the bar though the portion of the lift where the shoulders are under the most stress. The less time you spend grinding the bar through the first few inches off the chest, the better.
Optimal leg drive technique differs from lifter to lifter, but foot placement dictates leg drive technique. Lifters with shorter legs tend to thrive with the feet hooked tightly under the bench and the heels off the ground, while longer-legged lifters do better with the feet out wide and heels flat.
Either way, if you plan on competing in powerlifting, you have to abide by your federation’s rules, which may require you to keep your heels on the ground. Here are some tips for choosing the right foot position:
3. Try dark roast coffee to reduce caffeine jitters.
At first I didn’t believe it when Greg Robins told me this, but it’s actually true: dark roast coffee has less caffeine that light roast coffee. And while the difference in actual caffeine content by volume may be small, dark roast coffee is harder to drink in mass quantities than light roast, so a bolder cup may reduce overall caffeine consumption if it gets you to drink less coffee overall. If your morning joe gives you jitters, consider switching to a darker roast.
4. Slow down the concentric phase of isolation exercises.
As performance coaches, we constantly trying to help our athletes become more powerful. That means we’re often coaching them to perform the concentric portion of most exercises explosively to enhance rate of force development. But when it comes to small muscle groups that often get “overshadowed” when performing single-joint exercises, sometimes we have to slow down.
Specifically at CSP, getting athletes to “feel” their rotator cuff or lower traps during arm care exercises can be challenging, especially if they rush through the concentric phase. Slowing down the tempo of all phases of the exercise usually cleans things up by keeping athletes in a better position and reducing contribution of unwanted synergists. For example, taking 3-5 seconds to externally rotate the humerus during cuff work can prevent the deltoid or lat from taking over.
5. When setting up for the front squat, exhale first.
I stole this trick from Miguel Aragoncillo and it works wonders for athletes whose elbows drop during front squats. Take your grip on the bar and before you unrack it, give a good hard exhale to get your ribs down. Then, inhale into your belly and back, drive your elbows up and unrack the bar.
While “elbows up” is a great cue for front squats, it won’t work if the athlete doesn’t set his or her ribcage in a solid position during the setup. Exhaling first gives you a better zone of apposition, allowing for a fuller breath and creating greater intra-abdominal pressure to keep you upright. Like Miguel told me, “Front squats are just abs and legs, dude.”
