It's been a while since I published one of these, so I thought I'd throw out two quick recommendations - both for reads from Cressey Performance guys.
Exercises You Should Be Doing: Quadruped Rhythmic Stabilizations - This blog from Tony Gentilcore features an exercise we've introduced in the past month since the seminar I did with Mike Reinold. It integrates "true" training for the rotator cuff along with an element of anterior core stability training.
Liquid Reeses and Banana - Brian St. Pierre presents a sweet shake idea for those of you in love with chocolate, but not wanting to eat all the bad stuff that'll give you a spare tire to remind you of how great the winter of 2009-2010 was.
We had 29 people in all, 23 of whom were CP clients/athletes. Five major league organizations were represented, as well as several universities, some meathead powerlifters, a dog, a physical therapist, a professional poker player, some badass chicks lifting heavy stuff (including a GP girlfriend and CP fiancee).
Some additional flavor from Tony Gentilcore's camera (the jackass who flexed at the 25 second mark):
1. I got a question earlier this week about how I felt about swimming for pitchers. To be honest, I'm not a huge fan for pitchers. Swimmers actually have a lot of the same issues as pitchers in terms of adaptive changes in the shoulder: an acquired anterior scapular tilt, glenohumeral internal rotation deficit (GIRD), and generalized laxity. I guess when it really comes down to it, I'd rather have guys actually throwing if they are going to develop imbalances.
2. Last, but not least, Mike Boyle has a good video up in conjunction with the release of his new Functional Strength Coach 3 product. Check out The Death of Squatting.
3. Even if he never scores another goal in his life, this kid is a stud - quite possibly on par with the West Virginia Ninja from last week.
4. Tony Gentilcore just switched his blog over to a new site. If you guys want to be entertained and learn something in the process (infotainment), check out www. TonyGentilcore.com.
5. Speaking of Tony, the two of us tested 1RM deadlifts yesterday (yes, together; it's kind of like when women go to the bathroom together). This came after a month-long deadlift specialization program that kicked the crap out of us (let's just say it was 4x/week deadlifting for three weeks, then one week of rest). Tony pulled a personal-best 550 pounds; here's our boy in action:
6. As for me, well, there was no PR. In fact, I got sent down to the JV team. I got 700 about three inches off the floor, and that was it. A subsequent attempt at 675 went only slightly better in my fatigued state. And I put a crater in the middle of my hand when a callus ripped off.
7. If you're a strength and conditioning coach or personal trainer looking for work and are anywhere near (or willing to move to) just east of Philadelphia, please shoot me an email at ec@ericcressey.com. I have a friend who is looking for some good coaches to work with athletes at his facility in that area. It's a positive, learning environment - and he's a great dude.
8. And, last, but certainly not least: Assess and Correct will be up for sale on Monday! Newsletter subscribers will hear about the product first, so if you aren't subscribed already, head HERE to get signed up.
Here are a few good reads from a variety of disciplines:
Organic vs. Kind of Organic vs. Wait, I'm Confused - This was a great blog post by Tony Gentilcore that tells you everything you ought to know (but might not want to know) about organic food.
Clean Eating Gone Wrong - Another great post, this one from Dr. John Berardi. It just goes to show you that being on the money with your nutrition can quickly and easily hit the fan.
Blood and Chalk: Jim Wendler Talks Big Weights - Jim is a great dude and one of the most amusing guys you'll encounter in this industry; he's always got something funny, but incredibly valuable to say. Check out this interview with him at T-Muscle.
1. I started this week off with a bang with a few good (and goofy) YouTube clips in my newsletter, so there's no reason to shy away from a continuation of the awesomeness in this blog.
2. Tony Gentilcore got the day off from work today. He claimed it was to go see the filming of the next Functional Strength Coach seminar, but we all know it was just a front for his regular ol' "weird ninja dude in the woods" routine. Glad you enjoyed your alone time, big guy.
2. Congratulations to CP athlete and New York Mets minor leaguer Tim Stronach (St. Lucie Mets: High A), who just missed both a perfect game and no-hitter on Wednesday. "Stro" took a perfect game into the 8th inning, and then lost the no-no with one out in the 9th. The wildest part is that Tim didn't even know until the day before that he'd be making the start.
Stronach packed 21 pounds on his 6-5 frame this off-season with loads of hard work at Cressey Performance, and deserves all the success that comes his way. Great job, Tim!
3. I received an email with the following question yesterday: "I play basketball. I watch how guys lose lots of weight and bodyfat preparing for the combine. How do they do that?"
Answer: The overwhelming majority of college basketball players I've encountered live on sugary sports drinks, chicken wings, pizza, and booze. Simply cleaning up their diets for a month or two will work wonders even if training is held constant. Did you expect something more revolutionary?
4. Here's another study showing that swinging a heavy bat prior to regular hitting is an inferior warm-up protocol as compared to swinging the normal bat or an underweighted bat. Researchers "suggested that when preparing to hit, 5 warm-up swings with either a light or normal bat will allow a player to achieve the greatest velocity of their normal bat." This is in complete contrast to the use of weighted baseballs to increase throwing velocity; I love 'em when used with the right population.
5. Huh? What? Come again?
6. I went back through Jim Smith's Accelerated Muscular Development today to check up on how he approaches formatting for e-books (as we prepare some for the upcoming project's release). While I was looking it over, I got to thinking about how it never ceases to amaze me how thorough Smitty is with his products; he just seems to cover everything. I've said it before: this is a great resource; I'd highly recommend you check it out.
Looking at some relatively recent research, you'll find that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that 34% of small business start-ups are no longer in existence two years after their inception. So, the logical assumption is that we're automatically more awesome than at least 1/3 of the small business world (we stole their lunch money and gave them wedgies, in fact).
Kidding aside, you don't just start a business so that you can "not fail." You do it so that you can thrive - and CP has done just that. I owe a huge thanks to our clients and staff for all their dedication to helping making CP what it is today: a place where....
...an Olympic boxer can share a stability ball with Pete in the office while getting awkwardly close to another man's meatloaf lunch
...it's considered perfectly acceptable to foam roll in catcher's gear.
...ladies and 68-year-old men alike bang out pull-ups like nobody's business.
...the average lifespan of a medicine ball is about seven minutes.
...it isn't uncommon for old clients to come back, handcuff Tony, and leave him for dead (out of love, for the record).
Interestingly, we haven't spent a penny on advertising over the two years; the business has grown purely by word of mouth. Is it any wonder when you can see stuff like this almost every time you enter the facility?
Thanks again to everyone involved for making my job so fun and for sharing my vision.
Q&A: Hip Injuries in Baseball
Q: On Sunday, The New York Times published this article that discusses the dramatic increase in hip injuries in Major League Baseball in recent years. I know you work with a ton of baseball players and was curious about your thoughts on the article. Do you agree with their theories?
A: As always, my answer is "kind of" or "maybe." I think they make some great points in the article, but as is the case with mainstream media articles, they're written by reporters with word count limits, so a lot of the most important points get omitted. For example, with respect to the hips, it isn't as simple as "weak or strong." You can have guys with ridiculously strong adductors that are completely overused, balled up, and short - but terribly weak hip extensors and abductors. So, part of the problem is that journalists don't even qualify as casual observers to exercise physiology, so the public only gets part of the story.
(Sorry, but that digression was totally worth it.)
First, I agree that one of the reasons we are seeing more of these issues is because doctors have become better at diagnosing the problems. The "corollary" to this would be that the issues are perceived as more severe because so few physical therapists, athletic trainers, and strength and conditioning coaches are comfortable treating and preventing the problems. That's not to say that hip issues aren't serious in nature; it simply implies that there is a divide between diagnostic capabilities and treatment/prevention strategies.
Second, I agree wholeheartedly that early specialization at the youth levels can lead to injuries down the road. We're dealing with some significant rotational velocities at the hips. In previous analyses of professional hitters, the hips rotated at a velocity of 714°/second. This same velocity isn't the same with little leaguers, but with skeletally immature children, it doesn't take as much stress to impose the same kind of damage. So, I don't see it as at all remarkable that some pro ballplayers have hip problems after they may have played baseball year-round from age 9 all the way to the time they got drafted. They also have bad shoulders, elbows, knees, and lower backs that have taked years to reach threshold. It just so happens that folks are getting better at diagnosing these problems, so we now have an "epidemic," in some folks' eyes.
What I can tell you, though, is that it's borderline idiocy to think that strength training is responsible for these problems. Injuries don't occur simply because you enhance strength. In fact, muscular strength reduces the time to threshold for tendinopathies, and takes stress off passive restraints such as ligaments, menisci, labrums, and discs. Making this assumption is like saying that strength training drills to bolster scapular stability may be the reason we see more shoulder and elbow injuries nowadays. Um, no. Shoulders and elbows crap out because of faulty mechanics, poor flexibility (e.g., shoulder internal rotation ROM), bad tissue quality, and muscular weakness. Granted, the shoulder (non-weight-bearing) and hips (weight-bearing) have different demands, but nobody ever tried to pin the exorbitant amount of arm problems in pitchers on "the advent of strength training."
That said, injuries occur when you ignore things that need to be addressed: pure and simple.
To that end, I can tell you that a large percentage of the baseball players I see - including position players, pitchers, and catchers - have some signficant hip ROM and tissue quality problems. In terms of range of motion, the most common culprints are hip internal rotation deficit (HIRD) and a lack of hip extension and knee flexion (rectus femoris shortness). Pitchers are often asymmetrical in hip flexion, too, with the front leg having much more ROM. In terms of tissue quality, the hip external rotations, hip flexors, and adductors are usually very restricted.
This is has proven true of guys who lift and guys who don't lift. The latter group just so happens to be skinny and weak, too!
Done appropriately, strength training isn't causing the problem - particularly when we are talking about huge contracts that restrict how aggressive programming can be. Trust me; guys with $20 million/year contracts aren't squatting 500 pounds very often...or ever. The risk-reward is way out of whack, and no pro strength coach is going to put his job on the line with programming like that.
However, strength training may be indirectly contributing to the problem by shifting an athlete's focus away from flexibility training and foam rolling/massage. Pro athletes are like everyone else in this world in that they have a limited time to devote to training, but to take it a step further, they have a lot of competing demands for their attention: hitting, throwing, lifting, sprinting, stretching, and soft tissue work. So, they have to pick the modalities that give them the biggest return on time investment and prioritize accordingly in terms of how much time they devote to these initiatives. Some guys make bad choices in this regard, and hip flexibility and tissue quality get ignored.
Baseball is a sport that doesn't permit ignorance, unfortunately, and this is one of many reasons why it has one of the highest injury rates in all of professional sports. We are talking about an extremely long competitive season with near daily games - a schedule that makes it challenging to maintain/build strength, flexibility, and tissue quality. Throwing a baseball is also the fastest motion in all of sports. Rotational sports have the pelvis and torso rotating in opposite directions at the same time. And, as I noted in Oblique Strains and Rotational Power, most professional ballplayers have a stride length of about 380% of hip width during hitting. It is really just a matter of which joint will break down first: hip, knee, or lower back. Taking immobile hips with poor tissue quality out into a long season with these demands is like doing calf raises in the power rack when someone is around with a video camera: you are just asking for a world of hurt.
So, what to do? Well, first, get cracking on tissue quality with regular foam rolling and massage (the more an athlete can afford, the better). Here is the sequence all Cressey Performance athletes go through before training.
In many of our guys, we also add in extra adductor rolling on the stretching table.
Second, you've got to hammer on flexibility. We spend a ton of time with both static stretching and dynamic flexibility. Here are a few of the static stretching favorites (the first to gain hip internal rotation, and the second to gain hip extension and knee flexion ROM):
Third, as Dr. Eric Cobb has written, you use resistance training to "cement neural patterns." This includes all sorts of lower-body lifting variations - from single-leg movements, to glute-ham raise, to deadlifting and squatting variations - and multi-directional core stability drills. And, often overlooked is the valuable role of medicine ball training in teaching good hip (and scap) loading patterns:
For more information, check out my previous newsletter, Medicine Ball Madness, which describes our off-season medicine ball programs in considerable detail.
All taken together, my take is that the increase in hip injuries at the MLB level has everything to do with early baseball specialization and improved diagnostic capabilities. However, when you examine hip dysfunction under a broader scope, you'll see that this joint breaks down for many of the same reasons that lower backs and knees reach threshold: inattention to tissue quality and targeted flexibility training. Strength training works synergistically with these other components of an effective program just like it would at any other joint.
*A special thanks goes out to Tony "Explosive Calves" Gentilcore for being a good sport in the videos in this newsletter.
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1. It's a big weekend around here with lots going on. First off, my lovely fiancee Anna is graduating from the New England College of Optometry this weekend. That's right, folks; in spite of eight years of schooling that culminates with her becoming "doctor," she was still clueless enough to marry a bonehead like me. I guess they can't teach you everything in school.
Just kidding, honey; I know I'm awesome in every way. And really proud of you.
2. Saturday, there are pre-graduation ceremonies. Unfortunately, out of fear of "poking an eye out," these ceremonies will be devoid of pin the tail on the donkey, darts, wiffleball, Hungry Hungry Hippos, and Twister. Instead, the future eye docs will participate in staring contests and heated "Corneal Abrasion Bingo" contests.
3. Saturday also happens to be a big day for Massachusetts high school baseball playoff games. We've got loads of guys participating, so I'll just say good luck to everyone.
4. Tony Gentilcore is moving to a new apartment this weekend, too. I just checked the Vegas odds, and after today's 58 complaints about packing, the over-under on Tony's instances of pissing and moaning about moving this weekend is 847.5. I am feeling frisky, so I'm going with the over.
5. In my newsletter on Wednesday, I raved about Jim Smith's new product, Accelerated Muscular Development. I actually received three emails from folks thanking me for the recommendation; they all loved Jim's new product. This is quality stuff; I encourage you to check it out.
6. A big thanks goes out to everyone who offered car-buying tips in last Friday's blog. I picked up a new car at the beginning of this week and definitely put some of the advice to use in saving me some cash, time, and hassle.
1. It's going to be a quick one this week, as I'm doing some last minute preparations for this weekend's Perform Better Summit in Providence, RI. To all the poor abandoned souls who count on my blog for companionship each Friday, I apologize for not giving our relationship the tender romance it deserves this week.
2. Congratulations to Cressey Performance athlete and Auburn High pitcher Tyler Beede, who threw a no-hitter on Wednesday. Tyler struck out 15 in his complete game performance.
3. I contributed on the fourth installment of Mythbusters at T-Nation this week. It also includes contributions from Chad Waterbury, Tony Gentilcore, and Christian Thibaudeau. Noticeably absent from this esteemed crew of contributors is Mr. Celery - so I thought I'd give him some love.
4. For the foam rolling aficionados in the crowd, here's a great variation to use for those hard-to-reach grundle adductor region. Thanks to Tony Gentilcore for the video:
This is a really important one for those of you in the crowd with a history of groin strains and sports hernias. Hockey players, soccer players, and powerlifters should commit this one to memory.
5. It's official: Mike Robertson, Bill Hartman, and I are filming a new DVD on June 7th. Lots to prepare before then!
