I've written previously about the many flexibility deficits we see in baseball players (particularly pitchers). One of the biggest issues we face is a loss of elbow extension range-of-motion. This adaptive change most likely occurs because of the insane amounts of eccentric muscle action required to decelerate the 2,500 degrees/second of elbow extension that occurs during pitching. You'll find some serious shortness/tissue restrictions in biceps brachii, brachioradialis, brachialis, and all the rest of the muscles acting at the elbow and wrist.
Unfortunately, it's not an area you can really work on with the foam roller or baseball, as it's in a tough spot. For that reason, we prefer using The Stick - and hold it in place with the j-hooks in a power rack. Here is how it works when rolling out the anterior forearm musculature (this same technique can be utilized on the elbow flexors):
Follow that up with some longer duration holds of this stretch, and you'll get that elbow extension back in no time.
For the entire Cressey Performance foam roller series, click HERE.
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used by Cressey Performance Pitchers after they Throw!
Risk-Reward in Training Athletes and Clients
This week, approximately 1,500 players will be drafted in the 2009 Major League Baseball Draft. Historically, a whopping 2-3% of these players will ever actually make it to the big leagues. In fact, only about 2/3 of all first-round draft picks - seemingly the most qualified candidates - ever make it to the major leagues.
For this reason, many have labeled competing in the professional baseball ranks a "War of Attrition." High-round picks get preferentially escorted through the minor leagues, while a lot of the late-round picks fight for their positions in the minors - especially since they know a brand new class of 40-50 draft picks and a bunch of free agent signees will line up to take their jobs each year. Along the way, loads of guys incur career-ending injuries.
Here, we come to several decisions in how to train athletes.
First, all athletes have unique movement inefficiencies, so we screen these issues and address them individually. Nothing remarkable there.
Second, some athletes have bigger contracts, so you have to be more conservative with their programming. Sure, they might get benefits out of more aggressive programming, but it also increases the likelihood that you'll mess up an athlete with multi-million dollar contracts in his immediate future.
Take, for instance, Cressey Performance athlete Shawn Haviland. Shawn was drafted out of Harvard by the Oakland A's in the 33rd Round of the 2008 Draft after being named Ivy League Pitcher of the Year. As Shawn himself has said, he "would have signed for a plane ticket to Arizona." In other words, he didn't get an $8 million signing bonus; he's a very low-risk investment. Life goes on for his organization if he doesn't work out because they can just draft another 50 guys the following year. After all, he's just another 6-0 right-hander in the system - a dime a dozen, if you will.
This is the exact conversation Shawn and I had last October when we first met up. He'd been 86-88mph on the radar gun most of last year, and that really isn't going to earn you a long stay in professional baseball. So, we decided to be more aggressive with his off-season programming than we would with someone who'd just become a first-round pick.
All off-season, he lifted, sprinted, accumulated 80-120 medicine ball throws three times a week, did some extreme long-toss, threw the weighted balls around, and consistently worked on his flexibility and tissue quality. It flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that says: a) we shouldn't long toss more than 120 feet, b) weighted balls are the devil, c) only distance running and steady-state cardio will "build leg strength" in pitchers, d) lifting will ruin flexibility, and e) medicine ball throwing will cause oblique strains (yes, I've really heard that one). However, it worked.
Now, seven months later, Shawn was just named a Midwest League All-Star. He is consistently 91-94mph and has completely changed his body. In short, he took a chance, worked his butt off, and got better.
Shawn's program wasn't "unsafe;" it was just "less conservative." It was at a different point on the continuum on which every strength and conditioning coach and personal trainer works on a daily basis. This program was obviously different than what I'd do with, say, a 40-year-old marathon runner, but it's also different than I'd do with a first-round pick with Shawn's exact build, competitive demands, and inefficiencies. And, if I had a pitcher with those exact same characteristics and an extensive injury history, we'd be even more conservative. Otherwise, the risk: reward would be completely out of whack.
Often, in our industry, we get far too caught up in numbers - whether it's the weight one lifts or his/her body fat percentage. In reality, I look at what I do as a means to an end. People train with us first and foremost to stay healthy, whether they're pitching in the professional baseball ranks or just carrying their kids around. What you do in the gym should improve quality of life first and foremost, and any activity that carries a high likelihood of injury is very rarely worth the risk.
Why pick up a stone - which demands compression and lumbar flexion - when you're not a strongman competitor and could just as easily do a more controlled trap bar deadlift?
Why behind-the-neck overhead press - which puts the shoulder at one of its most at-risk position - when you've already had four shoulder surgeries and still have hunchback posture?
When it really comes down to it, you have to fit the program to the athlete, and not the athlete to the program. For more information, a few resources I'd recommend:
1. My article, 6 Mistakes: Fitting Round Pegs into Square Holes
2. The Building the Efficient Athlete DVD Set
3. The 2008 Indianapolis Performance Enhancement DVD Set
4. For those of you interested in a bit of what we did with Shawn, check out this Athlete Profile on him.
New Article at T-Nation
For those who missed it, Part 3 of my "Lower Back Savers" series was posted at T-Nation last week. You can check it out HERE (and be sure to check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you missed them in previous weeks).
New Blog ContentRandom Friday ThoughtsBogus Workouts and the Official Blog of...Building Vibrant Health: Part 2Friday Night Journals
Have a great week!
EC
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used by Cressey Performance Pitchers after they Throw!
If you're an intern here at Cressey Performance, it's not enough to just get smarter, become a better coach, and refine your vacuuming prowess. You have to get diesel, too.
This summer's crop of interns began to learn that the hard way last Thursday when their introductory challenge, the 16x16 sled relay, was proposed to them. Lucky for them, we only used three plates (instead of four). Also lucky for them, they were assisted by Alex Hill, an 17-year-old Cressey Performance athlete (and recent Wayland High School graduate) with about 1.5 years of training experience with us under his belt. As you'll see, he crushes them.
In watching this video, you'll realize:
a) Interns do not know how to turn a sled without flipping it over. Just imagine them trying to parallel park their cars.
b) They went out of order. And, they stopped early - and then realized that there was more to do. Poor, confused souls.
c) They struggle with double-knotting their shoelaces.
d) They got dominated by a high school athlete (oops...already said that)
e) Several of the intern trips resembled this dude:
f) The sleeve monster attacked two of them prior to this challenge.
g) Roger's last trip was painful - quite possibly as painful to watch as this.
This Thursday, we'll be teaching them about the birds and the bees, and then crushing them with something else. These boys will be diesel by the end of the summer if it's the last thing we do.
In place of our normal "Random Friday Thoughts" blog, I just wanted to use today as an announcement of something I think is really cool, convenient, and forward-thinking.
Anthony Renna has done a great job with the Strength Coach Podcasts, and now he's taken it a step further with the introduction of the Strength and Conditioning Webinars. As the name implies, a webinar is a seminar done on the web. So, you view a speaker's Powerpoint presentation while he does the voice-over on it.
It's super-convenient for presenters because we don't have to travel anywhere to give it, and we can deliver it while in our boxer shorts and beat-up old t-shirts. And, it's convenient for the audience for that exact same reason, but also because it's a bit of a lower price point (no facility rental fees to cover) and because it's convenient as heck. You can watch it at your convenience and don't have to be there "live" - and you can rewind to listen to it again if there is something that doesn't quite make sense.
Essentially, Anthony has addressed a lot of the shortcomings of traditional seminars - yet still brings together a bunch of great minds. Thus far, he's recorded webinars with Mike Boyle, Alwyn Cosgrove, Tim Vagen, and Tim Yuhas. In the future, you'll see folks like Gray Cook, Mike Robertson, Mike Reinold, Lee Burton, me, and a whole bunch of other super-talented and smart strength and conditioning coaches, physical therapists, aned athletic trainers.
If you look around, most webinars are going for $25-30 each. Conversely, Anthony is only charging $29.99/month for a membership to StrengthandConditioningWebinars.com. It's even cheaper if you pay up front for the year!
Even better, if you sign up before Monday, June 8, you can get an unbelievable deal- only $19.99 a month for as long as you are a member, or again, even cheaper if you sign up for the whole year- only $199.
You'll get two webinars a month guaranteed from the world's top coaches, bonus webinars, and access to presenter forums, all for $19.99 a month.
This is seriously a great deal and it is truly a one-time offer. After June 8, the price goes up.
So go to StrengthandConditioningWebinars.com, sign up for the Special Pre-Launch Offer before June 8 and start watching webinars right away.
Sooner or later, you're going to tweak your back, and there's nothing you'll ever experience, perhaps shy of limb dismemberment, that'll put a stop to your training as cruelly or effectively. Of course, if you've already had some back problems, you know what we're talking about. Either way we recommend you bone up on the back. It's one complex little beastie.
Continue reading...
Some reading recommendations for the week:
Why You Don't Need Bottled Water - This blog post from my good friend, Cassandra Forsythe-Pribanic, will definitely make you think twice about the containers in which you keep your drinks.
Max Push-ups and Upper-Body Strength - A perspective on the use of the push-up in females.
Regaining Shoulder Mobility for Back Squatting - This recent newsletter outlines some tips for getting under the bar to back squat, if you've got flexibility deficits at the shoulder.
Another day, another happy Maximum Strength customer!
"Hey Eric,
Just wrapped up your Maximum Strength program and I was definitely more than pleased with the results. I know it's a little weird that I switched up the box height on the box squat. I switched because the pre-MS box squat was the first time I ever performed the box squat. Here are my numbers:
Starting Numbers
Body Fat: 16%
Weight: 178 at 5'9
Bench: 215
Box Squat (24 inch box): 315
Deadlift: 330
3 RM Chin: BW+35
Broadjump: 87 in.
Ending Numbers
Body Fat: 10%
Weight: 170
Bench: 240
Box Squat (12 inch box): 325
Conventional Deadlift: 403
3RM Chin: BW+50
Broadjump: 96 in.
Thanks Eric!
Mike Coval"
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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I usually write my blog posts a few days in advance - and that's the case with today's blog, which I'm actually writing on Friday night, May 29. It's 10:31PM, and I'm not going to lie: I'm absolutely exhausted (and, I guess it technically should be called "tonight's blog," even if it's published four days after I write it).
My fiancee had a pre-graduation party of sorts to attend with some classmates, and because I was covering the gym until 5:30PM (and Friday traffic in Boston is a pain in the butt), I wasn't home in time to tag along. Since I'm pretty beat and I missed out on my chance to have some fun tonight, I decided to make lemonade out of rotten lemons.
Sure, I wrote a few programs for athletes and answered a few emails, but the "excitement" for my night was a chance to get better as a coach. You see, I delved into the folder I keep on my desktop entitled "Overhead Throwing Journal Articles." Essentially, this folder is full of PDFs of all sorts of studies relating to baseball - from injury prevention, to performance, to characteristics of successful athletes. Call me a dork, but it's a Friday night, and I'm psyched to be reading this stuff.
Why? Well, I want to be the best in the world at developing baseball talent - for my sake, my family's sake, and most importantly, for the athletes who trust their development to me. Baseball players account for 74% of the Cressey Performance clientele, and I feel it's my obligation to them to be as on-top of things as is humanly possible.
I don't want this to come across as a "hooray for me" post, so I'm trying to choose my words wisely - but I can honestly say that I HATE not knowing something. It's a hatred that's driven me to read everything I can get my hands on and make the most of the valuable experiences I've been afforded and relationships I've cultivated with bright minds in related fields of study.
A few weekends ago, during the Q&A section of the Perform Better Summit in Providence, Al Vermeil - quite possibly the best strength and conditioning coach of all time (has won multiple Super Bowl and NBA Championship rings) - came right out and said (paraphrased, as I recall it), "I'm tired of hearing about people in the fitness industry asking about how to make more money. The only thing I ever focused on was becoming a better coach. Get really good at what you do and then you'll make enough money."
It really rang true for me, as my mindset all along has always been to just keep getting smarter and smarter: something that's easy for me to work toward, as I genuinely love what I do. I often get asked how I have accomplished so much by age 28, and the answer is that I really love it, and work has never been about a paycheck. It's been about gathering, interpreting, utilizing, and disseminating information - to my athletes and reading/viewing audiences.
So, I guess you could say that a Friday night with a collection of journal articles isn't such a bad thing. I'm guessing Al Vermeil had plenty of "Journal Fridays" along the way to all those rings. When was the last time you set aside a Friday night (or several of them) to get better in your chosen field?
