Back to the basics for improved athletic performance

The first question that may have popped into your mind was “basics as in squats, deadlifts and other compound exercises?” And my answer is “No, even more basic than that”. So what could someone do that’s even more basic??

Let me just sidetrack briefly: The longer I’m in this industry working with young athletes, The more coaching/correcting I have to do of basic movement skills whether its running, side shuffling, backpedalling, or simple jumping. However, these all start with one basic position which most people have learned as an athletic position.

So when I mean “basic” in this post, I’m ging way back before we even talk about loading someone with a bar of their back. With inexperienced trainees, its often a case of having to cue the position of their hips, chest, eyes so that we can create a new habit. More experienced young athletes on the other hand, still need to be cued on staying in that athletic position for shuffling or to stay at the same level instead of popping when they run or perform some other movement drill.

With the inexperienced trainees, it becomes a case of teaching them that there is a best way to move on the field, court, or ice. With the more experienced athletes, its more a case of refining movement so that energy is not wasted or leaked.

This is something that can make a huge difference in terms of movement quality and in turn non-specific athletic performance.

Alos, I forgot to ask: to all you northeasterners (I’m including my feelow Canucks in this) — how ’bout this summery weather??!!

CB

Having some more time for blogs this long weekend

With a relatively low key long weekend, I’ve been able to catch up on all my blog readin’  (even finding some new stuff to read!!) So here’s a recap on what I found really interesting and of a high quality (I know, I know, objectivity at iots best!!)

1) Mike Reinold (if you havent heard of him) is a physical therapist and athletic trainer. Part of his work includes working with the Boston Red Sox. Anyways earlier this week, Mike began a new blog series on patellofemoral pain. If you are not a trainer or of a similar field to Mike AND/OR do not get giddy about anatomy, then his stuff may not be for you…however if you DO enjoy learning some anatomy, you can’t go wrong with Mike’s blog. What the series has looked at so far is why PF pain is so misunderstood when it is so common, and where is the pain really radiating from (and why).

Click the link (…if you dare…??) >>PF Pain and more!!!

As a trainer, I believe reading things from folks with this sort of background is a great addition to my knowledge and skill set in that it let’s me know about issues so that I can know when I have to refer out to someone else. Also if someone is post-rehab and I’m training them, I shouldn’t just be guessing about how to (hopefully) keep them out of rehab/from going back to it.

2) Adam Ringler is a masters student at Michigan State specializing in strength and conditioning while interning with their strength and conditioning department. I’ve recently started to converse with him, so upon checking out his website, I found not only a clean looking site, but also several great blog posts on the front page! His writing is very clear, concise, and that all important skill of making things seem simple without giving a “dumbed-down feeling”.

Check out Adam’s site HERE

So thats it from this weekend. Let me know if you’ve found Mike’s and Adam’s sites useful or interesting — and of course if you guys have been reading some good stuff which I havent mentioned, throw that down in the comments section below!!

If you have tomorrow off, ENJOY!!

CB

Time to join to real world…

Can I make this work as "rugged and manly"???

Yup, another step into full-time workin’ adulthood and farther from my goin-back-to-school-every-September schoolboy(man) years. I’ve always written any articles and blogposts from home quite simply because a) there isn’t the likelihood of a client walking in that I have to coach and b) its quieter without the my-mother-didnt-love-me music playing in the background. What I’ve never really done is organized my writing ideas so what would happen is I would get an idea, and then lose it by the time I tried remembering it usually no more than half a day later, so I finally took the plunge and got one of those dry-erase boards.

Quite frankly my desk is always messy enough that writing the ideas on paper would have meant I would have forgotten the idea AND lost the paper, so for me the whiteboard makes a lot of sense since I’ll have my reminders in front of my face and easily accessible.

Now if anyone comments and calls me old…yup, you dont want to know what would happen!!

And on that note, HAPPY WEDNESDAY!!!

CB

Keeping or losing and audience

This is in reference to coaching, be it a large group or a single client. I know this is something I am always working on — just being brief and clear in any exercise or drill instruction I am giving. I find that at times, especially when explaining a more complex exercise (think a deadlift vs. a step up), that I will begin to explain more than just what the client needs to know. Fortunately since this has been something that I’ve had to work on since I started training two years ago, I’ve learned to read people as well as just catch myself in the act which gets me back on track to just get the client doing the exercise.

Another thought I have now is that if a client needs more explanation about an exercise or drill such as if they don’t understand my initial explanation, is to switch to another mode of teaching. So instead of trying to explain it further, I will switch to demonstrating the exercise or putting them in the position I want them to be in. I have found this to be more of an experience thing as I get better at recognizing people’s learning styles with each client I work with.

CB

Mis-using hurdle drills to train agility

Thinking about how versatile hurdles (especially the mini “banana” hurdles) are in a speed and agility program has been on my mind I guess for the last couple weeks. In programming, I know I have sued them for jumps and hops (plyometrics) and also for quick feet drills when I speed and agility sessions over the last two summers at SST. Needless to say, I thought of them as quite a useful piece of equipment for these sessions! However, this year my ideas on some of this have changed because of two reasons which are related to one another:

1) As my training philosophy has developed, I’ve realized that I need to design programs or speed/agility sessions so that sport performance is improved, not just that a training effect is achieved.

2) Reading Coach Mike Boyle’s book Functional Training for Sports, I once again learned something that left me with the “how did I not think of this already” thought in my head.

So, here’s my take on hurdles:

• They are great for plyometrics!

• Using them for quick feet shuffling-type agility drills promotes a high-knee, step-over typer action (the Ah-Ha moment out of Coach Boyle’s book), yet in sport, athletes will keep their feet low to the ground when shuffling to their right or left or taking crossover steps. If I want to train lateral movment or agility via shuffling or lateral running then I would rather opt to use a piece of equipment which lies flat on the ground so that the movement can be performed as it is in the sport.

To continue with this thought, it isn’t that I feel that these quick feet type drills don’t develop the intended result, just that after considering the athlete’s sport, it appears that there are better drill choices or pieces of equipment to use.

Anyways with that said, I realize I haven’t blogged in oh, AGES, so I’ll do my best to get back on track!

CB

Getting back into coaching mode

Now that I’m back from school and starting to get involved again with training at SST, it has become apparent (as it did last summer) that I need to brush up on my training and coaching. Being away at school for 8 months where I’m only training myself and one of my friends, if I have a workout buddy at all, gets me away from the skills I acquired during the previous summer. I guess its like when returning to school and it takes a while to get into the groove of going to school and preparing for classes. Now all I have to do is come up with another analogy since I’m no longer in school…

Short and sweet today folks!

CB

Addressing your weakest link

Most people know the saying you’re only as strong as your weakest link. Once the weakest link is known (usually found through the assessment) though, how should we go about fixing it?? Relating this to athletes changes the options a coach/trainer has because there is always that ultimate goal of improved athletic performance to consider. With that said, what is the right thing to do?? Does a muscle need to be isolated? Does it just need to get stronger? Is more flexibility needed or is the muscle stiff?

If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, you’ll probably guess my answer: It depends. Don’t you just love gray answers???

It depends on the nature of the weakest link — is a muscle just weaker than others, is there a motor control issue that needs to be addressed, do they lack the ability to perform a basic movement skill well.

What does this all mean??

If the weakest link can be any of these things listed in the above paragraphs, how can we try the same approach to fix everything?? Does a screwdriver equally work for both a screw and a nail??

CB

What to learn first the snatch or clean??

First off, just a quick note to celebrate my last exam being over as well as having my undergrad now completed — YAY!!

Alright enough feeding my ego. Here’s an interesting debate that just seems to go back and forth. I’ll actually come right out and say my stance on this isn’t the same as it was even a couple months ago. What  I used to think was teach the clean first then teach the snatch…so maybe you’re thinking “why did you change your mind?”

I think the snatch gets a bad rap as being excessively dangerous, and I was definitely in this boat until I tried them! Then until a couple months I just didn’t give it enough love to say that I’d teach them before cleans — I know my decisions are always changing (I prefer the term “evolving”) Anyways, let me be blunt: EVERY EXERCISE can be dangerous. The thing that worries many people about the snatch is catch a fast moving weight overhead. If you have never snatched before go read up on some form somewhere on the internet and try it next time in the gym, then please come back here and comment on your experience — did your arm fall out of its socket? did you get some shoulder injury that wasnt there before??

Your body naturally decelerates the weight, just as it would declerate the weight doing a shoulder press. As long as the athlete can get their arms up overhead, they can learn to snatch. Now does this mean I’m starting with a barbell?? — My experience until now says no. I would start with a 1-arm dumbbell snatch  because a) holding a weight in only one arm limits the amount of weight you can use (I guess I didnt need letters).

Now, just because I would dumbbel snatch doesn’t mean I would teach dumbbell cleans — I hate the idea of having dumbbells come crashing down on top of someone’s shoulders! So with the clean I’d start out with a barbell. Here’s how this plays into my decision: everyone wants to load barbells — especially adolescent males! If someone’s snatching a dumbbell overhead with one arm, they dont tend to be quite as obsessed with using the big weights, so in essence I can keep someone’s ego out of the equation to a greater degree with a dumbbell snatch than a clean.

On a final note, I have just personally found that dumbbell snatch allow me to focus on form easier than barbell cleans — I know, thats some  scientific data right there! Anyways, this has just been my observation. With the natural tendency to avoid the snatch as long as one can, I wanted to just point out that though it LOOKS dangerous, it really doesnt have to be and the learning curve might not be as long as many people think it to be.

Snatch away my friends, snatch away!

CB

Progress your Plyometrics!

Alright, I’m back at it now that I’m back at school to finish up exams and my 3 wisdom teeth are out of my life for good! Also with some time recovering from the surgery, I’ve been able to get back some energy which I really needed after writing 3 papers last week.

Since December one of the things I changed about by own training was adding in plyometrics. Now these were difficult to implement at my university gym, so I will talk about a more idea situation than what I did.

Basically we have 2 ways to make plyometrics more intense:
1. increase the magnitude of the effect of gravity
2. increase the demand on the Stretch-shortening cycle.

The first refers really to the hieght of anything you are jumping onto, off of, or over — this can be a box or hurdle usually. Anyways, when you jump onto a box there is a reduced effect of gravity since you are landing higher than your take off point. Think of when you jump, you go up and you come back down. Jumping up to a box obviously means your coming down part is shorter than the going up part, hence less of an effect of gravity on the landing. When you jump over an object your takeoff and landing will be at the same level and if you jump off an object there is a higher effect of gravity since your landing is lower than where you takeoff. Basically we manage this aspect of exercise intensity depending on safety and strength (which go hand in hand with eachother).

The second point is more sciency. The Stretch-shortening cycle is basically a physiological mechanism that allows your muscles to briefly store energy from a preceding movement to make the proceeding movement happen with less muscular demand. Using it is driven by the nervous system, so yes, we can train it. Oftentimes though athletes need to learn how to use this mechanism to be a benefit to their performance so we would start by doing consecutive jumps with a little bounce between that way theres not an excessive force absorbing demand on the muscles. Because the SSC happens very quickly, we just need to make individuals able to use it effectively — we can’t just throw them into the fire with the most advanced drill and hope their bodies will catch up before an injury happens.
Back to the progression — it will look like the above stage moving to consecutive jumps at a lower height which increases (think – jumping off a higher and higher box over time, or over higher hurdles — these make it more difficult to use the SSC efficiently).

Anyways I’m no Bill Nye the Science Guy (who remembers that great man??!!), but I hope you enjoyed this semi-science lesson on plyometrics. The reason I covered progressions is because most people generally can find where to start, but then results stop because they don’t progress difficulty or change things up.

Anyways its good to be back. With work starting up again in a couple weeks after school is finished, it should be nearing an exciting time for the blog since I’ll have much more hands-on stuff to write about!

CB

The State of the Fitness Industry

Earlier this week on one of the fitness websites/blogs I read on a regular basis, there was a discussion on the possibility that in New Jersey a bill mgiht be passed that will make becoming a trainer a lot more difficult and costly. Needless to say many responses involved current trainers who had an issue about this since they already believed they have put forth their own effort to raise the level of professionalism of the fitness industry, and I pretty much agreed with them. One of the big issues with the proposed bill besides increasing the difficulty of entry into the industry was that the bill would also limit our scope of practice which I again disagreed with since I beleive training is more than just instructing resistance training exercises — we do mobility, flexibility, basic nutrition, etc.

Not actually living in Jersey, I know that eventually this would become a matter in Canada since as we all know “what happens in America affects Canada”. I could see it just cascading to Canada after some more state governments climbed on board with this bill.

Back to the bill. Then this morning I read this article about those worst-case scenarios where some trainers really do some damage to clients (often during the first session with them).

Here’s the link >> Is Working Out the Newest Health Threat?

After reading this and remembering some of the idiotic things some trainers have done out there, I can’t help but be for the licensing to regulate the industry. Just for the sake of people who might run into these stupidly preventable situations in the future. If we can prevent fools like this from entering the industry or at least making them better educated before they work with a client, then I definitely cannot be opposed to that!

CB