Recently I’ve been introduced to the concept of heart rate variability (HRV).  For those who don’t know anything about HRV, it’s basically a measure of the variation in beat-to-beat interval of your heart rate.  Methods to measure HRV include ECG, blood pressure and specific devices (which I’ll talk about a little later).  HRV has been shown to be a pretty accurate predictor of heart diseases.  But more specifically to training and performance, HRV can give you information about the CNS, the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems activity, and overall fatigue and recovery.

What that means is that HRV measurement could be an invaluable tool to monitor fatigue and recovery in athletes.  Think about the implications of this.  We all periodize our athletes’ training programs and adjust the training loads in order to give them the biggest benefits from training and we try to follow some sort of supercompensation model, in the hopes of getting the desired results.

But how do you know if you’re training loads and recovery times are perfectly adjusted so your athletes reach optimal supercompensation?  There is no way to know without measuring it!  It doesn’t matter how much experience you have in training high level athletes and writing training programs; the fact is that you can’t know EXACTLY how much training load and recovery is optimal for every individual athlete.  Because let’s face it, every athlete is different; they all handle stress (physical and psychological) differently, they eat and sleep differently and their bodies have different recovery abilities.

This is where HRV measures come very handy.  By getting those measures you can write programs and adjust training loads accordingly.  HRV measures give you all you need to plan your training, recovery and supercompensation optimally.  HRV is probably the future for most high level athletes and their training regimen.  But with the finding of HRV comes a bad news, and a good news…

Bad news first: there aren’t that many good devices out there that are user friendly to use HRV with yourself and your clients.  And most of them are worth thousands of dollars; OmegaWave, which is probably the most popular one is worth well over 10,000$!  And in terms of practicality it’s not better as you can run only one person at a time (takes around 5-7 minutes to run someone through); that’s pretty inconvenient from a team’s or small group perspective.

But here’s the good news: Joel Jamieson is about to launch is own HRV product called BioForce HRV  and it’s going to be available for less than 200$!  From what I heard, Joel has been working to develop this product for the past 10 years, and it’s been tested on hundreds of athletes.  It should be similar to the OmegaWave, but much more available to anyone who wants to use HRV.

If you have any interest in that type of product, I recommend you check out Joel Jamieson’s website as we’re getting really close to the launch date of his product, from what I heard.  Check it out HERE.

I’ve only been introduced to the HRV concept a couple weeks ago, and all I’ve been thinking about ever since is: with all the implications of this tool, it could very well change the future of periodization training for sports -and the one of every high level athlete, for that matter.  If you realize how much managing training loads and volumes matter with high level athletes (especially in-season to manage fatigue), you’ll probably think like me that this tool could revolutionize our industry forever.

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There are bunch of different injuries that occur in every sport.  If you look carefully at the injuries in each sport you’ll notice that there are injuries that are common in each one of them.  In fact, you could probably identify 3-4 different injuries in a given sport that you keep hearing about from athletes.  Hockey, like every sport, has its common injuries.  Before we go any further in this injury prevention discussion, it’s important to acknowledge that there are 2 different types of injuries:

1. Trauma injuries (e.g. shoulder dislocations, concussions, etc) that usually happen with some type of contact.  These injuries are not really preventable (the only thing you can really do is beef up the surrounding muscles to limit the effect of the impact).
2. Overuse/Under-recovery injuries (e.g. tendinopathy, muscle strains, etc) .  These injuries are largely preventable and can become pretty much completely absent if taken care of the right way.

Unfortunately, nothing you can do to prevent that.

Knowing that there is little we can do to prevent trauma injuries, we’ll focus on the preventable injuries.  Appropriate training and recovery methods can almost always prevent those injuries.  If we want to help prevent those injuries, we need to know what they are in the first place.   In hockey players, the common preventable injuries are:

• Adductor/Hip flexor strains
• Hip labral tear
• Sports hernias

If you are a hockey player or train hockey players, you’ll know that these injuries are VERY common among the hockey community.  The nature of the sport and the large amount of stress placed on the hips can explain in part why those injuries occur.  But it’s also important to understand that common doesn’t mean that it’s OK and that we shouldn’t do anything to prevent them.

To prevent the injury, you need to understand the injury mechanism.  In hockey the hip abductors (glutes) get a lot stress from the skating motion.  Conversely, the adductors and hip flexors are elongated with every stride of the skating motion.  That certainly creates imbalances across the hip musculature; some muscles get weak, some muscles build up a lot of adhesions and trigger points and some muscles are just overused.  Re-establishing that muscle balance in your training program is crucial to keep your athletes healthy.

Getting some soft-tissue work done on your glutes and adductors, stretching your glutes, strengthening your adductors in a shortened position and re-establishing neutral pelvic position (getting out of anterior tilt, which is way too common among hockey players) are just a couple of examples of strategies to help restore muscle balance across the hips for hockey players.

Kevin Neeld has a full chapter in his book Ultimate Hockey Training dedicated to those common hockey injuries and how to prevent them.  If you haven’t already, I strongly suggest you pick up a copy of his book.

I blogged quite a bit recently about the importance of breathing patterns in posture, muscle tone, optimal movement patterns, injury prevention and cardiovascular functions.  If breathing patterns aren’t optimal, it’s important to train them, or re-train them to make sure your diaphragm functions optimally for all of the reasons above.  Efficient breathing pattern means an adequate use of your diaphragm muscles (yes, you have two), and them functioning optimally is of utmost importance.

But do you know how to identify faulty breathing patterns in the first place?

There are many different ways to assess breathing patterns, some more advanced than others.  Here are simple ways to identify faulty breathing patterns:

1. Neck muscles’ hypertonicity.  When someone has faulty breathing habits, he will tend to “breathe more through his chest than through his belly”.  Breathing through your chest will make your shoulders go up and down every time you breathe and it will put a lot of stress on your neck muscles.  If you have a client who present with hypertonic neck muscles, it might be because of faulty breathing pattern.  This tension in those neck muscles can also lead to pretty severe headaches, as well.

Hypertonic sternocleidomastoid.  Could be the sign of a chest breather

2. Shoulder protraction.  As I just mentioned in the previous point, a chest breather will put a lot of strain on his neck and shoulder muscles as well.  Assessing the resting posture of the shoulders, as well as how they move when the person breathe (looking for significant up and down motion) can help identify faulty breathing patterns.  A chest breather will have his shoulders sitting higher (sort of shrugged up) and protracted because of the use of the wrong muscles to breathe.

Posture looks better on the right. But both present with protracted shoulders which could be sign of faulty breathing patterns.

3. Rib flare.  This is a really easy thing to identify: simply put the client on his back, ask him to pull his shirt up a little bit, and notice the position of his lower ribs.  If they are flaring out it is most definitely a sign of faulty breathing pattern.

  This is a rib flare.

……not to be confused with a Rick Flair.

4. Hyperextension at the thoraco-lumbar (T-L) junction.  This one goes hand-in-hand with the previous point on the rib flare.  If there is indeed a rib flare, chances are that there will also be a hyperextension at the T-L junction.  This can be caused by a faulty breathing pattern, as well as a lack of appropriate thoracic spine mobility.  People often compensate for a lack of t-spine extension with hyperextension at the T-L segment.

This is some of the stuff that I got from Dr. Jeff Cubos’ presentation in Muscle Imbalances Revealed – Upper Body.  That is a resource with great information, and if you’re interested in learning more about breathing patterns, how to assess for them and how to re-train them properly. You can get it by clicking on the link below:

Muscle Imbalances Revealed – Upper Body

Injury prevention strategies are an important part of a strength and conditioning program.  How important is it to get bigger, faster, stronger and more powerful if you’re sidelined with a preventable injury?  Not that important I would think…

But when including injury prevention strategies in your program or the ones of your athletes, you can face a couple challenges, mainly:

• how exactly to program those injury prevention strategies in your training
• how to not completely turn your training program into a rehab program
• not make your athletes feel like patients
• how to maintain a training effect while still working on injury prevention

Not Exactly how you want to make your athletes feel like

These are legitimate concerns in my opinion because there is a fine line between too much and too little corrective exercises.  And it’s also not easy to know where to include them in your program so you still end up with an optimal result, both from from an exercise prescription and a time management perspective.  Here are a couple of tips to help you program your corrective exercises better into your own program or the ones of your athletes.

1. Your warm up.  There is a decent amount of injury prevention strategies that can be included in your warm up, especially if they’re mobility exercises.  A warm up is the perfect time to work on soft-tissue restriction and mobility to improve range of motion.  And you’re going to use your lifting to reinforce that new found mobility with appropriate lifting exercises.

Your warm up should be a little more specific than that…

2. Your cool down.  Soft-tissue work and static stretching are great to include at the end of your training session.  It will promote recovery and limit the possible range of motion loss from tight muscles.

3. Fillers.  This is probably my favorite way to include injury prevention strategies in a training program.  Fillers are basically a corrective exercise that you include between sets of a lifting exercise.  It can help reinforce a movement pattern of your main lifting exercise, it can be a stability exercise or it can be a mobility exercise that doesn’t affect the part(s) of your body you’re training.  The reason I like fillers so much is because from a time efficiency perspective, it really doesn’t get any better.  It saves time so yo don’t have to do all of that corrective work at the beginning or at the end of your training, which would make your session time longer by at least 10-20 minutes.  It also makes your training more productive; you spend less time (if at all, when programed thoroughly) waiting and doing nothing between your sets of your main exercises.  This is something very common among most gym enthusiasts; they spend an awful lot of time doing nothing (most of the time talking, and losing focus) between their working sets.  No wonder why most people hate going to the gym and lifting weights!  I would hate training too if I had to wait 1-2 minutes between every single set of every exercise I’m doing; this is boring as hell!  Putting fillers in between your sets makes you move more, reduces your down time between sets, and makes you feel like your training was much more productive and that you got a lot more done in the same amount of time.  And you took care of the injury prevention side of things on top of that!

Here’s what a hypothetical upper body day could look like with the use of filler sets if we wanted to include shoulder injury prevention strategies (filler exercises are highlighted in green) :

Notice that you’d still get a decent training effect from the rest of the exercises while simultaneously working on lower trap and serratus anterior activation, t-spine mobility, breathing patterns and anterior chain muscles extensibility, which all play an important role in injury prevention for the shoulders.

As I mentioned above, fillers can be a tremendous addition in your training program.  Give it a shot and play around with your corrective exercises that you want to include in your program.  As long as your filler exercise doesn’t interfere with your main exercise, you should be fine.  But you might need some time to play around and find good combinations that will work for you.

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Guys, this is just a quick blog post to let you know that my good friend Kevin Neeld is still offering his Ultimate Hockey Training book at the introductory price (which, unbelievably is less than 35$!).  If you haven’t already, I strongly suggest you pick up a copy before Kevin decides to bump up the price of the book.

Get Your Copy of Ultimate Hockey Training Here!

If you ever buy strength and conditioning resources, you know that the books and DVDs that are sold usually don’t sell for less than 50-100$.  Kevin set up that intro price to make sure that it could be available to anyone who wants to read it.  Think about it.  He refused to put more money in his pocket because he wanted as many people as possible to afford it.

Take advantage of his generosity before it’s too late!

Get Your Copy of Ultimate Hockey Training Here!

We live in a world where low back pain is a very common issue.  We all know people who have back pain or who’ve had hernias or hurt there back playing sports, training or sometimes just picking up grocery bags off the floor.  I read a statistic somewhere that stated that 80% of the population will, at some point in their life, suffer from back pain.  That is A LOT!  And the truth is that low back problems are still very misunderstood.  Even in the research world, we seem to have a better understanding of the injury mechanisms of the lower back, thanks to great researchers like Stuart McGill, but there are still some gray areas.  There seem to be much more that we need to learn.

But as I just mentioned, there is definitely a better understanding of the injury mechanisms of the lower back.  According to McGill’s research there are different movement patterns that cause low back problems.  Hernias and other back problem are usually a result of one of the following:

• repetitive and/or excessive flexion at the lumbar spine
• repetitive and /or excessive extension of the lumbar spine
• repetitive and/or excessive rotation at the lumbar spine
• a combination of flexion and rotation
• a combination of extension and rotation

Most back problems originate from one of these mechanisms.  There are different reasons why these injury mechanisms develop.  Lack of hip mobility, lack of thoracic spine mobility, muscle imbalances and compensation patterns in the hips and core, poor posture, and sitting too much are all reasons why back pain these injury mechanisms can end up causing back pain.

One thing that is really important to understand with back problems is that they do go away.  Having back pain at some point in your life doesn’t mean you have to be stuck with this pain all your life.  Even serious back problems such as hernias don’t last forever.  If it needs surgery, you obviously need to get it.  If you don’t need it (which is often the case with low back hernias), according to McGill, the disk will go back in place by itself if you allow it some recovery time.

If the pain persists or come back, it probably means that the source of the pain hasn’t been addressed (note that I said the source, not the symptoms).  As mentioned above, the injury mechanisms that I outlined that are at the source of most back problems need to be addressed.  That might mean to learn to bend over the right way and learning a good hip hinge (e.g. let the hips move and do the work while keeping the spine in a neutral position).  It could also mean learning to get more hip extension when you run instead of having the lumbar spine compensate and extend too much.  There are also many daily behaviors that will need modifications in order to avoid the faulty movement occurring at the spine.

The bottom line is that you need to re-train your body to move the right way.  If you don’t, the pain will keep coming back because the injury mechanism is still there.  There is also usually a big mental component to any back problem, and understandably.  Folks who suffer from back pain often apprehend the pain coming back, whether it’s when they train or just in their daily activities.  Part of the re-training process in teaching good movement patterns and teaching back pain clients to move better is going to be mental and making sure they understand that they are not stuck with that pain their whole life.

It’s THAT important that you explain all of that as well as possible before you drop the word ‘Deadlift’ in front of them.  The deadlift is not only a safe tool, but an essential part of their rehab.  Most of them will associate deadlift with back injury, or think of it as a dangerous exercise for their back.  This couldn’t be any further form the truth.  And obviously deadlift doesn’t mean ‘heavy’ or ‘full range of motion’ right from day 1.  But there is a very under-appreciated rehab component to the deadlift for clients who’ve had back pain.  The deadlift is probably THE best way to teach someone how to hinge at the hips, while keeping their spine in a neutral alignment.  By reinforcing this movement pattern you will help your clients reduce their risk of re-injuring their back.  A very careful approach must be taken though, and no flaws should be allowed in their form before any type of loading is even considered.  The deadlift is really just a hip hinge and everyone should own that movement, whether you lift weights or not.  It’s just a back saver to know how to deadlift the right way.

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Two days ago, we started having staff lifts again at Endeavor.  For the past 4-5 months, we all have been doing our own thing by ourselves.  The reason being that we had different schedules that didn’t really allow us to all lift together.  Prior to that, me and Kevin have been consistently lifting together for over a year and a half.  Going into the summer and starting to lift by myself didn’t seem that bad of an idea; it was allowing me to wok on things that might be a little more specific for me (injury preventions strategies, limitations, personal goals, etc) instead of having one program for the whole staff.  It was also a good thing to just be able to lift whenever I felt like it and didn’t have to accommodate anyone’s schedule.  And there I went, getting on that journey all by myself, with no set program to follow, just figuring what I would be doing the day of.

Some ideas sound look good in theory, but when you put them to the test…

By doing that, I was slowly doing less and less every training session, being less and less motivated and in the last couple of weeks especially, I felt like I was just training because I needed to.  I wasn’t looking forward to it anymore.  But the worst part of all of this is that I didn’t really realize any of those things until recently.  I’ve always been keeping a training log in the form of a blog for the last 4+ years.  I’ve been doing this because it’s an easy way to keep track of everything, make sure you’re not losing previous training programs, easy to track back previous months and years of training and because it’s free.  Sure it’s there for everyone to see, but I don’t really care about that as I do it for myself and for the convenience of it.  That being said, Lately I was looking back at those last months of training and noticed a couple of things:

• My training volume was really low
• My upper body pulling volume was really low
• I probably missed more training sessions in the last 4 months than I have in the last 4 years
• I progressively stopped conditioning
• My numbers were really not impressive (not that they ever were, but considerably weak for me)

I also noticed recently, as I’ve mentioned earlier, that the idea of lifting weights was becoming less and less appealing to me.  Coincidentally, I had a talk with Kevin about 2 weeks ago and he brought up the idea of doing staff lifts again as he was surprisingly feeling in a similar way I was.  This is pretty much when I realized how unproductive my training sessions had become recently.

I was getting there…

So I wrote a staff training program last week, and me and Kevin were planning on starting to lift together again.  I also happened to e-mail the program to Matt, Karl (the 2 other coaches at Endeavor) and Jared (our boss) as I thought they might be interested in giving the program a shot.

Two days ago, me and Kevin started the new program and Jared jumped in.  Yesterday, Matt also joined us.  I was just thinking that the lower body lift we just did the 4 of us together would have probably crushed me a lot more if I would’ve done it by myself.  It was pretty hard, and I know that I would’ve struggled to finish it.  But training with the boys made it so much more enjoyable and more easier to go through.  I still felt out of breath the whole time and I sweated like a pig, but knowing that these 3 other guys were going through the same thing as me made me just suck it up and push through it. There is a team cohesion component to lifting as a group.  You know that the other guys are going through the same thing as you are, everyone is struggling when the training is hard, and we all have the same end goal: finish the program.  There is also probably an ego component to it; you don’t want to quit or slow down as the other guys keep pushing through it.

Sometimes it’s good to lose what you’ve had for a little bit to realize how great it is.  Do yourself a favor: find a training partner (or training partners) that have similar goals as you, and I can guarantee your progress will skyrocket.

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There has been a barefoot revolution lately in the fitness industry. We’ve realized that modern shoewear have been restricting foot and ankle mobility and basically being just crutches to fix bad mechanics (if you’re foot pronates too much when you run, buy an anti-pronator running shoe; if your shins or your knees hurt, buy a shoe with more cushioning; if your foot is flat get a shoe with a good arch support, or get orthotics).

This is like putting a bad-aid on an open wound…

Never have we been thinking: “well, if your foot pronates too much, there might be a cause to it”. The shoe itself became a solution to a problem that most likely originates somewhere else. We never thought about analyzing biomechanics and assessing movement quality at the hips, knees and ankles.

But luckily, we’re coming to the realization that the shoes are not going to be the solution. This trend probably started with the popularity of the book Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall. A lot pf people started dropping anti-pronator shoes with an arch support and 2 inches cushioning to start running and training bare foot or in Vibram Five Fingers.

That caused another problem, though. People started getting injured because they transitioned too drastically to barefoot running and their body wasn’t ready for that.  If you have a problem originating at the hips that cause your feet to overpronate and you jump to barefoot running, not only you’re not solving the problem, but you may be making it worse!

In the book Born to Run, McDougall talks about how the Tarahumara, a Mexican tribe, were one of the greatest groups of runners in the world and they were pretty much running barefoot (using thin leather sandals) and never got injured.

What we failed to realize about the Tarahumara is that they have been running for years and years barefoot, learning to run without shoes, building up their stamina while running barefoot (they probably didn’t start running 10 miles per day), they are very thin and light people who don’t present with any weight surplus whatsoever because they are a more active population than the average person in North America (which also means they probably don’t have as many movement dysfunctions and poor posture from sitting all day), and more than anything else the surface they are running on is soft: it’s DIRT!  And we have much heavier people, with sub-par running mechanics, usually pretty deconditioned  and running on concrete and asphalt and expecting to get the same benefits out of barefoot running as the Tarahumara?

So just dropping our shoewear altogether is probably not the right place to start.  But at the same time it’s pretty obvious that we need to get away from the Nike Shox, Reebok Zig Tech, high top sneakers and 2 inches heel lift running shoes of this world.  Before shoes, feet used to be hands; feet used to have dexterity and the brain used to have good motor control over the toes and how they’re moving.  Modern days shoewear have completely deprived the feet of any proprioception.  This is what feet should really look like:

This is the feet of a Tarahumara.  Notice how naturally spread out the toes are.  All they’re ever wearing is those thin leather sole sandals.

With modern days shoewear that have made our feet and toes become lazy this what our feet now look like:

You think this is normal? ….this is what 21st century footwear has done to our feet!

There is a problem with that!  So where do we start if we don’t drop our very cushioned footwear completely?  Here are a couple guidelines to help your feet become feet again:

• Fix any lower body movement pattern restrictions that you might have (having a symmetrical score of 14 on the FMS is a good place to start).
• Buy a pair of shoes with a thinner and more flexible sole to wear daily to get to work, go to school, when you go shopping, etc.  Nike Free, New Balance Minimus, and Reebok RealFlex are all great options.  You don’t have to wear them all day; you can start wearing them just a couple hours a day and progress from there if you’ve been having lower extremity issues or if you have a weight surplus.

• When you work out, do your warm up barefoot.  That’ll be a good place to start to help your feet and your toes gain proprioception, and that won’t be too much stress on your body.  You can go through dynamic stretching and low impact movement preparation drills.
• If you lift weights use a thin sole shoe like the ones mentioned above and do your posterior chain exercises (deadlift variations, pullthroughs, good mornings, etc) barefoot.
• If you run distances, keep your regular running shoes for a little while, but try to include some sprint work in your thin sole shoes on a soft surface (grass, dirt, turf, etc) to help improve your running stride and get more of a forefoot strike.  This way you minimize the impacts and your body will adjust, instead of having the shoes do all the work without the presence of decent foot proprioception, which in turn leads to having too much of a heel strike when you run (a.k.a not a good thing because a heel strike forces your body into deceleration with every stride).

• After a couple weeks, you can slowly move to sprints barefoot or with Vibram Five Fingers, and start running in a running shoe that has a thinner sole and doesn’t restrict motion as much.  If you’re running on concrete or asphalt, I would suggest you stay away from shoes that have too thin of a sole as those surfaces can take a beating on your lower extremeties.

• When you’re at home, try to walk barefoot as much as possible, and try to do proprioception drills for your feet and (especially) your toes.
• Hammer ankle and big toe mobility, as well as lower leg and plantar fascia soft-tissue work.

All of this should help your feet become feet again.  Adequate proprioception of the feet and toes shouldn’t be neglected; they give your CNS important feedback that will lead to better stability, more efficient gait and running mechanics and limit the instance of injuries, especially in runnners.  And don’t be surprised if your flat feet or high arches get fixed in the process.

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Core training is most often referred to as exercises that work your rectus abdominis.  Sometimes the concept of core training will go as far as including the external and internal obliques and the lumbar erectors, but it rarely goes past that stage.  The term “core” in itself is very loosely used to describe either abs training or stability training, or sometimes both.  But the reality is that your core can include every muscle that runs across your hips, spine (including the cervical spine) and shoulders.

And this is only the back view…

So we definitely need to broaden our horizons when we think about core training and realize it’s much more than just the muscles around our belly.  Here are some of the most overlooked aspects of core training:

• Cervical spine alignment (packing the neck)
• Inner core activation (pelvic floor, diaphragm, transverse abdominis and multifidus)
• Breathing patterns

These are 3 things that go hand in hand with each other, as well as with traditional core training and in my opinion they’re probably the 3 most overlooked aspects of core training among athletes and regular gym-goers.

The trend since Stuart McGill’s work came out is to use neutral spine whenever we train the core and lift weights.  The goal is to reinforce this pattern as much as possible.  But we often forget that the neck is part of the spine and that should also be trained to be neutral.  There is a much deeper core activation when the neck is packed in a neutral position and it provides for greater stability.  The cervical spine often gets into hyperextension when training, especially with posterior chain exercises.  The tendency is to keep the eyes up while the angle of the spine gets closer to parallel.

Notice how hyperextended the cervical spine is.

This position puts a lot of strain on the inter-vertebral discs of the cervical spine on top of having sub-optimal spine stability all the way down to the lumbar spine (each segment of the spine interacts with each other).  Keeping the neck in a neutral/packed position will facilitate a proper breathing pattern (Try and take a deep breath- without thinking about it- first, in a relaxed position with your neck not in a neutral position, and then try it again in a packed neck position.  Notice how the breath with the packed neck position is much more of a belly breath, compared to more of a chest breath without your neck packed).  And that in turn will facilitate activation of the inner core muscles.

Why is this the first image that pops up when I google “packed neck position”??
…but I have to say that his form is pretty impressive

The bottom line is that everything in your core is interrelated together and when everything is indeed coordinated, you gain amazing stability that you wouldn’t have otherwise.   That’s why it’s so important to train your inner core, your breathing patterns and your packed neck position.  From an injury prevention and a strength gain standpoint it can make all the difference.

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Single-leg exercises like reverse lunges, rear foot elevated split squats and 1-leg squats can have great value in a training program as it improves your strength, your stability and your balance on 1 leg, which is the way most sports are played.  Whether it is when you run, when you change direction, when you skate (if your sport is played on the ice) or when you decelerate, all of these actions take place on one leg at a time.

For these reasons, single leg exercises might be more “functional” than 2-legs exercises like squats.  Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love squats, but they might not transfer as much as single leg exercises when it comes to developing strength, speed and power in a sport context.  You just need to know which one to use and when.

Athletes still need to be able to squat as it is one of the most primitive patterns that the nervous system should control and master at a very young age.  You could be surprised to see how many athletes have a hard time squatting properly.  It can be because of mobility restrictions, stability or motor control problems, or other reasons, but it’s still a movement that an athlete (and any person as a matter of fact) should own.

If this isn’t textbook form….unfortunately I might lose this skill as he ages

That being said there is a strong neural relationship between single-leg strength and its carryover to sport’s performance.  And these can be used as a main lower body lifts just like a squat or a deadlift.  On top of being very beneficial in the transfer to sport’s performance, single-leg lifts can be great to reduce spinal loading (because you’re usually using less weight than double leg exercises) and to establish symmetry between both sides.  Also everything changes from double leg to single stance; more stabilizer muscles are engaged, core muscle activation is increased and the foot’s proprioception is challenged to a much greater extent.

Even if spinal loading is not as great as with regular squats, you can still get a tremendous effect out of single-leg training and gain a lot of strength.  If you’re not convinced, just check out this video of one of our hockey player at Endeavor doing Reverse Lunges with 255 pounds for 6 reps!

Even Coach Jorts  from  CoachJortsTraining.com can’t squat as much double leg! (barely 225! Pfff, those jorts don’t even make you stronger)

In all seriousness, my friend Kevin Neeld just released his Ultimate Hockey Training book last week and he goes into great details on the benefits of single-leg lifts.  Make sure you get a copy; he’s still selling it at the introductory price (less than 35$!!)