When you think of aerobic training, you think about getting on the stationary bike or going for a jog for an hour. Pretty boring right?
Even though a lot of people bash aerobic training, it definitely has a place in a training program; it’s just a matter of how and when it’s implemented. When used the right way, low intensity aerobic training can increase the oxygen supply to the muscles, increase the capacity of your heart to pump blood with each beat, and improve recovery capacity.
Here’s one method that you can use that is not taxing at all on your nervous system, and will allow you to reap the benefits of aerobic training….and on top of everything, it’s less boring than going for a stationary bike ride! That’s actually what I did yesterday after my lower body lift.
What you need: A heart rate monitor, and a football field (or any straight line that’s about 100-yards- preferably outside to get some sun and some vitamin D!)
How long it takes: It could be done for anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes.
How it works: Set up your heart rate limits on your heart rate monitor between 130 and 150. All you need to do is run at a moderate pace until your heart rate goes above 150, or until your heart rate monitor beeps. When you heart rate reaches 150, start walking at a steady pace until your heart rate goes back down to 130. Then, start running again. When you reach one end of the field, just turn around and start running (or walking) the opposite way.
It’s a lot more fun than riding a stationary bike, you’re spending time outside, you’re improving your aerobic capacity and increasing your recovery capacity! Make sure you give it a try!
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I’m currently reading See to Play, a book written by Michael Peters, the optometrist for the Carolina Hurricanes. The book is about the importance of vision in sports, and how it can get trained. I’m not even half way through the book right now, but I’m already learning so much about the importance of vision in performance training.
Let’s be honest, vision is an aspect of physical preparation that gets highly overlooked. I just realized that although vision in any sports is arguably the most important aspect that directly relates to performance, I don’t know of many strength coach (including myself) who trains the visual system. And still, if vision is not developed to its full potential, we might be holding our athletes back.
How did we miss the boat on that one? I don’t know…
That being said, one of the things Dr. Peters mentions in his book that struck me is that all athletes have a a dominant eye, just like they all have a dominant shooting, throwing or kicking side. A lot of people are dominant on the same side as their shooting/trowing side; that’s called same-side dominancy. If you’re dominant eye is the one opposite from the shooting/throwing side, it’s called cross-dominancy.
Athletes who are same-side dominant are usually better at sports where aiming or shooting is required (e.g. soccer, basketball, hockey, etc). Athletes who are cross-dominant have a better advantage in a sport like baseball, where the ball comes from the opposite side of batter’s hitting side (think of a right-side batter- his bat his on the right side of the body, but the ball is actually coming from the left-side of the body).
Think about all the implications of same-side dominancy and cross-dominancy in athletes’ performances. If you’re cross-dominant in a sport that favors same-side dominant athletes, your accuracy might be off- and probably always missing on the same side. There’s plenty of examples in all sports of how it could affect an athlete’s performance. Golf would be the perfect example; in a sport where precision and perfection in the swing has such a dramatic impact on the outcome. Golf is a sport where same-side dominancy is more advantageous because of the way you line up over the ball. If you have a golfer who’s cross-dominant, he will need to readjust the position of his body over the ball so his dominant eye is in a better position to focus on the ball. That might mean tilting is head more, shifting his whole upper body back, etc.
This is just one example of why addressing vision as part of physical preparation would be so important. Making sure your athletes get checked for high-performance vision by a qualified optometrist is definitely the place to start. But there is much more you can do.
If you want to establish if you’re same-side dominant or cross-dominant, here’s a neat trick: extend your arms in front of you and place your index and thumb of each hand in a diamond shape. Move one hand slightly in front of the other one and make that diamond smaller until the middle is about 2-3 inches wide.
Stand in front an object that’s about 15 feet away. You want to see all of it in that small diamond created by your hands. Now close one eye. If you still see the entire object in the diamond, your eye that’s open is your dominant one. If you can’t see it, that’s your non-dominant eye! Hopefully I just blew your mind…
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As you read in Tuesday’s post, this week marks the 2nd year anniversary of this website. I wanted to continue with the celebration by putting up a top 5 of the best videos I posted in this last year. Without further ado, here we go!
This is by far one of the toughest exercises you’ll ever try. A good way to work on single leg stability, endurance, and core stability all at once.
The KB Arm Bar is a great shoulder stability exercise. It also improves t-spine range of motion and you get a decent pec stretch if you’re somewhat restricted in that area.
This next one was just a deadlift video with a rotating angle to show that you can’t see everything happening by just coaching from the side. In this video, when standing from the side you can’t tell that Matt’s knees are coming in. Definitely important to keep in mind when coaching.
I made the following video not too long ago. It’s really just a quick way to fix compensations when trying to improve t-spine mobility.
Aaaaaannd last but not least…we were attempting to make a curling video on slideboards at Endeavor a couple weeks ago. We shot a couple of takes and this one was BY FAR the funniest! Sometimes at Endeavor we just like to have some fun…
Enough with the celebration now! I’ll be back with some fresh new content next week!
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This week marks the 2nd anniversary of this blog. It’s pretty incredible to me that I’ve been running a website and everything that comes it for 2 years.
That means writing 2 blog posts every single week which translates into 104 posts a year and 208 total posts, sending a weekly newsletter with a new video every week, keeping the website updated, etc, etc.
I’ll be honest it is a lot of work. I’m far from being a full time writer; I’m a full time strength coach. I’m trying to share knowledge and opinions with people interested in strength and conditioning, but when you have a full time job (50+ hours/week) spending an extra 5-10 hours a week to run a website is not always easy. I wouldn’t do it any other way, but it does require some time.
I’ve been pretty amazed at the growth of my blog, too. I started out of nothing with about 5-10 people visiting my website daily- realistically all friends, colleagues and family. After only one year of operation I had around 4,000 visits per month. After 2 years I’m up to around 11,000 visits per month! It’s still nothing crazy, but considering what I started from and the fact that it’s only been 2 years, I am more than happy with how things are turning out. More than anything: thank you for supporting my blog and making all of this possible!
That being said, I’ll celebrate this 2 year anniversary the right way by making a top 10 of my best posts of the last year! Without further ado, here it is:
With the rising popularity of Dr. Stuart McGill and his work on the lumbar spine in the health and fitness community, people have started to understand that excessive lumbar motion leads to injuries. The extent of his research (which he has been leading for years) have given all of us a better understanding of the spine, how it works, how it should move, and what leads to injuries.
This is a MUST read. Period.
Like many other things in the fitness business, it caused an overreaction. We started avoiding movement at the lumbar spine at any cost. We started to focus on the hips and the thoracic spine as the places to improve mobility, which I’m not going to say it’s a bad thing because that is exactly what most people need; more mobility in the t-spine and the hips.
This overreaction, though, caused us to ignore that there is a certain degree of movement that is normal to have at the lumbar spine.
As you can see in the chart, although the biggest potential for rotation is at the thoracic spine, the lumbar spine still have a couple of degrees of rotation. The same thing applies for flexion and extension.
To better understand the reason to why we actually need range of motion at the lumbar spine I’ll refer to the pendulum theory that Charlie Weingroff introduced a little while ago. To quote Charlie:
“So every joint has a core and it has a neutral that is decided just like a pendulum. It has to know that the stiffness properties allows it to go all the way to the left, right, front, back, etc., so it can rest with no effort in the middle, the position of optimal force transfer.
The clinical application is that the spine’s neutral is a function of full flexion, full extension, full side bending, and full rotation. Then and only then does the core have it’s premiere chance to do as little work as possible for segmental stabilization, and the phasic lumbar muscles can pick up the bracing slack to handle huge loads and force transfers.
If you don’t have yoga-ish mobility, the middle is always off-center, and the local stabilizers (of any joint system) aren’t triggered ideally via the brain getting “wrong” feedback from the joint receptors (…)”
What this means is simply that if your body doesn’t have a proper “neutral”, everything is going to be affected, compensation takes over, and injuries eventually happen.
Even if the goal should always be to lift weights and reinforce proper movement pattern with a perfectly neutral spine, it doesn’t mean that you’re body shouldn’t “own” that range of motion at the lumbar spine.
My personal story is a pretty interesting one in this regard. Since reading the work of Dr. McGill years ago I became a strong advocate in limiting motion at the lumbar spine. When I say I was doing everything with a neutral spine, I mean everything: sitting, brushing my teeth, tying my shoes, and even putting socks on in the morning! Have you ever tried putting socks on in the morning without allowing any sort of lumbar flexion? Trust me it’s not that easy! But I was doing it!
Not quite like this, but that far off!
I was also getting pretty strong for my height and my body structure, I was deadlifting a decent amount of weight and I never allowed myself to have anything less than perfect form on every single rep I was doing.
About 2 years ago, I started to get a little less zealous about the whole neutral spine thing in my everyday life. A couple of months later, I was brushing my teeth in the morning and as I was bending over to spit in the sink I felt a sharp pain go through my right lower back just above my right SI joint. A couple hours later, I couldn’t bend over at all, and I mean not at all. Even breaking at the hips slightly to grab a glass from the kitchen table was impossible. The pain started to go away after 3-4 days, but my back bothered me for a couple of weeks. And weirdly enough, a similar event happened about 8 months later.
It’s only when I learned about the SFMA, the pendulum theory and other philosophies along the same line that I realized that my lumbar spine wasn’t flexing at all, which was later confirmed to me by a good friend of mine who’s an enlightened physical therapist.
I’ve been working on my lumbar flexion more recently and making sure my toe touch, as per the SFMA, stays intact and turns out my back has been feeling much better.
That doesn’t mean I’m doing silly stuff like stiff-legged deadlift with a rounded back, or crunches and sit-ups, but I’m doing isolated mobility exercises that don’t involve any type of loading to make sure that my pendulum is in the right “neutral” position.
Do you ever assess for lumbar range of motion? You might be surprised at what you’ll find.
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Here’s a breaking news: you need good shoulder flexion to be able to perform overhead work safely.
All sarcasm aside, if you don’t have appropriate shoulder flexion range of motion, you’re setting yourself up for injury when performing overhead exercises.
Many different things can be the cause of a lack of shoulder flexion. Here are some of the causes of limited shoulder flexion.
A lack of upward rotation at the scapula can be limiting shoulder flexion. This can happen for a couple different reason. One of them is the lack of activation or the lack of strength in the serratus anterior and the lower trap.
The upper trap is usually the strong player of all 3 muscles that contribute to upward rotation, so it rarely needs more activation.
The lack of shoulder flexion can also be caused by shortness or stiffness of the pec minor, latissimus dorsi or the long head of the triceps.
As you can see in this picture, the long head of the triceps could limit overhead range of motion because of its attachment on the scapula.
Another factor that could limit shoulder flexion is the structural variation of the acromion.
There are structurally 3 different types of acromion, and depending on what type you have you might be limited in shoulder flexion. The type 3 acromion is usually one with which we want to stay away from overhead exercises.
I didn’t go into too much details about the causes of shoulder flexion limitation, but the message I want to get across is that although some of these limitations are modifiable, and some of them aren’t, there is significant damage that can be put on the shoulder if you try to grind through overhead work, especially exercises involving approximation (think pressing movements) of the humeral head in the glenoid fossa when your mobility is limited.
The other important thing to know is that if you force overhead exercises on someone who doesn’t have the shoulder flexion range of motion, he’ll definitely try and compensate in some way to get the weight overhead. One of the most common compensation patterns you’ll see is lumbar hyperextension.
The picture above is not even taken from the side and you can still see how hyperextended she is at the lumbar spine. Overhead presses, carries or other overhead exercises that involves approximation of the humeral head in the glenoid fossa should be avoided, at least in the short term while you fix the problem (if it’s not structural).
There are plenty of alternatives to overhead pressing that can yield similar benefits, depending what the goals are. Be smart about it, and make sure you assess your clients and athletes before throwing them under the bus with overhead exercises if their body is not ready for it.
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“Every non-traumatic (non-contact) injury is preventable”
I didn’t say it.
Shirley Sahrmann said it.
Other than contact-based injuries, all other injuries are preventable.
A lot of people believe that injuries happen because you did “something wrong”. Although they’re not completely wrong, that thing that you did wrong is not at the source of the injury.
Let me explain…
Injuries originate from something going wrong in your body, whether it’s a dysfunctional movement pattern, an asymmetry, a structural problem, or just an overuse of the tissues or the joints.
If you move like this, and end tearing your ACL it’s not because of ONE THING you did wrong
Any movement that you do that affects the area of dysfunction adds a little more stress to the joint or tissue in question, or often times on a different area of the body that’s trying to compensate for that said dysfunction. Every time you train, practice, play your sport or do any activity, it adds a little more insult to the joint or tissue in question.
As my good friend Kevin Neeld would say, you can think of it as drops of water in a bucket- the bucket being your injury threshold. If you’re carrying a dysfunction, any activity or movement is going to be another drop of water in the bucket. At the very moment you’re doing something wrong, or not moving the right way it’s not going to hurt you; just like one drop of water in a bucket won’t do anything. But what happens if you keep adding more and more drops of water over the weeks, months and even years? Well, depending on how big your bucket is (which is different for everyone), eventually water will spill. That’s when you cross the injury threshold and actually get hurt!
The dysfunction has been there the whole time, but because you didn’t do anything about it, wear and tear just accumulated until the joint or the tissue being stressed just gave out.
That’s why injury prevention strategies are so important. And that’s why assessing for limitations and asymmetries is even more important. You want to identify the potential issues early on.
You don’t want to just let the water drops accumulate until it’s too late.
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Static stretching is an important part of any training program to help improve or maintain elasticity in muscles and range of motion around the joints. Depending on the sport you play, some stretching might be more important than others. In other words your post-workout stretching circuit might be different depending on what sport you play.
Hockey players, for example, usually have pretty stiff hip flexors (especially the TFL), posterior hip muscles (glutes, piriformis, etc), and posterior neck muscles due to the way they skate. These will be areas that you’ll want to focus on in their stretching circuit.
Here is the post-workout stretching circuit that we use at Endeavor with most of our hockey players at the end of every session:
1. Lateral Hamstring w/ Band
2. Prone Glute
3. Lying Knee-to-Knee
4. Rectus Femoris w/ Internal Rotation
5. 90 Degree Pec
6. Cross-Body Lat
7. Diagonal Neck
Notice how their is no groin, or adductor stretches. The reason is that it’s an area that hockey players are already overly flexible in. In fact, they need a little more tightness in the groin/adductors area, and more tissue elasticity in the posterior hip muscles.
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Another short video post today. It’s a little bit of a follow up to the one I posted earlier this week, as I discuss the implications of thoracic spine extension compensation. The video is specifically on the deadlift. I’m sure you’ll pick up a thing or two on how to cue your athletes and clients on the deadlift.
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