I am in the middle of Dan John’s Intervention right now. I enjoy reading Dan A LOT! He is very entertaining, but there are always very important lessons to learn from his books and articles as well. The guy has so much experience and did everything possible in the strength and conditioning field.
Yet, his advice is always about simplicity.
He is one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve ever read. Yet, when you read what he has to say it is always ridiculously simple.
Just like he would tell you himself: Simple. Not Easy, though.
To me that’s what being extremely knowledgeable is about: putting good information in a format that is not only simple, but easy to understand, and most importantly APPLICABLE! I never finish a Dan John book or article thinking “WOW, my brain is spinning a 100 miles an hour, and I have no idea how to apply anything he’s talking about”.
Instead, I know exactly what I took away from the book– and more often than not, on top of the strength and conditioning material, I always take away important life lessons.
Intervention is about teaching, it’s about learning, it’s about simplicity. Definitely a must read for any strength coach and personal trainers. Make sure you check it out HERE.
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I’ve been coaching Olympic lifts for quite a bit now, but it’s one of these movements that take time to learn. Although the most athletic kids out there will be able to perform a pretty decent hang clean after their first session, in my experience there is a good 20-30% of the kids that just seem to struggle with it.
When working with those kids, I always feel like I over explain everything in a attempt to make them get it, but more often than not it’s not working too great.
But the goal really is to minimize the explanation and the number of cues you give to the athlete so he doesn’t have too many things to think about at the same time.
Working with a lot of large teams this year, I had to perfect my coaching approach for hang cleans so it’s direct, to the point, and it produces efficient results.
Here are my top 3 coaching cues that I’ve had the most success with. Usually just these 3 cues will make an athlete’s hang clean look pretty darn good whether he’s a beginner or not.
1. Shoulders in front of the bar. This is a cue for the set up position. I tell the athlete to shift his weight forward so his shoulders are slightly in front of the bar, instead of right above it. This helps the athlete use more hips as he initiates the movement.
2. Curl your wrists in. This is another cue for the set up position. This basically just ensures that the athlete keeps the bar tight in his hands and close to his body. And more often than not curling the wrists in will help in keeping the elbows locked and not bent. Not sure that it makes much sense, if at all, but I’ve noticed that my athletes just tend to keep their elbows locked when I tell them to curl the wrists in.
3. Pull your shirt up with the bar (assuming the athlete is wearing a loose shirt). This is probably my favorite cue for the hang clean. It teaches the athlete to keep the bar close to his body. Having coached the hang clean for a number of years at this point, I can say that keeping the bar close to the body is one of the biggest mistakes one makes when learning the hang clean. Most athletes are tempted to just curl the bar up to their shoulder. When telling them to pull their shirt up, it makes the curling motion almost impossible to perform, and instead it forces the athlete to shrug the bar up, which is an important part of the movement.
The hang clean is a very technical movement and a lot of coaches stay away from it because it is difficult to teach. I am not going to argue with that, as there are a lot of technical components that go further than the 3 simple cues I just highlighted.
It is really just a matter of finding the most efficient way to teach the movement so it doesn’t end up eating up too much time in your session. Personally these 3 cues are what have made the biggest difference to me in the way I teach the hang clean that have yielded the best results.
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As time goes by and as I gain more experience as a strength coach, the 1-leg squat off a box or a bench is quickly becoming one of my favorite strength exercises for the lower body.
It is a very challenging exercise to perform even without weights. It requires a decent amount of relative strength (strength to bodyweight ratio) to only be able to do it correctly.
If you have been following my blog for a while, you should know by now that I’m a huge advocate of single leg exercises. Of all the lunges, split squats and others, I believe that the 1-leg squat off bench can give you the most benefits. Compared to a lunge or a split squat, you don’t have any support of your non-dominant leg. That makes it very hard to compensate or use too much of a push with the support leg.
Also because of the lack of support from the non-working leg, it makes it pretty challenging on your stability. I am not a fan of unstable surface training, but I’m all for improving stability on a stable surface. If an athlete can’t keep his balance trying to perform a 1-leg squat that tells me a lot about his stability.
The lack of stability in single leg support may lead to a host other problems. Think about it for a second, all sports are played on one leg at a time with actions such as running, jumping, skating, cutting, etc. If an athlete can’t be stable when performing an unsupported 1-leg exercise, he’s setting himself for injury.
The 1-leg squat usually requires little external loading compared to exercises such as a reverse lunge or a RFE split squat. I am not saying that external loading is necessarily bad, and I do use these exercises myself with my athletes. But even if you can load lower body exercises safely, it still adds compression to the spine. According to research, axial loading (as in this case) is not what causes injury; repetitive and excessive flexion, extension and torsion combined with loading is what causes spine injuries. However, even if axial loading doesn’t translate into injury there is still some wear that accumulate on the spine if you lift weights for years. In the case of a pro athlete or an athlete trying to maximize the longevity of his career, it would be smart to lean towards exercises with less axial loading on the spine more than just once in a while.
Since the 1-leg squat can be a difficult exercise to perform for some athletes who’ve never done it before, you may be facing a couple problems.
One thing very common with young athletes performing the exercise is that they won’t be able to go all the way down and touch the ground. An easy fix for that is to lower the box or stack plates on the ground, so the distance the athlete needs to travel to touch his heel down is less.
Shirt optional…
Another common problem with a lot of athletes is the inability to control the valgus collapse (the knee going in). Some coaching cues can help solve the problem, but if it doesn’t seem to be working too well, you can use a technique called reactive neuromuscular training (RNT). The idea behind RNT is to force the body into its natural compensation pattern to make the brain automatically correct it. In this specific example, you would wrap a band around the athlete’s knee and pull it towards the valgus collapse. The brain will naturally want to resist the tension, which will also correct the problem because you’ll be activating the muscles that actually prevent that valgus collapse.
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Chest up. Belly tight. Finish with your hips. Stay on your heels.
The most common coaching cues are pretty much the same ones for a lot of exercises. The reasons are pretty simple; people in general have a tendency to be quad dominant, to use their lower back instead of their hips, and have a hard time maintaining a neutral spine. So the same coaching cues come back constantly, no matter what clientele you’re working with- whether they’re athletes, weekend warriors or just soccer mom.
There are other coaching cues that are less common, or very exercise specific. One of them that I use with all kneeling and half-kneeling exercises is the “toes under shin” cue.
This might seem like an unimportant cue in the tall kneeling or half kneeling positions, but to me it makes a huge difference.
There is a lot more stability in those positions with the toes pulled under the shin. If you’re toes are pointed back there is basically no anchor to the ground. Your down knee(s) are not really an anchor; it will only serve as a pivot for what is happening at the hip. With internal or external rotation torque at the hip and no anchor at the foot, the lower leg will only follow the lead of the hip.
External rotation at the hip can transfer to the lower leg if there is no anchor at the foot
The toes under allow the big toe to anchor the whole limb to the ground. You’ll have a greater proprioceptive feedback to the brain, and therefore more stability.
Don’t underestimate the importance of the toes in stability and proprioceptive control. In 2012, conventional shoewear make our foot very lazy, so training gives us a good opportunity to re-establish some of this stability and control of the toes and feet. Coaching the “toes under shin” for all half kneeling and tall kneeling exercises is a good place to start.
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That’s the first thing that came to mind when I wrote the title of this post. Hopefully you can appreciate.
Aaaaand just so you know I didn’t write this title just to plug a wrestling reference! I promise.
In fact, I was at the BSMPG summer seminar this past weekend and I had a blast. I got to spend some time with the smartest minds in the business including Patrick Ward, Sean Skahan, Cal Dietz (University of Minnesota), Joel Jamieson, and Jim Snider (University of Wisconsin) just to name a few.
The recurring subject that came back with a lot of these guys during conversations is that…well…you have to know your role! What I mean is that as a strength coach you need to recognize your area of expertise, and more importantly you need to know where that area of expertise stops.
It’s really cool to learn about the SFMA, DNS, ART, Graston, Mulligans, all the rehab protocols, but we need to recognize that a lot of these things are not our job to do. There is nothing wrong with learning from different fields, but not with the mindset of doing everything yourself! As Patrick Ward was telling me himself: “we need to know just enough about everything to know where to refer our clients to and when”. I couldn’t agree more with this statement. Joel Jamieson was also telling me that coaches get too caught up sometimes trying to fix people, and their sessions turn out into an hour of corrective exercises.
Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s extremely important to be able to bridge the cap as a strength coach because there always will be some grey area, and we can’t send every one with a mild discomfort to physical therapy. Which is why we need to understand how the body works, what is good movement, how to identify dysfunctions or imbalances, and how to use corrective strategies efficiently. But our job is still to TRAIN ATHLETES!
I will be the first to recognize that there is a lot of incompetent health practitioners on this planet, but it doesn’t mean that you should try to fix everyone yourself.
Our job is to make athletes and clients feel better, improve their performance and lower their risk of injury. If they’re in pain, that is not our job to take care of them and fix them. And that’s the bottom line.
Another wrestling reference. Sorry.
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Here’s something we don’t talk about much: where should you stand when you coach exercises? Although there is not one correct answer to this question, most coaches would agree that coaching from the side gives you the best perspective on most movements.
Squats, deadlifts, lunges and rows are all exercises that should be coached mostly from the side. This lets you see if the spine is neutral, if the hip hinge is good, if the knees come forward too much, if the chin stays packed, etc.
I definitely agree that it’s the most efficient angle to coach from. But it doesn’t mean that you should coach exclusively from the side. There is valuable information that you can collect from the back or from the front that is pretty much impossible to identify from another angle.
The knee valgus collapse for example is something that’s pretty hard to spot if you’re only coaching from the side. Moving around a little bit will give you that additional information that is hard to identify from observing from the side.
I posted a video a couple weeks ago on box jumps shot from the back. You can see the knees collapsing in during the loading phase of the jump with that angle. I am not sure that it would be as easily identifiable from the side.
Same thing for a deadlift or a squat; a knee valgus, unless extremely bad, is hard to identify from the side. In this video you’ll see that the form looks good from the side, but as soon as the camera gets behind the athlete, you immediately notice the feet being a little too wide, and the knees collapsing in.
Another thing that can be spotted from the back is the feet position. Without going into too much details, as this could be the subject of an entire article, a foot that looks flat in a standing posture, or when lifting weights doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s structurally flat; it can be the result of a collapsed arch (similar to the knee valgus collapse, it’s something that can be coached and/or corrected).
Standing from the back, you’ll notice immediately when the feet lose their arch during a deadlift or a squat. (Whether the problem is structural or the result of stability problem in the weight bearing position is something you should assess early on.)
The take home point is that you shouldn’t just be standing still watching things from one angle when coaching athletes or clients, whether you do group training or one-on-one training. Seeing things from different angles will give you more information on the exercise or the movement you’re coaching, and it’ll help you see everything that’s going on in the execution of said movement.
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Being a strength and conditioning coach or a personal trainer requires many qualities. One of them is the ability to pay attention to details. When coaching exercises, there are many different body positions and subtleties in movements that one needs to be aware of. Just demoing the exercises and throwing a couple coaching cues up in the air is usually not enough to get the result we want from our athletes and clients.
A coach (or trainer) needs to be able to identify and understand the subtleties in the different movement patterns to be able to coach the exercises in the most optimal way possible. Here are some of the subtleties that a coach needs to be able to distinguish and correct (in no specific order):
1. Thoracic Spine Extension vs Thoraco-Lumbar (T-L) Junction Extension
I covered that in a previous blog post, but the “chest up” cue is not always interpreted the right way by the athlete or client. Basically what we want to see when calling “chest up” is an extension at the thoracic spine so that the athlete maintains a more neutral spine. Often times, the extension will come from the T-L junction which will put more stress on the lower back, will cause the anterior lower ribs to flare out and put the diaphragm in a less than optimal position. That pretty subtle substitution will too often go unnoticed if the athlete is wearing a loose shirt.
Barely noticeable T-L junction hyperextension because of a loose shirt
2. Hip Flexion Compensation
In most athletes the psoas ends up being the weakest hip flexor. The reason being that it is the only hip flexor effective above 90 degrees of hip flexion. In most athletic endeavors the hip ends up being flexed above 90 degrees rarely, if ever; that in turn causes a higher recruitment of the 2 other main hip flexors, the TFL and the rectus femoris, and the psoas ends up weak. It is a good idea to include psoas activation exercises in a training program to re-establish hip flexor strength in the end range of motion. When doing these drills, athletes will be tempted to compensate because they are pretty weak in that position. The seated psoas lift is one of my favorite psoas activation drill, but can be cheated pretty easily if not coached properly.
Often times, athletes will either lean back or hunch over to try to get the knee up as high as possible. But in both situations, you’re really avoiding the above 90 degrees end range of motion; the angle of the hip flexion will be less than 90, and therefore you’re not getting that psoas activation you’re going after.
Bad Form- Leaning back will prevent your hip flexion to be above 90 degrees
Bad Form- Rounding of the lower back will also avoid that end range of motion
The same problem can occur if you perform a standing psoas hold, or any other type of exercise of that nature.
3. Full Hip Extension Compensation
The complete hip extension is definitely something important in many different exercises that are part of a training program. An incomplete hip extension can expose some pretty serious problem going on around the hips. Whether the problem is caused by a hip flexor restriction, a lack of glute activation or just poor coaching, this is a problem that a coach needs to be aware of to be able to prevent injuries with his athletes. This is another movement that can be very subtle and if you don’t pay attention to it can be missed altogether. The incomplete hip extension can present in a wide variety of different movements, with posterior chain exercises (deadlift variations, pullthrough, slideboard hamstring curls, etc) being some of the most important ones. An athlete not being able to finish his movement at the top with full hip extension will usually compensate with a hyperextension at the lower back.
Again, if no attention to details are paid during a deadlift (or just from coaching from different angle) this is something that can easily be missed.
4. Scapular Protraction vs Elbow Extension
This is something even more subtle. The correct technique for pressing exercises is to keep the scapulae packed back together. If unable to get a full elbow extension, the athlete might compensate by protracting the shoulder blades to get the end range of motion at the top.
Good Form- The shoulder blades stay packed back while getting full elbow extension
Bad Form- Protracted shoulders compensating for incomplete elbow extension
The biggest problem I see with this compensation pattern is for the following reps; if you’ve lost your packed scapulae position, when going for the next rep your shoulders are not going to be in a stable position to press a heavy weight anymore. That can in turn have deleterious effects on the shoulders.
5. Feet Position
This is one that will go unnoticed more often than not. One of the main reasons is that the shoes your athletes are wearing might simply hide what’s going on at the foot and ankle. During lower body exercises like squats, deadlifts, lunges and the like a lot can happen at the foot that might be detrimental to an athlete’s health because it will either cause problems further up the chain, or it might be in itself the result of a problem going on somewhere else. An overpronation, or a loss of the arch of the foot are good examples.
Relatively neutral feet in the bottom of the squat
Feet overpronating at the bottom of the squat
In this last picture, it is easy to realize that it is something that be completely missed when the athlete is wearing shoes. (As a side note, I am not necessarily recommending that people squat without shoes on, but it clearly reveals a problem that might have otherwise been missed.)
This is really just a quick list of some of the most subtle body positions and compensated movement patterns you can see in athletes and clients. Paying careful attention to details is such an important part of a coach or a trainer’s job because in the end, it plays an extremely important part of the injury prevention component of an effective training program.
Arguably one of the main goals of strength training is to improve the way the body moves and reinforce good movement patterns with weights. It will make your body stronger in those positions and those movement patterns that are considered optimal in the way we move. It will also ensure that when challenged by outside forces and velocities, our body will be able to maintain good alignment and react properly. The squat and the deadlift, for example, are primitive movement patterns that your body needs to own. We own them as babies, but because of modern life that makes us extremely sedentary and because we sit all the time, we lose these movement skills as we age.
How many adults do you know can squat this low with a spine as neutral as this?
So in a way, we need to re-learn these movement patterns, and ultimately become stronger in them. But because how restricted our bodies are, there is a process to go through to be able to own these movements and get stronger. It might mean working on soft-tissue restrictions, doing general and specific mobility work, doing static stretching, improving motor control, etc. Once the restrictions are out of the way, you’ll want to become proficient in the basic movement patterns before getting stronger. Most strength gains you’ll make in in the beginning are going to be mostly neural adaptations and improved motor control, anyway.
In order to get strong and efficient in the basic lifts, you need PRACTICE! I just finished reading Never Let Go, by Dan John, and one thing he stresses is the repetitions. If you want to get good at something, if you want to get strong, you need to put the reps in.
When designing programs, we probably don’t need as much variety as we think we do. Sure we need to keep things interesting so we don’t get bored in the long run. But the basics stay the same; squat, deadlift, 1-leg squat, bench press, chin ups and rows. That’s it. You don’t need to have a new main lift every month; if that’s what you do, how do you know if you’re getting stronger, or better? You don’t have any basis of comparison. If you want to become proficient in these movements to improve the way your body moves and get stronger, that’s what you need. And you need to do them a lot. If you do chin ups for 4 weeks, and then take them out of your training and don’t do them for another 3-4 months, how do you expect improvement? Repetition really is the key to mastering a movement and getting stronger. The more repetitions you do, the more efficient your nervous system will be at this specific movement, and the easier it’ll be to get stronger.
Not only do you want reps, but you want perfect reps. Doing near-max effort reps every single time you deadlift is not going to be the answer because your body won’t be able to perfect the movement pattern; every single time you perform the movement, you’re just trying to lift the heaviest weight possible (aka, your body switches to compensation mode). Don’t get me wrong, you do need to load the bar to get stronger, but you need to be smart about it. You need to make sure that form is your first priority and you never sacrifice it for weight.
Practice. Practice with perfect form. Practice some more. Make every rep count. Do a lot of them. Do your main movements more than once a week.
“If it’s important, do it every day. If it’s not important, don’t do it at all.” – Dan Gable
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We all know there are more than one line of thought in the fitness industry. Strength coaches and personal trainers argue a lot over what’s the best way to do things; everybody has his philosophy and his own training system. There are some things that are backed by science, others not so much, and some that are just good marketing tools.
Regardless of what your training system is and what you believe in, there are some things in common that smart, educated people believe in. Whether you’re a powerlifting guy, an Olympic lifting guy, a Poliquin guy, an injury prevention guy, or even a Crossfit guy, there is at least one thing everyone can agree on. If you put all of those people in the same room they might try to kill each other over what they don’t agree on. But one overlooked principle is actually crucial in making any training system efficient (or somewhat efficient), and that smart people in each camp preach by: form.
Exercise form is often overlooked when judging the efficiency of a training method or system. No matter which system you believe in, or even if you developed your own, I’m sure one of the things that make your system effective is the way the exercises are performed. Because after all, good movement is good movement. This is something that even the smart people in Crossfit would agree on. I don’t think ALL Crossfit advocates are stupid; I’m sure there are some smart people who believe in it. And I’m sure that those smart people are preaching good form on their lifts BEFORE trying to get the best time on a given circuit. There are many things I disagree with about the whole Crossfit thing, but if I was going to get in an argument with a smart Crossfit advocate, I would probably agree that there are some benefits to it when done the right way, with flawless form on every single rep.
Not exactly what I mean by “flawless form”
In the end, no matter what training system you believe in, the most important thing is ‘good movement’. You want your body to move the right way, and that is not something we can argue over. Integrity in the joints and in the basic movement patterns is what we’re after. Moving well and without compensation is the foundation of any athletic endeavor; you develop functional movement first, performance second and skills at last. Whatever you do, the quality of your movement will dictate the outcome; and the better you move, the easier it’s going to be to achieve high performance and athletic success with minimal risk of injuries.
I’m sure you can agree with me on that….
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Being a strength and conditioning coach is not much different than being a sports coach, a school teacher or even a music teacher. We all teach something. The skills or the material we teach is different, but in the end, it’s pretty much all the same. Kids will learn something from us that will make them better at something.
So in a way, we need to have a pretty good mastery of the material or the skills we teach. We also need to be able to communicate well in order to help the kids get better. Being a good player will not guarantee that you will be a good coach, or that you will be good at helping the kids become better at playing their sport.
But other than teaching kids to get better playing guitar, playing hockey, learning history, or improving the way they move and helping them get stronger, what are we there for? Being a teacher or a coach in whatever field is also about making an impact in kids lives.
No matter how old the kids you’re coaching or teaching are, kindergarten or college, you can make an impact. You can make an impact by making them better at what they do, but it goes far beyond that. Some kids need guidance, encouragement, rewards, better self-esteem, and sometimes just someone to talk to. The impact you can make in a kid’s life is huge. So many of the kids we train at Endeavor leave after training for a couple months with us with more confidence than they ever had, and sometimes it’s all it takes for them to become a better soccer player, baseball player, hockey player, etc.
Too often we underestimate the influence we can have on a young person’s life. Many habits, lifestyle changes and values can be taught through strength and conditioning, like any sport, discipline or school subject. Kids are very influenceable and very moldable and there lives are just waiting to be shaped by their parents, family, friends, coaches, teachers and whoever comes in their life.
One of the stories about a coach’s influence in an athlete’s life that I really like is the one of Cus D’Amato and the impact he had on boxing legend Mike Tyson. D’Amato, who was a nearly retired boxing manager took Tyson under his wing and made him one of the greatest boxers of all time.
Tyson with his late manager and mentor Cus D’Amato
With the help of D’Amato, Tyson found discipline, work ethic, respect and got his life together; D’Amato was the father figure he never had in his life. Tyson always attributed his success and rise to stardom to D’Amato who helped him have structure in his life. What is amazing about this story is that Tyson before D’Amato was a bum, who grew up in high-crime neighborhoods all is life, who has been arrested over 30 times by the time he was 13 and lost his mom at 16. Despite everything in his life that was pointing to him becoming a criminal, Tyson had the chance to cross path with D’Amato, who put him on right track and gave his life structure.
And if you’re not convinced of the positive impact of D’Amato in Tyson’s life, just take a look at how his career turned after D’Amato died in 1985, and after he fired Kevin Rooney in 1988 (who was his trainer under D’Amato); Tyson’s career started to decline, he started having problems inside and outside the ring and he never was the same boxer again.
Of course it is a peculiar situation, and you can’t expect all the kids you coach or teach to be little Mike Tysons who need someone to put them on the right path. But there is always a way you can impact a kid’s life in a way you can’t imagine.
How are you going to make an impact with your athletes today?
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