Everybody makes mistakes.  And if you think you’re any different and you don’t make any, you’re really kidding yourself and it’s probably time for a reality check.

We all make mistakes, whether we like to admit it or not; this is human nature.  It’s part of the learning process.  Strength and conditioning coaches are not different.  I’m no different.

This is the time of year where everybody makes resolution for the new year or highlights what they learned or changed in the last year.  I’ll give my 2011 review a different flavor by giving you my top 5 mistakes I made in the last year (or the ones that have lasted up to this past year).

1. Recommending minimalist footwear for everyone.  I wrote a whole blog post on the subject not too long ago (if you missed it you can check it out HERE).  The idea is that for too long we have restrained our feet in footwear with a lot of cushioning, big heel lifts and support all around.  That made the feet become lazy, and they stopped doing their job because they didn’t have to anymore.  But the thing is that the problem can originate somewhere else; in other words, the feet are not always the source of the problem, but rather the result from a problem originating somewhere else.  In our lifestyle in 2012, there is more than just our footwear that’s wrong.  Sedentary lifestyles, prolonged sitting, poor posture, long commute in cars, and early development in young athletes who do too much too young are all factors that can wreak havoc on our bodies.  Any of these factors (or a combination of) can lead to permanent structural changes on our bodies.  Femoroacetabular impingement (FAI), femoral anteversion and retroversion and other hip problems can lead to different feet position and structural variations.

Probably wouldn’t be a good idea to have this guy run in Vibrams…

Before I digress too much, it simply means that not everyone can get away with wearing Vibram Five Fingers or New Balance Minimus all day.  I used to blindly recommend those type of shoes without assessing the person.  Let’s just say that I’m a lot more careful about it now.  As a side note, overweight and poor running mechanics are 2 other factors that would lead me to not recommend a minimalist type of shoes for physical activity.

2. Minimizing the importance of breathing.  If you’ve followed my blog for some time, you should know by now the importance I pay to breathing patterns.  I’ve blogged about that many times during the last year, and I must say that the more I learn about it, the more I realize how crucial it is with any movement pattern and for proper alignment (as a side note, I can improve your range of motion just by teaching you how to breathe; that’s how powerful it is).  The diaphragm muscles (yes, there are 2 of them) have fascial connections with the thoraco-lumbar fascia which in turn connects with the psoas (that attaches on the spine) and the hips.

Because of that, proper diaphragm function and proficient breathing patterns are essential for optimal posture and positioning through various movement patterns.  Ineffective use of the diaphragm muscles could lead to hyperextension of the thoraco-lumbar region, faulty positioning of the hips and plenty of other problems all the way up and down the chain.  This is something I coach a lot now, and it has made a huge difference on our athletes at Endeavor.  If you’re not familiar with proper breathing patterns and diaphragm function, I suggest you take a look at the PRI stuff (Postural Restoration Institute).

3. Mismanaging training volumes and intensities.  Whether it is in my own training or the ones of my athletes, I think I have not always been good at managing fatigue and recovery.  On paper, training volumes always look well managed, but the reality is that it goes far bey0nd that.  For one, if you always go balls to the walls when you train and push yourself the the very limit every training session lifting maximal weights and pushing lactic conditioning ’til you puke, chances are you won’t recover properly even if the planned training volume for the week is moderate.  The other thing is that there are a lot of other factors that factors in the equation (quantity and quality of sleep, nutrition, other sports and activities outside of the gym, the party factor, etc).  Whether you like it or not, there aren’t that many athletes that won’t take some time to enjoy life during their off-season, which usually means spending a day at the beach not eating too well (or enough) or have a late night and a couple of beers once in a while.  In their off-season, athletes not only need a physical break from their sport, but a mental one as well.  Nothing wrong with that, as long as they keep it in check and don’t overdo it.  It struck me this past summer when we had one of our pro hockey player return to Endeavor after a very long season in which his team ended up winning the Stanley Cup.  First of all he came back from his team mid to late June, almost 2 months later than all the other guys, but he was also way more beat up physically and mentally.  It was apparent that even after almost 10 days completely off, he just didn’t have the wheels he had the previous off-season (which started in April the year before- that’s a big difference).  He took more days off from training than the previous off-season and the number of days he showed up hungry to get after it were definitely not as frequent.  The off-season is not only about getting ready for the upcoming season, but also recovering from the previous one, especially if it was a very long and excruciating one.  This is where HRV measurement tools are gonna come in handy; it allows you to measure physical and nervous system fatigue and you can manage fatigue and recovery so much better.  And that technology is becoming available to us.  I blogged about this before.

4. Aerobic training is not the evil I thought it was.  I always stood up against aerobic training for team sports because it’s simply not the way most sports are played.  After trying to prove my point for years, and I am starting to realize certain things.  I still don’t think I was wrong about the fact that long slow pace aerobic training is not specific to sports, but I’m starting to realize that the pendulum may just have swung too far.

The aerobic system plays a huge role in recovery for the lactic and alactic systems and a decent amount of the energy produced in a team sports setting will come from the aerobic system.  It still doesn’t mean that you should go for hour long jogs 4-5 times a week to get ready for your hockey season, but there just might be a place for steady state aerobics in a yearly training plan after all.

5. Not enough external rotation based rotator cuff exercises for my baseball players.  With the importance of scapular stability, t-spine mobility, breathing patterns and working the rotator cuff in a stability role, I will admit that I neglected external rotation based exercises a little bit last off-season with my baseball players.

Shoulder injury prevention is about much more than just external rotation exercises, but it might have been another pendulum that swung too far for me because I haven’t done much of it with my baseball pitchers last off-season.  The reality is that the external rotators of the shoulder still need to decelerate the crazy velocity of internal rotation that occurs at the shoulder in a pitching motion (over 7,000°/sec), so it’s still specific to do direct external rotation work with baseball pitchers, so these muscles become better at decelerating the internal rotation.

Those are the mistakes I’ve made this past year.  What are the mistakes you’ve made during the last year?

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I’m just finishing up Joel Jamieson‘s book Ultimate MMA Conditioning, and as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, it’s definitely an eye opener for me.  There are many things about conditioning that I thought I understood well, and now I’m just starting to rethink everything.  And to be honest, it goes far beyond just the conditioning part of training.  I’m starting to rethink some of the strength stuff as well.

Ever since I read the Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual from Eric Cressey and after I interned at Robert Morris University a few years ago, I was seeing max strength as the answer to pretty much everything; if athletes just got stronger, everything else would just fall into place.  I still think that max strength is a very important part of an athlete’s training program, and has profound effects on speed, power and agility.  But I’m starting to realize that it’s not all…

With that focus on max strength, the emphasis is mostly on improving the efficiency of the nervous system, increasing the activation of the fast-twitch muscle fibers and recruiting more motor units.  All of these effects are very important for any athlete if they want to improve their performance.  And this is mostly how we usually see strength training; it’s all about the nervous system, the muscle fibers and everything in between.

What we, myself included, too often fail to consider is the energy systems part of the equation.  And I’m not talking about how we condition our athletes.  I’m talking about the implication of the energy systems in strength training.  There is indeed a big neural and muscle fiber effect that comes from strength training, but there is also a energy system effect.  Even if it’s not conditioning in it’s traditional form, your body still need to produce the energy necessary to lift the weights.  When we lift weights and train for max strength, the anaerobic alactic system is going to be the one that is used primarily, which also means that we don’t have to worry too much about oxygen utilization, the number of mitochondrias in the muscle and that kind of stuff…..but that’s for one set of one exercise.

What happens when we run out of stored ATP after one set in the anaerobic alactic system?  Your body needs to recover and regenerate that source of energy while you rest.  And how does that happen?  Because you’re resting and the demands on your body are fairly low until you start your following set, this recovery process will happen through the aerobic system.  Now can you see where I’m going with this?

This is just one example to show you that your energy systems, and especially your aerobic system are involved in strength training even if you don’t think about it.  Not because we’re using weights means no energy system work is happening.  There is not a clear line between strength work and conditioning.  There is some overlap, just like there is some overlap between each energy system when you condition AND when you strength train.

Think about the implication this can have on your max strength and ensuing effect it’s gonna have in the practice of your sport.  Training for max strength is going to improve the efficiency of your nervous system and increase the percentage of fast twitch muscle fibers activation.  But if you don’t realize the importance of the aerobic system in the recovery process after short bouts of intense activity (a.k.a the use of the anaerobic alactic system), chances are you’ll be performing your first shift (or your first play, your first punch, first set, etc) at a very high intensity and you’ll have an edge over your opponents…..and then it’s gonna go downhill from there until the end of your game, match, etc. because your body will not have been trained to recover quickly.  If your body can’t recover as fast as possible every time, your performance will only get worse and worse as your game goes on.  Nobody wants that!

This is why understanding the importance and the implication of ALL the energy systems is crucial for your performance or the one of your athletes.  And that includes being aware of the implications of the energy systems on strength training and how to maximize the performance and recovery of each one of them.

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I’m in the middle of Joel Jamieson’s book Ultimate MMA Conditioning, and I have to say that (even being only 1/4 of the way through it) this book is about to be one that’s a COMPLETE game changer for me.  Even though the title says ‘MMA Conditioning’, the book is not so much about specific MMA conditioning as it is about developing the different energy systems the right way.  It’s making me rethink all of the conditioning I program for my athletes.  And I’ll have more on the subject very soon.

While reading it though, I’ve come to a couple realizations about my job as a strength and conditioning coach that go beyond just conditioning stuff.  As a professional who’s concerned about constantly thriving to get better and always do what’s best for his athletes, it’s quite important to reach out to new resources that will help you get better at what you do, especially in an ever-evolving industry like ours.  In our quest to learn new information and get better, the internet has been more than helpful.  It’s giving us free information everywhere in the form of blogs, articles, videos, webinars, podcasts, you name it.  Of course there will always be information that’s of low quality and it makes it very easy for anyone to put information out there without any guarantees that it’s any good.  But with a minimum of educational background and critical judgment, one can pretty easily judge of the quality of information he’s reading.

What we see happening with the age of the internet though, is some trends spreading virally, which can end up changing our perspective on things.  One such trend has been pre-hab and corrective training.  There is a LOT of great information out there on injury prevention, corrective exercises, and the like.  It seems to be the cool thing to write about these days, and I am guilty as charged, like a lot of people.  And don’t get me wrong, I do not think there is anything wrong with using injury prevention strategies or trying to learn more about how the body moves.  But is this overwhelming amount of information about injury prevention been shifting the pendulum too far?  Having all of this information available to you, and being aware of the importance of limiting injuries can make you obsessed with it…when in reality it’s only one part of the puzzle.  Continuing education is not just about learning more about functional anatomy and new corrective exercise strategies.  It’s about getting better at what you do.  And I say this because I’m starting to realize that it’s one big mistake I’ve been making in the last couple of years.  Functional anatomy is a very complex thing and it’s easy to get caught in just wanting to learn more and more about that only.

But there are a lot more components to our job that we need to consider and get better at.  Conditioning is one of those areas.  One of my bosses at a former job once said in a meeting: “the problem with you, personal trainers, is that you’re too good with the lifting part of the programs you write.  Programing for cardio is by far your weakest link.”  And if you’re wondering, yes, he did indeed used the word ‘cardio’.  But when he said that, I didn’t listen for a couple of reason:

• He started by critiquing us, which is never a good way to open the lines of communication
• I was obsessed with strength at that point in my career, and thought nothing else really mattered
• Conditioning was a very simple concept in my head, and if you wanted to improve it you just had to do intervals
• He wasn’t really good at his job anyway
• He was shaped like a pear and his training consisted of squats on a wobble board, Russian twists and machine chest press

“You should listen to me ’cause I know how to train right!”

Thinking back about what he said, he probably was right.  But it’s unfortunate that he was such a close-minded indiviual because I probably could’ve learned a thing or two from him, but I was completely shut off because of his attitude in general.

What I’m trying to say here is that I’m not saying that injury prevention strategies (or any other component of a training program) are not important, but we need to take a step back and realize what our job is.  We need to get better at what we do in a more general sense.  We want to get better at preventing injuries, but we also need to get better at maximizing hypertrophy, developing speed, improving range of motion, and of course improving conditioning, which I think is too often overlooked in a training program.

Never forget that your clients are looking for a training effect.  Let me say that again: your clients are looking for a training effect.  Working AROUND limitation is as much our job (if not more) than working ON limitations.  Your clients are not looking to do miniband exercises for an hour and half let you tell them how bad they move.  They want to reach their fitness goal.  They don’t want you to tell them what their goal is.

Not sure this is what your clients are expecting

Think about how you would feel if you were to go in store restaurant, order a pizza and 15 minutes later your waitress would bring you a salad telling you that it’s better for you to eat a salad!  This might be a stupid example, but it’s just to make you realize that what we do is still in big part customer service (unless you’re working in a college or a pro team setting).  Clients and athletes come to us to get results, whether it’s improved performance, fat loss, muscle gain or whatever else; they expect to get results because they’re giving you their hard-earned money!  I think it’s important to always ask your clients what THEY expect out of your services.  It doesn’t mean we can’t help them move and feel better along the way, but I think it’s important to always keep the client’s expectations in mind and do what you need to meet them.

Getting better at what we do is not only preventing injuries better.  It’s making them lose fat faster, getting them bigger and stronger, maximizing their conditioning, and more than anything else listening to their needs and meeting (or should I say exceeding) their expectations.

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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As I mentioned last week, my friend and colleague Kevin Neeld is releasing is Ultimate Hockey Training book this upcoming Wednesday!  This will be a book on hockey training like you’ve never seen before.  Most of the hockey products out there are pretty outdated as the majority of them were written or produced in the late 80′s-early 90′s and the information contained in them is flat-out outdated.

Kevin worked really hard (trust me, I know; we share the same office) to put together the most recent information available, combined with his many years of experience training hockey players to bring you the most comprehensive hockey product to date.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the information contained in this book will completely blow your mind away!  One of the things Kevin covers in great details in his book is hockey-specific conditioning.  To give you a sneak-peak, Kevin put together a free hockey conditioning webinar that describes:

Sled drags are probably the best option for conditioning in the early off-season for hockey players.  After spending 7-9 months on the ice pretty much everyday, in a hip flexed position and stressing the hip joint with the skating stride over and over, hockey players’ hips need a break.

The early off-seas0n is definitely not the time to hammer the volume on the players, not with the lifting, not with the conditioning.  They need a good amount of corrective exercises and things that will help them reverse the damages a long season will put on their body.  You want to follow the same mentality with the conditioning protocols.  It’s definitely not the time to use shuttle runs and slideboards.  And as far as the stationary bike goes, even if it’s easier on the joints, you’d still be stuck in hip flexion sitting on the bike.

Sled drags are a great option as in puts the athlete in a pretty upright position, it requires a good amount of active hip extension (reverse the tight hip flexors effect), and there is no eccentric stress, so it’s a lot easier on the joints including the hips, but also the knees and ankles.

Take it easy on your hockey players in the early stage of the off-season conditioning wise; they need some recovery from the season.  So the overall conditioning volume should be pretty low, and joint-friendly and full range-of-motion modalities like the sled drag are optimal.

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Training for sports has been around for years, even for decades.  I haven’t made any specific research on the topic, but from what I’ve seen and heard people were training for sports as far back as the 1960s.

It’s cool to think that over 50 years ago, people understood the concept of training for sports; that they needed to do some type of strength work and some type of conditioning work in addition to the practice of their sport to become better athletes and perform better in their sport.  Understandably, what they did back then was not optimal because they didn’t know as much about the way the body works as we do today.  They didn’t know much about functional anatomy, energy systems, injury mechanisms and overtraining; research was simply not where it is today.

Training for sports over the 60s through the 80s has been strongly influenced by bodybuilding, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and distance running.  What they were doing back then was definitely not optimal, sometimes counterproductive and they had pretty much no injury prevention strategies.  All everyone did was go hard, give a 100% whatever they did.  When in doubt or when they didn’t get the results from the training program, they just worked harder.  It was also a time when everyone thought that more is always better.   Nobody ever questioned if the program made sense and if it was geared toward their goal or not.  After all, all types of training were created equal and any program was only as good as the effort you put in.

I really don’t have a problem with that; everything has to start somewhere.  And more than anything else, there is a valuable lesson to be learned through that: your training program is only as good as the effort you put in.  But everything has to evolve.  Or does it?

The problem I have with all of this is that WAYYY too many sport coaches, strength coaches and trainers today in 2011 are still doing the exact thing and using the exact same protocols they used when they were athletes back in the days.  They just transfer what they have been using 15, 20 and even 30 years ago when they were athletes, and having their athletes train the exact same way.  Like I mentioned earlier, we evolved, we learned things we didn’t know about how the body works and a lot of research has been done in the last 30 years.

Some training protocols never get old though!

So where does that leave us today in 2011? Training influences from decades ago still govern how most athletes train.  And even worse, they do it because they don’t know any better!  This is the sad reality of sports training today: most people go by what has been done over 30 years ago.  Coaches and trainers alike don’t go out to try and learn and understand what is optimal and what should be done.  Or is it because recent training knowledge is not spread enough by the people who know their stuff?  Or is it just because the culture change we desperately need hasn’t caught up yet?  All I know is that it leaves us with under-qualified exercise “specialists” in the sports training field, even at the professional level!  Instead of having well informed coaches and trainers that apply appropriate training principles, we have coaches who use what they used 20 years ago, which in turn probably comes from what their coaches at the time taught them that probably comes from what they used to do themselves 20 years prior to that.  So we end up with training strategies that go back 40-50 years ago that are flat wrong!

This is the training culture that is engrained in almost every sports in 2011.  There is a lot of people out there that really get it; they understand how the body works and how athletes should train to become better athletes; they went out of their way to learn new things and apply it with what we know is best for an athlete training for a specific sport.  But this is a very, very small percentage of the training community.  That same culture is present in every sport, as much at the amateur level as it is at the professional level.

How is it that distance running is still the most common training modality for high level baseball pitchers when a pitch takes no more than a second and the rest in between each pitch is at least 30-40 times longer?

How is it possible that VO2 max (an aerobic test that lasts usually more than 10 minutes straight) is one of the most commonly used test among professional hockey teams when the average hockey shift lasts around 30-45 seconds followed by at least a 3-4 minutes rest?

How could the leg press be one of the most commonly used lower body exercise to develop strength in athletes when there is clearly no sport that require you to drive as hard as possible with both legs at the same time with your back resting against an immovable object?

How is it possible that among basketball players who are clearly among the weakest athletes ever, there are a amazingly high percentage ofplayers who don’t even lift any weights in the off-season?

The culture engrained in sports today is completely retarded.  There are just so many things that don’t make sense and are totally outdated.  This even happens with coaches and trainers who have Bachelor’s degrees in exercise science and kinesiology.  Having been to college myself, I can tell you that a lot of the stuff they teach you is outdated.  We’re not going in the right direction to fix that problem at all when the “educated crowd” out there is taught stuff that is not updated.  Who’s to blame in that situation? The education system? The colleges?  The teachers that don’t always have updated material to teach because they don’t stay current themselves?  But I digress.

Something needs to change.  Something need to change quiclky.  In an era where performance enhancement is more important than ever and where the incidence of non-contact injuries is increasing at an alarming rate, something needs to be done.  Performance enhancement happens through proper training and dedication.  Non-contact injuries are preventable through good training as well, according to many experts.

The culture needs to change.  Hockey players should know that aerobic training is not optimal and that they have better options to improve their conditioning on the ice.  Baseball pitchers should know that they have so many options available to them to reduce the risk of shoulder injury that they can use between starts instead o just using distance running that might be more detrimental than beneficial to them.  Basketball players should know that max effort strength training will improve their vertical jump.

Everyone involved in sports should know those things.  It should be part of the culture.

2010 is coming to an end, and I must say it has been an incredible year for me! In the spirit of the holidays and as we’re wrapping up 2010 by the end of the week, I’ve decided to do the first ever DavidLasnier.com Best of 2010 Awards.  So without further ado, here it is:

Best Website: HockeyStrengthAndConditioning.com .  This website contains all the information you need from the top guys in the business.  If you train hockey players, or if you’re a hockey player yourself, the information on this website will be of great help.

Best New Exercise: Standing Belly-to-Overhead Press.  I got this one from my colleague Tony Gentilcore, and I simply love it.  The Standing Belly Press was already one of my favorite exercise, especially because it’s so functional and also because there are so many variations you can use.  Here’s the latest variation; it adds an overhead/anti-lateral flexion component to an already great core stabilization exercise.

Best Blog Post (from me): Keep Your Goal in Mind.  This was definitely one of my favorite blogpost, because I feel so many athletes are studying for the wrong test when it comes to training for sports peformance.

Honorable Mention:  The Glute Guy: An Interview With Bret Contreras

Core Training: The Good Stuff .  These were 2 of my blog posts that had the most visits, so it’s worth mentioning.

Best Blog Post (from someone else): The Case Against Conventional Dairy by Brian St. Pierre.  Technically, Brian wrote it in 2009 (December 21st, to be more specific), but it is by far the blog post that had the most impact on my life in 2010.  Brian raises many interesting facts on conventional dairy; the way it is produced, the way the cows are raised and how it affects the quality of dairy, and how low fat dairy products are linked to different types of cancer.  And don’t get me wrong, it’s not just Brian’s opinion; there are enough scientific proofs to support his point.  Simply put, if you are still consuming dairy products, you NEED to at least make the switch to the organic kind.

Best Quote: “We judge others by their behaviors. We judge ourselves by our intentions.” by Stephen Covey.  I read that quote for the first time on Kevin Neeld‘s website a couple of weeks ago.  Think about it for a second.  We all judge people around us by the way they act, even if their intentions might be different, but NEVER will we ever judge ourselves by our actions; only by our intentions.  This is a very powerful quote that impacts all of the relationships we have with other human beings.

Honorable Mention: On a funnier note, this is the most hysterical quote EVER: “Arguing over the internet is like the special Olympics; nobody wins and you’re still a retard” by Tony Gentilcore.  Hahaha…I have nothing else to say!

Best Sport Moment of the Year:

Enough Said.

Best Training Related Product: Show And Go by Eric Cressey.  If you have been reading my blog consistently this will come to no surprise for most of you.  The Show and Go program have been tested and approved by the whole Endeavor staff; and the results speak for themselves.  If you’re looking for a great training program that’s been proven effective without taking any guess on the results, Show and Go is what you need.

Best Song: Sitting on top of DavidLasnier.com’s Billboard for the past 3 months, none other than No Love, featuring Eminem and Lil’ Wayne:

Best Supplement: Vitamin D.  I have blogged many times in the past HERE and HERE about the positive effects of supplementing with vitamin D, so I won’t go over all the benefits in details again.  I will simply say this; with all the scientific proofs piling up, vitamin D is now considered an ESSENTIAL supplement.  It has been proven to increase levels of awesomeness and decrease the risks of everything that doesn’t make you awesome.

Best Picture:

Best Conditioning Modality: Split Squat Iso-Holds Into Slideboard.  I will admit that this is very hockey-specific type of conditioning, but 80% of our athletes at Endeavor are hockey players, so did you expect anything else?! My colleague Kevin Neeld came up with this idea this past summer, and I’m still amazed at how great that idea was!  Hockey is exactly that; iso-holds positions (when just gliding on the ice) alternated with short powerful bursts of acceleration (when skating).

Best TV Show: Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the New York Jets.  That show featured on HBO was simply awesome!

Rex Ryan is the freakin’ man!

2010 was a great year, and honestly I’m sure 2011 will be just as exciting, if not more!  I wish to all of you nothing but the best for 2011; may this upcoming year bring you health, love and joy!  I will see all of you in 2011!

P.S. I have postponed my special announcement and my surprise to you, my readers, after New Year’s day, as I’m sure most of you will have something more interesting to do than read strength and conditioning blogs on December 30th and 31st.