Baseball is one of the sports that puts the most stress on your joints, especially if you’re a pitcher; the throwing shoulder is under tremendous stress.  With the crazy velocities at which you throw a baseball, and with the volume of pitching that accumulates over the years, by the time a pitcher gets to the professional level, he probably has a lot of overuse damage to it (soft tissue restriction, ligament laxity, partial labral damage, etc).

Last Saturday I played in a fund raising dodge ball tournament in Philadelphia.  Having not played dodge ball since middle school, and not being a natural thrower (my main sports growing up were hockey and basketball) made me a little worried about my dodge ball performance.  As expected I sucked pretty bad, but at least I stole the show with my purple cobra entrance before every game…

A little less glorious when you get hit in the face 30 seconds later, though!

If you’re wondering where I’m going with this, here it is: I was so freakin’ sore the next day it was unreal!  My whole shoulder and arm, starting from the attachment of my rhomboids on my spine going all the down to my fingers, were as sore as I’ve ever been in my upper extremity.  Rhomboids, levator scapula, rotator cuff, biceps, and all of my forearm muscles were completely smoked.

Is that a coincidence that these muscles all have fascial connections?

That just made me realize all the stiffness and soft-tissue restrictions that can build up in a baseball pitcher’s arm when he throws around 100 pitches every time is on the mound.  Of course there are some adaptations taking place; the body becomes more efficient at it as you build up your arm strength, stamina and improve your technique, and you don’t get sore (like I did playing dodge ball) every outing.  But it still makes you think about all the stress that the shoulder and arm are taking on a weekly basis.  And when young baseball pitchers throw with their high school team in the spring, play summer league and fall ball on top of that, the accumulated stress on your arm builds up pretty fast.

That’s why taking care of your pitching arm, using injury prevention strategies, and having an smart (and planned) training program are going to be important factors in the longevity and durability of your arm over time.  Soft-tissue work on the rhomboids, levator scapula, rotator cuff, biceps, and forearm muscles is going to be an important part of that ‘arm care’ program.

Try and not cry the first time you dig a lacrosse ball in your rotator cuff muscles

If I got stiff and extremely sore in these muscles by playing 6 games of dodge ball (realistically ~10 throws per game), I can guarantee you that any baseball pitcher will build up severe restrictions in those same muscles over time, whether they feel it or not.

Do your dedicated self soft-tissue work on a daily basis, go see a qualified active release therapist on a regularly (once a month, as a bare minimum- but College and professional players probably need more) and you’ll increase your chance of staying pain and injury free, and give yourself the best chance to perform at the highest level.

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Pretty cool blog title, huh?  After hours of deliberation, DavidLasnier.com’s board of directors came up with this ingenious title that, I’ve been told, was guaranteed to catch your attention.  I’ve even been told that no one would pass on this title without wanting to read the whole post!

My actual board of directors…

All kidding aside, this title is in relation to corrective exercises.  If you’ve been reading my stuff for a little bit, you should know by now that I’m a big believer in incorporating injury prevention and corrective strategies in training programs to help my athletes and clients move better and lower their risk of injuries.  And I’m not the only one; there is a pretty big trend in fitness world that seems to be going on right now.  I think it’s a really good thing that more coaches and trainers are now aware of the importance of the glute function in hip extension, scapular stability in shoulder health, etc.  With all the smart minds in this business, new corrective exercises come out every day giving us a really big toolbox to work with when it comes down to corrective exercises.

NOT what I’m talking about!

One thing I feel we don’t stress enough with corrective exercises though is that the way we perform them is crucial.  It’s a good thing to include glute bridges in a client’s program that seems to be prone to low back pain.  But it’s not going to do much good for him if he’s not performing it the right way, or if he just goes through the motion.  Sticking with the glute bridge example, if your client doesn’t know that the whole purpose if the exercise is to squeeze his butt cheeks as he lifts his hips up, he might be compensating with his hamstrings, or even worse, his lower back.  If the ribs flare out at the top, or if the client feels the movement in his hamstrings or low back, there is something that needs to be fixed.  Anyway, you get the point.

Kevin Neeld from KevinNeeld.com knows how to bridge

For that reason, switching around your corrective exercises all the time might not be a good idea.  You want to make sure that your client masters a certain movement perfectly before moving on to something else; the goal is not always to have him do something “challenging”.  It’s still a corrective exercise and it should never be a max effort anyway because that is exactly when your body will look to compensate.  Corrective exercises should be kept simple; you should try to reinforce the same ones with a client until there is some sort of improvement.  You’re really not doing him a favor if you throw a bunch of new corrective exercises at him every couple of weeks, just for variety purposes.  Keep in mind that the client doesn’t know any of that stuff, and for every new exercise, he has 4-5 different things to think about at the same time while he’s perform it correctly.  If you need to stick with the good old 2-legged glute bridge for 3 months before your client really gets it and feels it in his butt, that’s what you need to do.  Variety or results?  Which one are you really after?  Pretty simple answer.

Start with the basics, make sure the execution is flawless, that your client feels the exercise in the right spot (if needed), and never progress a corrective exercise until you see progress.  In a way, it’s just like a lifting program; it doesn’t need to get fancy schmancy with tons of new exercises in every new monthly program, because you’ll never know if you’re making progress or not.

As you can see, getting fancy is not always your best bet…

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Warm ups have been an important part of any training program almost forever.  Warm ups have also evolved since the classic “just go for a 10 minutes jog” that most coaches and trainers used to recommend 20 years ago.  I do realize that it’s still common practice by highly uneducated personal trainers and coaches around the world, but I’m not going to get into this…

Mobility exercises, activation exercises, movement pattern training, dynamic stretching, foam rolling and the dozen of others soft-tissue work modalities are usually some of the components we can include in a good warm up.  Depending on your own situation, it might not be possible to include all of the above, and in fact, for some it might be possible to include only one or two.  The amount of time you spend with each client or athlete is going to dictate what your warm up is going to look like.  But it doesn’t mean that your warm up should take 30 minutes when you have more time with your clients and athletes.  The reason I say this is because there are many different components (as I mentioned above) that can fit into your warm up and it’s easy to get caught trying to include too much, and your warm up routine might end up taking forever to perform.  The warm up is essential to improve range of motion, increase blood flow to the muscles, increase heart rate and body temperature and decrease tension in stiff muscles.  But it’s also called a warm up.  It shouldn’t take half the time of your total session.  You want to choose the things that are going to be the most bang for your buck, get it done and be ready to attack your training.

Here’s the way I structure my warm ups in order to make them as effective as possible without taking forever:

- Self soft-tissue work: 5 min- Working on tight areas, usually 4-5 different areas (might different ones every day, depending on how I feel)

- Specifc warm up: 3-4 min- this is the time where I work on personal weaknesses or corrective work (this can include FMS correctives, correct a dysfunctional movement pattern, etc).  Currently I use this time to do PRI breathing drills.

- General warm up: 3-4 min- this will include more general movement patterns that will help improve dynamic range of motion and body temperature at the same time (combination of lunges, inverted reach, push ups, etc)

- Movement preparation: 3-4 min (if needed)- if I’m going to do any kind of dynamic work like sprints or plyometrics I will always include some sort of skips, cariocas, shuffle, back pedal, hops, etc.  If I only lift, I’ll usually just skip that part.

Following this model, a good, complete warm up would take you about 14-15 minutes (10-12 if you don’t do any movement prep).  It really covers everything and it’s not too long!

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I’ve had a couple people come up to me recently with a nagging shoulder pain.  One of them was one of the baseball pitchers that I train during the summer who’s now in College.  He’s had a nagging pain in his throwing shoulder for the past couple of months that’s preventing him from pitching at the same intensity as he used to, and now he’s freaking out because the baseball season is starting in a couple of weeks.  The second is a good friend of mine who’s into the Crossfit thing and he was telling me one of his shoulder has been bothering him for a little bit.  They both had pain in their shoulder with either the shoulder clearing test from the FMS (baseball player) or the empty can test (Crossfit guy).

The Empty Can Test

A quick assessment of their range of motion around the shoulder showed an internal rotation deficit in the painful shoulder for both of them.  Shoulder extension wasn’t too bad in both cases and t-spine ROM was lacking a little bit in the Crossfit guy.

Instead of cranking on their range of motion and possibly forcing something that’s not there (and possibly originates somewhere else), I gave them 2 simple breathing exercises that I learned from the Postural Restoration Institute to re-establish proper diaphragm function, as well as ribs, thorax and scapulae positioning.  I also gave my Crossfit buddy a t-spine mobility and scapular stabilizer drill do to because his posture was not great.

The positioning of the diaphragm can affect all the surrounding structures

After only 5 minutes, both of them had an increased internal rotation range of motion in the painful shoulder; and I did absolutely no stretching or soft-tissue work whatsoever.  And even more importantly, their shoulder pain wasn’t there anymore with neither the FMS shoulder clearing test or the empty can test!

This is how important proper breathing patterns and diaphragm function are.  It can affect the way your shoulder, your pelvis and everything around them is positioned.  Before forcing range of motion and hammering the soft-tissue work, make sure your athletes and clients are breathing right!

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Strength and conditioning coaches and personal trainers use a variety of different coaching cues to guide their clients and athletes to perform various exercises the right way.  When you first start coaching or training people, you talk too much, demonstrate too many times and use too many coaching cues, and your clients end up being confused.  Rightfully so!  Just imagine trying to perform a complex movement that you have never done in your entire life and that is not even close to being similar to something you know; you have no point of reference, your body doesn’t recognize the movement pattern, and on top of that, the person teaching you the movement just keeps talking and adding the number of things you should focus on!  You end up not being able to focus on any one thing because there are too many of them.

But luckily, as you become a better trainer or coach you refine your coaching technique, simplify your explanations and use fewer coaching cues.  You also realize that the most effective coaching cues end up being 90% the same from person to person.  The “chest up” cue is definitely one that’s very common among coaches and trainers.  But it’s also an effective one for a bunch of different exercises.  You can usually use the “chest up” cue with the squat, the deadlift, all variations of horizontal pulling exercises and most posterior chain exercises, just to name a few.

I use the “chest up” cue quite a bit myself.  Combine a loud “chest up” yelled across the room with a French-Canadian accent, and you have something for athletes and fellow coaches at Endeavor to make fun of me for!  It has became a running joke around Endeavor, and our athletes will take the first opportunity to make fun of me, as you can testify yourself by listening to Colby Cohen, Boston Bruins prospect, at the beginning of the following video (I’m also famous for the “butt tight” cue as well, as you’ll notice):

Coming back to serious matters, the “chest up” cue is definitely a useful one to use, but one that you need to be careful with.  There are some unwanted results that could present with this particular coaching cue.  Let me explain…

The “chest up” cue is an effective one because it’s short, simple and hard to misinterpret.  What we are usually looking for with the “chest up” cue is for the client or athlete to prevent from rounding or slouching at the upper back and thoracic spine, and keep the spine neutral.  You might also use the “chest up” cue to help pack the shoulder blades back together when back squatting or doing a horizontal pull.  But one problem may present when an athlete or client tries to get his chest up.  What they don’t know when we say “chest up” is that we want an extension at the thoracic spine, but too often they will get that extension through their lower back or thoraco-lumbar junction.

T-L junction subsitution for thoracic extension

And if you don’t pay close attention to it, you might not even notice, especially if the client or athlete is wearing a loose shirt.

A lumbar hyperextension is not always obvious when you wear a loose shirt

 An extension at the thoraco-lumbar junction will in turn cause a lower ribs flare in the front.  I’ve mentioned in a previous post that a rib flare is also associated with faulty breathing pattern because the diaphragm is not in an efficient position to do its job.

Just notice how differently the diaphragm is positioned between the inhaling and exhaling phases of breathing

So it’s very important to be conscious how your client or athlete will adjust when you tell him/her to get his/her chest up.  Again, the coaching cue in itself is not bad to use, you just need to be more aware of how the person in front of you will interpret it, and you can make the adjustment when necessary.  Personally, when correcting it, I like to put my finger tips on the person’s lower ribs while instructing them to get their ribs down while keeping their chest up; it usually works pretty well.

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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.

It’s not a breaking news if I tell you that baseball players, and especially pitchers need to address rotator cuff strength in their training program.  There are many different ways to go about it beyond the traditional external rotation variations that will give you some added benefits on top of the strength you’ll gain in your cuff muscles from performing these exercises.  Here are the different options you have and the benefits from using each of them.

1. External Rotation Using External Resistance.  This is the category that I just mentioned above; it’s pretty much the ‘typical’ way of strenghtening the rotator cuff.  It’s usually done either with an abducted or adducted arm, and can be done using different types of resistance like dumbbells, cables or bands.  External rotation with external resistance helps strengthen the rotator cuff muscles concentrically and eccentrically in an external rotation pattern.  These muscles are important because they help decelerate the arm in the pitching motion.

Side-lying DB external rotation

2. Internal Rotation Exercises.  The reason why I put this one in a separate category than the previous one is because I think internal rotation based exercises serve a completely different purpose than external rotation exercises for baseball players.  For one, internal rotation exercises will strengthen the subscapularis, a very important internal rotator that won’t get much work from the external rotation exercises.  The subscapularis, located under the shoulder blade, prevents anterior migration of the humeral head during horizontal adduction or internal rotation of the humerus.  This can cause impingement in the shoulder, which usually happens when the pec major and the latissimus dorsi (both internal rotators) take over.  There are different ways to go about strengthening the subscapularis, but the most effective way is in a prone position with the arm abducted at 90 degrees.

3. Manual Dynamic Stabilziation.  I’ve talked about this type of exercise on different occasions before.  If you understand anatomy well, you should know that the first role of the rotator cuff muscles, even before internal and external rotation, is to stabilize the humeral head in the glenoid fossa.  So it only makes sense to stabilize these muscles in their purest function to avoid impingement.  There are many ways to go about it, and you can certainly play around with the body position (supine, quadruped, kneeling, etc), and the arm position as well.

4. Dynamic Stabilization with Unstable Surfaces.  Similar to the previous category, it challenges the rotator cuff muscles in a stabilization role.  Instead of having a manual resistance when you don’t have a coach or a training partner around, the use of unstable surfaces can definitely be convenient.  Again the positions and implements can vary.

5. External Rotation with Manual Resistance.  Similar to the first category, it will strengthen the rotator cuff muscles in the external rotation pattern.  There are 2 major differences from the ‘typical’ external rotation exercises with external loads.  First, there are less chances of your athletes cheating the movement and trying to compensate with the scapular muscles, and second, if done the right way it will put an emphasis on the eccentric part of the movement (which is more specific to the pitching motion).

6. Dynamic Stabilization with Unstable Surface and Perturbation.  This is basically a combination of categories 3 and 4.  This pushes the stabilization demand on the cuff muscles a little further.  Progressions from this category would not be used with novice lifters, as they need to master the different types of stabilization exercises separately before combining them.

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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.

Notice the T-L junction hyperextension

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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