It’s this time of year at Endeavor where our hockey players are slowly coming back for the off-season training.  During the next 2 months or so, we’ll progressively welcome back our players, and by the time June rolls around we should be at full capacity and be extremely busy throughout the summer.

In the meantime, the current phase of the off-season is what we call “the early off-season” for the guys that are already back with us.  These guys have the advantage of having a long off-season and plenty of time to not only improve their performance, but undo the damage they’ve put on their body throughout the season.  And God knows how much damage a long hockey season can put on your body, especially on your hips.  That’s why our early off-season phase focuses a lot more on re-establishing balance than it is about improving performance.

Hockey is a rotational sport, just like baseball, football (for quarterbacks), lacrosse, tennis and golf.  One thing to understand is that the rotational movements occur almost exclusively in one direction.  Over the course of a season, this accounts for many rotations when making passes and taking shots during all the practices and games the athlete takes part in.  Rotations in the opposite direction are almost non-existent, and if you want to ensure better symmetry and balance throughout the body, there is definitely a need for rotational work on the non-dominant side.

The core exercises in a training program can be a good tool to help re-establish better balance.  Even though our exercises are not purely rotational in nature (actually they are just the opposite; anti-rotation), the movement pattern and the muscles recruited are the same; they just happen to work in an isometric fashion.

That being said, instead of working both sides equally, we’ll double or triple the volume on the non-dominant side for all the anti-rotation core exercises we’re using.  Just about any anti-rotation exercise can be used, but 2 of my favorites are the Belly Press and the Chop, both in the 1/2 kneeling position.

I really like the 1/2 kneeling position, especially in the early off-season because you get some lengthening of the hip flexors and some hip stability in the end range of motion.  We’ll usually do 3 sets on the non-shooting side, and only one on the shooting side.

The concept can also be expanded with the rotational power work, with medicine ball throws and the like.  Adding more sets on the non-dominant side will help re-establish some sort of balance around the hips, the shoulders and the core.

The early off-season is a good time to work on major imbalances and the damage done during the season before getting into heavy strength and power work throughout the summer, so it’s important to take advantage of it.

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I’m currently working on a project at work where I need make a detailed plan of our training system at Endeavor, which I could explain to someone who has no idea what we’re doing.  Getting started on that project, I struggled just putting something down on paper, simply because I didn’t know where to start.  I was trying to think: “What do you cover first? How do you make someone understand all the subtleties of how you build a training program? Why we do the things we do? etc.”  After brainstorming for a little while and exchanging some ideas with Kevin Neeld, I was up to something.

But what are the steps to detailing a complete training systems?

To me the first step is to highlight the philosophies behind the system.  This is what’s going to guide you in building  programs and knowing what components to include in your training programs.  Your philosophy doesn’t have to be extremely detailed and it doesn’t have be 5 pages long.  It’s really just knowing what your goals are and what the underlying concepts of your systems are.  To me, these are 3 ideas behind a good philosophy:

• The priorities of a good training program are, and always should be:

• The Joint-by-Joint approach to training

• The Anatomy Trains concept; everything works together in the body and isolation doesn’t exist

Those 3 concepts help shape a mindset of what you’re trying to accomplish and what the general directions of your training programs is.  Once  a background philosophy is established, you can put the building blocks of a training program in place and develop the tools to use for each component:

• Self-myofascial release (foam rollers, lacrosse balls, the stick, etc)
• Dynamic warm up (mobility exercises, activation drills, corrective work, etc)
• Speed training
• Power training (plyometrics, Olympic lifts, med ball throws)
• Strength training
• Core work
• Conditioning
• Injury prevention strategies
• Flexibility

Once this is established, the next thing to do is to incorporate all of these things in a structured training program, or what you may call the art of program design.  Managing volumes, loads, recovery periods and the like is a task that’s not easy.  This is something that is totally dependent on your athletes, their sports, training background, phase of the season, recovery capacities, genetics, and much more.  Although the basics of program design can be taught, only will you become better at that with experience and by listening to your athletes.

And last but not least, is the coaching itself.  This is an area that might seem pretty simple, but you really need to understand the fundamentals of functional movements in order to coach even the most basic exercises the right way.  Athletes need to learn to move the right way before anything else; it doesn’t matter how good your program looks on paper if your athletes move like crap.  Because in the end it comes back to the first 2 goals of the whole program: do no harm, and decrease the risks of preventable injuries.  Such concepts as the neutral spine, the packed shoulder blades and the packed neck are just some the concepts of coaching that need to be understood in order to make your athletes move better.

There are many things to go over when detailing a whole training system.  Sure there are probably things I haven’t mentioned that might be important, but in the end I feel like those are the basics to understand to build a good, efficient training system.  This is how we do things at Endeavor.

Interestingly this is all stuff that Kevin Neeld goes over into his book Ultimate Hockey Training.  He goes into great detail about every aspect of a complete training system that has been proven effective for years.  And please don’t be fooled by the title; this book could’ve simply been called Ulitmate Training System because it goes far beyond the concept of training for hockey.  No matter what sports you’re coaching, it is an invaluable resource to have.

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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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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 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.

I write about smart program design, appropriate injury prevention strategies, the importance of strength development in attaining your athletic goals, but achieving a goal goes far beyond just the method you’re using…

Even if I’m not a fan of any of those trends, there’s gotta be a reason why so many people by Crossfit, P90X, bodybuilding training, or unstable surface training.  Why is there so many people out there giving so much credit to all of those training methods?  Which one is really more efficient?  Which one really gives you the best results?  If we put an advocate of each different methods in the same ring, it would make for a pretty interesting Royal Rumble. But are they missing the boat?

The same could be said about diets.  Why are there so many people raving about so many different diets?  Atkins, Weight Watchers, the Paleo diet, low-fat diets, low-carb diets, whatever!  Are they all that magical even if they all contradict each other? Wait, but why are they all working??

People are quick to praise the diet or exercise program they’re following.  But they don’t give much credit to the thing that matters most, the thing that made their diet or training program successful: their EFFORT!  If there is one thing those people who praise those diets and training methods have in common is usually that they follow it to a T and put a lot of effort into reaching their goals.  Sometimes it’s not so much which road you’re taking, but simply where you’re going.

There’s an old saying about that…..

I’ll be the first to admit that there are faster ways than others to attain goals, and certainly safer and more healthy ways than others to do it, but if you keep putting the effort in and never look back until your goal is reached, it probably won’t matter to you which road you took to get there.  And I truly believe it’s not just limited to diet and exercise; it works the same way for everything in life.

We should be proud of the goals we reach, and more often than not we give too much credit to the road we took to get there.  What about we stop giving all the credit to the method, and start giving ourselves the credit for all the blood, sweat and time we put in achieving our goals?

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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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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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As I’ve mentioned in the past, I’m a huge fan of random thoughts posts, both when I write for my own website and also when I read other people’s blogs.  I think it’s a great way to transmit many different ideas/topics while keeping the read short.  So without further, here’s my newest edition of random thoughts!

1. I just had my first article published on SportsRehabExpert.com last week.  For those of you who don’t already know the website, it’s an amazing resource for fitness professionals from physical therapists, to chiropractors, to strength coaches.  The website brings you THE MOST up-to-date information on sports and orthopedic rehab and injury prevention available on the internet.  It is a membership site, but you can join today for only 1$! With names like Gray Cook, Mike Boyle, Eric Cressey, Mike Reinolds and Charlie Weingroff contributing to the website, you’d be crazy not to take advantage of this offer!  Needless to say that I’m really excited about writing for SportsRehabExpert.com ; it is quite an honor for me to be lined up next to those big names! You can join today by clicking on the banner below.

2. A while ago, my colleague Eric Cressey posted a picture of his med ball graveyard.

Upon seeing that picture, I was like:”How is that possible to have this many cracked medicine balls?”.  At the time, we had yet to have one pop at Endeavor!  But that was almost a year ago.  A hockey off-season and a baseball off-season later, we’re catching up!

We’re nowhere close to where Cressey Performance is yet, but it feels good to know that our athletes too can pop medicine balls!

3. I have only a couple spots left for my online program design services.  If you’re looking for a quality program that will bring you the results and make you feel better than ever (read: pain and injury free), shoot me an e-mail and I’ll take care of you.  Don’t settle for the cookie-cutter program you’ll find in a fitness magazine that won’t do anything for you anyway.  Save yourself the hassle of writing your own program, and have someone write a smart, no B.S. program geared toward your specific needs and your specific goals.  You’ll achieve your fitness goals way faster than you ever thought possible!  Visit my Services page for more details.

4. I’ve been food shopping at Whole Foods for a little while now, and I must say it is the smartest nutrition related decision I could have made.  For those who live outside the US, Whole Foods is a mostly organic grocery store that carry the freshest produce and the highest quality food.  It’s simply amazing!  You won’t see this kind of sign in any other grocery store:

Not only do they carry the best quality foods around, by they also encourage people to eat healthy and they make proper recommendations (like this one on the sign) about the basics of healthy dietary habits.

5. A big shout out to the Comcast U-18 AAA hockey team who qualified for the Nationals this past weekend by winning the USA Hockey Atlantic District.  Jared, our boss at Endeavor is the head coach of the team and we train most of the players on the team in the off-season and some of them throughout the season as well.  They won a best of 3 series with their biggest rivals, the Junior Flyers.  They won the first game 5-1, lost the second 5-4 and won the decisive game 9-2 in an amazing game!  Congratulations guys!

6. I set a new deadlift PR yesterday!  I haven’t been deadlifting very heavily lately.  To make a long story short, I messed up my back a couple weeks ago and it’s been bothering me ever since and one of my knee is pretty banged up.  Despite the fact that my whole body is a mess right now, I managed to pull 445, and did it totally pain free!  Needless to say that I’m pretty excited about that new PR…and even more about the fact that my body’s feeling great with heavy loads again.  445 might not be that much, but in my situation right now, I’m pretty pleased with that.  And the next couple of weeks are looking pretty good!

Having a good training program might just be one of the most important thing in your training.  Think about it for a second.  Yes, you need to bring in the effort and your program is only as good as the hard work you put in it.  But if you get to the gym with nothing but good intents and you’re ready to bust your ass, and all you do is stupid stuff, not only you’ll probably end up injured, but your progress won’t even be half of what it could be with a good structured approach.

This is beyond stupid…

With a good approach and a structured program your gains will skyrocket like you could’ve never imagined.  More often than not, you think that just busting your ass and doing more will get you where you want to be.  While in certain cases, that might help for a while, but the truth is you’ll stagnate very quickly with this less than optimal approach.  And then you’ll start to do even more to bust through plateaus, you’ll spend hundreds of dollars on useless supplements, and you’ll develop pain and aches from doing too much while in reality, a no-nonsense approach that’s efficient, time-effective and adapted to your needs will get you where you want without all the hassle.

Writing programs to get faster, to get stronger and to get bigger are not easy to write, especially for intermediate to advanced lifters.  Even worst is writing such programs for yourself!  For many reasons it’s really hard to write a program for ourselves;

• we do the stuff we like
• we avoid what’s hard and we don’t like to work on our weaknesses
• we’re limited by our knowledge (exercises, training methods, etc)
• it’s easy to stay in our comfort zone and we pretty much always do the same things

Writing programs for yourself can literally give you headaches

Why don’t you hire somebody to do that for you?  Just like you hire an accountant to do your taxes, and you hire a mechanic to fix your car, why wouldn’t you hire a professional to write your training programs?  The truth is, fitness professionals (competent ones that is, which are not that easy to find) are way more qualified than you will ever be and they WILL get you where you want faster than you think.

I have been writing programs for over 7 years now.  I have worked with week-end warriors who want to put on muscle, with D-1 College athletes and pro athletes who need to get stronger and faster to make their team; I’ve pretty much worked every clientele possible.  Right now, I write programs for athletes at Endeavor and for a couple of online clients.  I’ve had some time free up on my schedule recently and I am opening up 10 spots for online clients as of now.  If  you want to take the guess work out of writing your own training programs, I can help.  I will write you complete, structured and effective programs that will make you reach your goals while staying pain and injury free.

If you’re interested, visit my Services page to read all the details and see if you qualify for my exclusive services.  Like I said, I’m opening up only 10 spots, so hurry up!

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