I know you’ve been waiting for it, so without further ado here is the final part of The 10 Best Things at Endeavor!

5. The connections.  Before working at Endeavor, I really didn’t know many people in the industry, and sure enough pretty much no one knew who I was.  After a couple months, Kevin Neeld pushed me into starting my own blog, and I didn’t really know back then why he was being insistent on it.  Fast forward 2 and half years, and now I understand.  Sure it’s cool because you get to share your knowledge, but most importantly it puts your name out there and allows you to create you contacts within the field.  I’ll be the first to admit that I’m far from being the most knowledgeable guy out there even though sharing my knowledge is the original intent.  But getting in touch so many like-minded people is the main reason why I keep doing it.  My internet presence combined with attending seminars and the help of Kevin, who has introduced me to so many smart people in the business, are another reason why Endeavor was so awesome to me.

4. The Road Trips.  I mentioned on #6 that it was nice to host seminars because you didn’t have to travel, but quite honestly there’s something about road trips that I just love!  It does take a beating on you to spend 8, 10, 12 hours in the car in one day, but when you have good company, good music, decent weather, and the appropriate amount of stimulants road trips are A LOT of fun.

We always end up having great discussions, and it always does great to take my mind off of whatever is stressing me out, kinda like a mini-vacation.  Over the last 3 years we made road trips to Raleigh, Youngstown (OH), Chicago, Wilkes-Barre (PA), North Jersey, Baltimore, and Boston (on multiple occasions).  It’s been a blast, and definitely one of the best memories I keep from Endeavor….especially the one time we challenged Matt Siniscalchi to find beer at 1 in the morning (if you know him just ask him to tell you the story!).

3. The Learning.  Since I started working in this field it’s always been clear to me that continuing education had to be a top priority in order to keep getting better and be successful.  I always had that at heart and was always reading and attending seminars.  But honestly it’s not like I was hunting for continuing education opportunities; whenever I came across something that seemed interesting, I would buy it (or attend in the case of a nearby seminar).  But oh did I step up my game when I started at Endeavor!  I started learning at a much faster rate than I ever had.  At this point these days, I feel bad when one day goes by and I didn’t read something to help me get better.  Being surrounded by hungry like-minded coaches, and especially sharing an office with Kevin who’s more dedicated than anybody I know at learning new stuff, helped me kick my game up a couple notches.

2. The Athletes.  My experience at Endeavor would not be complete without the hundreds of unbelievable athletes I’ve had the chance to coach in the last 3 years.  There wasn’t many athletes walking through our door who weren’t extremely dedicated and focused on becoming a better (insert sport) player.  There is a big camaraderie component that was developed with all of them over time.  And thanks to them I will forever be famous for the “chest up” and “belly tight” coaching cues inside the walls of Endeavor (mostly because of my French-Canadian accent), as you can hear at the beginning of the following video:

And finally, as number one……(drum roll)

1. The Staff.  This is the main reason why Endeavor as been such an unbelievable experience for me.  From day one when I moved to a new country to pursue my dream, the guys at Endeavor made me feel at home.  They have been there for me and helped every step of the way into integrating myself to this new job, and really a new life.  If it wasn’t for them, I would not be where I am today.  Through fun times or tough times, with this crew that has always been wayyy more like friends than they ever been colleagues, I have shared everything.  Road trips, seminars, after-hour “meetings”, Halloween parties, Christmas parties, the ups and downs of building a business, the playoff beards, etc; it’s been a blast.  I will never be thankful enough for what they did for me.  They will be friends forever.  Thanks for all the memories guys!

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I am leaving Endeavor at the end of this week to pursue a great opportunity and a new challenge in my career as a strength and conditioning coach. As of next Wednesday, I am heading South-West to work with the Arizona Diamondbacks. I am extremely pumped for this new job, and I have heard so many great things about the organization that it just adds up to the excitement. It is clear that I would not be where I am today and I would have never had this opportunity in the first place if I didn’t have the experience I had at Endeavor Sports Performance these last 3 years. Needless to say that I am a little sad to leave my colleagues (who really are more friends than anything else) and all the athletes I’ve been coaching these last couple of years, who quite frankly feel more like my own kids. The good thing is I’ll be back at Endeavor during the baseball off-season, so it’s not like I’m leaving forever.

That being said, I felt like writing a top 10 of all the great things Endeavor brought me over the last 3 years. Here are number 10 to 6 in this 2-part series.

10.  The Lab.  Working in a private setting allows you to pretty much do whatever you want.  You don’t have anyone telling you what the training goals should be or what to include in the programs you write.  This gave me, and the other coaches, the chance to play around with a lot of different stuff, doing a lot of trial and error and basically experimenting with whatever we felt like.  In this ever evolving industry, and being surrounded by like-minded coaches who thrive at getting better, we come across a lot of new information.  Having this kind of setting to experiment with new stuff has been great.  I can say with an unbiased opinion that the experiment that turned out to be the most successful was the squat and denim experiment: indeed,  squatting in jeans shorts has been proven to increase raw strength by 12.7%.

9. The Facility.  We moved into a new facility this past summer, and I must admit that it’s pretty darn close to being the perfect facility.  All open space, a big turf area, and all the necessary equipment we need to design effective training programs, and coach efficiently.

8. The Educational Videos.  Most of you know that a majority of the staff at Endeavor has a decent internet presence (including myself, Kevin Neeld, and Matt Sinischalchi).  This is a way for us to share our knowledge through our own blogs, social medias, and most importantly the educational videos we put together…like this one:

7. Getting Stronger.  I haven’t hit any PR’s recently, which coincides with the absence of our, once daily, staff lifts.  During my first year and a half to 2 years at Endeavor, we were always lifting together as a staff, and I was making really good strength gains.  The atmosphere, the music, lifting with guys who have similar goals and are dedicated made a huge difference in my progress.  Don’t underestimate that.  This really isn’t that heavy, but was still a PR for me:

6. Hosting seminars.  We hosted the Myokinematic Restoration course from the Postural Restoration Institute this past November.  This was the first ever seminar held at Endeavor, but it seems like it’s going to be only the beginning; Endeavor is hosting Rock Tape this upcoming weekend and Pelvic Restoration from PRI in April that unfortunately I’m going to miss both, and Postural Respiration from PRI next October.  Seminars are always a great way to learn while connecting with like-minded people, and when you don’t have to travel for it, it’s a pretty sweet deal!

Stay tuned for number 5 through 1 coming up in a couple days!

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For those of you who have been following my work for a while you know that I like to blog and write articles to share my knowledge, but I am first and foremost a strength and conditioning coach who walks the walk.  I coach athletes on a daily basis and as much as possible, what I write about is based on my experience.  I’ve been a coach at Endeavor Sports Performance in South Jersey for the last couple of years.  But there is a wind of change blowing on my career right now. (Cues Scorpion’s famous song)

In all seriousness, I am proud to announce that I just got a new job as a strength and conditioning coach in the Arizona Diamondbacks organization!  I am starting in mid-February where I will heading down to spring training in Scottsdale, Arizona!  I will be assigned to minor league strength and conditioning for the spring training and extended spring training until June, before I head to Oregon to work with the minor league team I am following.

I am extremely excited and looking forward to this new challenge.  The Diamondbacks have the reputations of having one of the best medical staff of all professional sports.  Just that in itself is a HUGE reason to excited for.  Not many pro sports organizations implement PRI and DNS, which shows that the staff is ahead of the curve and very proactive about continuing education.

On top of that, I’ll be working with professional athletes, which as been my goal since day one when I started to work in the fitness/strength and conditioning field.  Coming from a private setting, I’m sure it’ll be a huge change, but I am really looking forward to discovering what the pro sports setting has to offer.

Not knowing what the future holds for me in terms of schedule and free time, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to invest as much time as I currently do on blogging, writing articles and newsletter and all that good stuff.  I might be toning down the writing frequency a little bit, especially for the first month during spring training, as I heard that it is the busiest time of year for the medical staff.  Hopefully you’ll bear with me as I take the time to adapt to the new schedule and find a way to post consistently on my blog.

The other thing is that there might be an increase of baseball specific content in the future!  Although I always made a conscious effort to keep it more general and talk about all the major sports as it pertain to strength and conditioning, it might change a little bit.  I’ll make sure I don’t turn into 100% baseball specific content, as I realize most of you reading my website aren’t looking for baseball-only information.

That being said I am pumped about this new challenge and will make the most out of this opportunity.  My blog might suffer the consequences in the short term, but I’ll definitely keep it running because sharing my passion is important to me.

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Christmas is approaching, the year is ending, I’m going home for a couple of days, and I get to see my family; what can I say….I’m so excited I feel like doing a frog splash off the top rope!

Alright well that being said and my wrestling reference being out of the way, let’s get to the serious stuff.  OK, maybe not that serious….I just felt like doing a random thoughts post before the holidays, so here we go.

1. The in-season training with all the Comcast teams is going really well at Endeavor.  So far we have seen good results with the new implementation of an in-season triphasic training model with kids 16 and up.  It is this time of year though where everyone is starting to get sick, tired and overwhelmed with exams at school.  It’s also the time of year where some of the kids started high school hockey on top of playing club with Comcast.  For those kids it means being on the ice 6-7 days per week, and sometimes even skating twice a day.  Not exactly the best recipe to stay injury-free!  All that being said everyone is just completely exhausted all the time, and we have been doing a lot of “recovery” workouts recently.  That usually means skipping the lifting session altogether, lots of foam rolling, an extended dynamic warm up, and a lot of stretching.  This is often what they need to reduce some of the stress on their bodies.

An athlete’s best friend during the season….the roller….not the chick.

2. On a different note, our baseball players have been getting after it pretty hard this off-season.  I have been playing around a lot with their programs this year, and they have been kind of my guinea pigs.  I have included a lot more conditioning in their programs than I typically do with my baseball players, and I’m really looking forward to see what the results will be once their season gets under way.  The good thing is that they’re still getting a lot stronger even though the conditioning volume has been higher, and so far they seem to be responding pretty well to it.  To be continued…

3. I’ve been on a quest to find new rap/hip hop material for my i-pod.  I really like rap, but I’ve probably been listening exclusively to Biggie, Lil Wayne, and Busta Rhymes for the last 4 years.  I figured some novelty wouldn’t kill me, and it turned out I found some really good stuff! –Thanks to my Comcast kids.  Although some of the names were familiar I didn’t really know this newer stuff.  If you’re into rap at all, I would recommend you check out Meek Mill, Wiz Khalifa, and Waka Flocka Flame.  Really good stuff!  I also re-discovered the Wu-Tang Clan.  I haven’t really listened to that stuff since high school, and even back then I wasn’t into them much, but after listening to their greatest hits album I’m a big fan now!  Here’s my favorite Meek Mill song to get you going (as a fair warning, there’s some explicit language). Wait ’til it gets to 1:42 in the song, that’s when it really kicks up a notch!

4. If you’re looking for a last minute Christmas present for a loved one involved in strength and conditioning, or even just a gift for yourself you should put your hands on Kevin Neeld’s Ultimate Hockey Training book.  It goes way beyond training hockey players; it’s a complete training system to get athletes to the next level.  For under $30, it’s more than worth it!

OK Kevin, I will promote your book!

5. OK I lied when I said my wrestling reference was out of the way…cause I’ve got another one!  Actually it’s more of a rant.  I have been a wrestling fan since I was about 5 years old.  Generally people who have been wrestling fans at one point in their life, it’s usually during their childhood and early teen years– which is clearly not the case for me probably because there is still a 12 year old boy living inside of me!  Anyways, people usually say stuff like: “wrestling was so much better back in the days”.  My first comment is always: “Of course it was better when you were a kid because you thought it was real!”.  I guess you appreciate things on a completely different level when you know it’s fake, but to me it doesn’t make it any less good.  Yes there are probably some eras that were better than others because sometimes the WWE lacks highly charismatic characters that can carry the company.  And a point could be made that following the attitude era (which was basically the prime of Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Rock, and DX all at the same time) things weren’t as entertaining.  But if you’re a real wrestling fan and still watch it regularly, you have to admit that right now John Cena and CM Punk are absolutely carrying the company on their shoulders.  There is no doubt in my mind that in 10 to 20 years from now, they will be remembered with the greatests of all time along with the Hulk Hogan’s, Bret Hart’s, Shawn Michael’s, The Undertaker’s, and the Stone Cold’s.  Cena and Punk have what all these guys have; it’s just a different era and a different generation.  I personally really enjoy what’s going on in wrestling right now, and when you witness TV moments like the following (especially when you know everything that was going on behind the scenes when it happened) it’s hard to not feel like you’re 12 year old again.  It is pure delight!

This has to be in the top 10 best promos shot in the WWE EVER! I seriously have goosebumps watching it!

6. Last but not least, happy holidays to each and everyone of you reading this!  I hope you’re gonna have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year.  I will be up in Canada enjoying some time off from work and spending time with my friends and family that rarely ever see since I moved to the US.  Hopefully you will be spending time with loved ones as well, and enjoying a little bit of time off.  Make the best of it, and best wishes!

I’ve done this every year since I started my blog, so I figured: why stop?  Christmas is by far my favorite time of year, mostly because I get to go home and spend time with my family and friends that I rarely ever see since I moved to the US.

Blogging about Christmas just puts me in the mood and gets me even more excited about it.  So, here we go; my list of Christmas present ideas for the fitness enthusiast.

- Heart rate monitor.  This is something I have worked out without for many years until I got one last year.  The benefits of using a heart rate monitor to improve your conditioning are so much greater with this simple accessory.  Doing conditioning without a heart rate monitor is basically like lifting weights to get stronger without ever knowing the amount of weight you’re lifting.  I have seen immediate benefits since I started using mine, and I seriously wonder how I even improved my conditioning without it in the past.  I really like the polar RS-100 as it includes all you need and it is very reasonably priced.

- Healthy cookbooks.  With the New Year around the corner and all the weight management resolutions that come with it, a cookbook with healthy meal recipes and snack ideas seems like an ideal gift.  When trying to gain muscle mass or lose body fat, your best asset is planning.  Planning your meals ahead and never not knowing what your next meal is going to be is the key to success.  My 2 favorite healthy cookbooks are Gourmet Nutrition and Metabolic Cooking, which are both very reasonably priced and contains hundreds of meal and snack recipes.

- Supplements.  This is always a good gift to give to the fitness enthusiast in your life.  I personally really enjoy receiving supplements as a present; it’s always appreciated not to have to spend some money on it myself, and let’s face it it’s not gonna be wasted!  At the top of my list are: a good protein powder, fish oil, and a greens supplement.  For the protein powder, I really like Biotest Grow and Jay Robb’s Whey Protein.  For the fish oil, I tend to recommend Carlson Lab’s fish oil capsules and for the green supplement I really like Greens+.

- Self soft-tissue tools.  I’m huge a proponent of self soft-tissue work, and it’s been an important part of my program and the ones of my athletes for a long time.  There are a lot of different tools out there to accomplish that work.  My top 3 favorite ones remain the good ol’ foam roller, the lacrosse ball, and the thera-cane.  With the use of these 3 implements you’re usually pretty good to cover all the main problematic areas in the body.

- CM Punk’s DVD.  Ok, ok, I admit this might be more of a present for the wrestling enthusiast in your life, but seriously fitness and wrestling go hand in hand, don’t they?  I got it a couple of months ago when it came out, and it’s brilliant.  It’s a documentary on his path to the top of the wrestling business with 2 extra DVDs of his best matches.  Everything you need to know about the best in the world!

There you got it; my top Christmas present ideas for the fitness enthusiast.  If that doesn’t help you, at least maybe that’ll encourage you to start shopping for presents since Christmas is in 2 weeks….well, maybe it’ll encourage me too to get started!

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It’s no surprise that playing sport at a high level takes a toll on your body.  Sports with a particularly long competitive season like baseball, hockey and basketball are even more subject to leading to overuse injuries and causing shoulder, hip, knee and lower back issues, and decrease in performance as the season progresses.  If you did things the right way growing up, you didn’t specialize too early in your sport, and you played a variety of other sports and activities.  If that’s the case you’ve definitely done your best to avoid overuse injuries while developing general athleticism.

General athleticism: being able to give the Attitude Adjustment to a 500lbs giant

At the higher level though it becomes more important to focus on one sport.  More often than not it means a lot of practices, a lot of training, and a lot of games played.  To ensure optimal performance during long grueling seasons, you must do the right things.  Here are 5 very important things to care of during the season.

1. Maintain your range of motion.  This means a LOOOOOOOT of mobility work,  and stretching.  Putting yourself through the same repetitive motions for full seasons over the years will create some serious imbalances that need to be taken care of to stay away from overuse injuries.  Way too many athletes consider hip flexor, groin and shoulder pain “normal”.  It’s not.  Your body is trying to tell you something is wrong and if you don’t take care of it, it will turn into an injury that’s gonna keep you on the sideline.

2. Take care of soft-tissue quality.  This goes hand in hand with the previous point.  I always go back to Mike Boyle’s band analogy.  If you try to stretch a band that has a knot in it, it will only tighten up the knot.  That’s why you need self soft-tissue work on a daily basis.  And getting manual work done by a professional on a regular basis becomes increasingly important as you play at a higher level.  It’s not a coincidence that every pro sport organization have manual therapists on their staff.

NOT that kind of manual therapy

3. Keep you strength up.  As the season progress, everything usually go downhill– energy level, performance, etc.  One of the reasons is that athletes lose strength throughout the season.  Why even work on getting stronger during the off-season if you’re going to lose it all during the season?  That’s why maintaining your strength is very important during the season; it will be a big factor in minimizing any decrease in performance.  For younger athletes with less strength training experience you can even expect gains in strength during the season.

4. Nutrition.  As the season progresses, a lot of athletes get more and more tired, they don’t have energy, they’re weak, etc.  Is it a coincidence that most of them hardly eat 1 serving of vegetables per day?  When you have to get up early for practices, you’re on the road a lot, and with everything else you’re trying to juggle with in your life, nutrition takes a back seat more often than not.  That translates into a lot of “quick fixes” when it comes to eating.  If you don’t fuel your body right, you can’t expect it to perform at the highest level; it’s direct correlation!  Given that traveling doesn’t help an athlete’s cause at all, your best friends during the season should be: a good protein powder, nuts, fish oil, and a greens supplement.  Also try to opt for healthier options when it comes down to restaurants.

5. Sleep.  That seems to be another thing athletes don’t see too much of during the season.  With the crazy schedule it’s not always easy to get enough quality sleep, but this is another factor directly related to performance.  Your body needs 7-8 hours of sleep per night.  If you get any less than that because of your crazy schedule, consider taking naps.  This is a very efficient way to make up for the lack of sleep in your life.  You could be surprised at how energizing just a 30 minute nap can feel.  You might also want to consider natural sleep enhancers such as ZMA and Z-12.  This is not something you should be taking every night, but when a much needed quality night of sleep is required, they might provide some help.

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A post by Anthony Donskov on Mike Boyle’s blog called Not Everyone Gets a Trophy, and a discussion with some fellow strength coaches from Massachusetts inspired this.

Obviously building self-esteem is important with kids, and it is an important part of a strength coach’s job when you work with young athletes.  I’ve seen parents come in our facility and flat out tell me their kid “suck at baseball”, or “runs like an idiot”.  I am always amazed to hear those comments coming from THEIR OWN PARENTS!

“OMG, you suck at basketball!”

But quite frankly, I see both extremes.  The other extreme being that some parents just simply reward too much!  Again, I am all for improving kids’ self-esteem in sports and other areas of life because that will carry over to their adult life.

To me, there are core values that will shape your life forever that need to be transmitted at a young age: discipline, hard work, dedication, perseverance, etc.

To quote Anthony: “I miss the good old days!  A time where hard work, commitment, discipline and positive attitude were expected, not rewarded, failure was not final and earning meant sacrifice.”

If you reward your kids for every single thing, they will never learn what it takes to succeed.

I understand that it can be tough for kids to lose, finish second, fail a subject in school, but guess what?!  It’s normal!  It’s part of something we call life!  Not everyone wins all the time, we don’t succeed at every single thing that we try, and you know what? It’s OK.  You’ll get over it, and if you learned a lesson, you’ll work even harder to succeed next time!

Kids do need to be rewarded when they do great things, when they win, when they get an ‘A’ in school, but they also need to learn what it feels like to fail, and learn that it’s normal.  You can’t expect a reward every single time to act the way you’re supposed to!

When did boosting kids’ self-esteem came to the expense of everything else that’s important in life?!

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Health is important.  That’s no big surprise here.  We are becoming more aware of the consequences of unhealthy eating habits, and being inactive on our health and well being.  The need for these things has been constantly growing as our lifestyles are moving in the opposite direction; we become more sedentary as most jobs involve sitting at a desk all day, means of transportation are making us walk less, and we are always looking for the quick fix for most of our meals.

It’s no surprise that this has caused a rapid rise in the number of health related problems.  Therefore a lot of money has been invested in the health care system to address this problem.  But are we addressing the wrong way?

When someone has high blood pressure, he goes to the doctor and he is prescribed medication to reduce his blood pressure.  When someone has a headache, he takes ibuprofen, or acetaminophen, or whatever else to cure his headache.  When someone has back pain, he goes to the chiropractor to get his spine cracked and get rid of the pain.  When someone has knee pain he goes to the physical therapist so they can treat his knee.

You get the idea…

Everything we do in regards to our health is geared towards treating the symptoms, treating the pain.  All (or most) of the money that is invested in health care is put towards that; treating symptoms.

But what exactly causes all those symptoms?  Isn’t the government and everyone that invest in health care interested in where do these problems actually come from?

What causes the high blood pressure?  What causes the headaches?  What causes the back problems?  What causes the knee pain?

All the symptoms (health problems, pains, aches, etc) that our body experiences are the results of something going wrong somewhere.  And most of the time, the cause of the problem is not the symptom.  It’s different, it comes from somewhere else.

My colleague Perry Nickelston is dead on.

We need to start paying attention to what causes problems.  What causes are body to hurt, ache, and feel like crap sometimes.  Here are some of the causes of our problems in our life today:

• sedentary lifstyle
• not enough exercise
• too much of the same type of exercise without variety
• processed food
• too much sugar
• pesticides in food
• heavy metals in fish and other types of food
• chemicals and solvents in cleaning products, and perfumes
• chemicals in water
• pollution
• etc

There are obviously many different causes of health problems in our world today.  The most important thing to take away from this is that treating symptoms, and investing money in the treatment of symptoms and medications are not solving any problems.

We need to take a good hard look at our lifestyles today and ask ourselves why we are dealing with so many health problems in a time where we put a lot of money in our health care system, and where our doctors are smarter than ever.

The bulk of the money in the health care system might need to be invested somewhere else if we want to break the cycle, and actually solve health problems.

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I haven’t done one of these in a while!  Since they’re my favorite, I figured I was due.  Without further ado, here we go:

1. We work on dynamic flexibility a lot in our warm ups with our athletes at Endeavor and with team Comcast during the season. A couple of guys on each team always complain that their flexibility is horrible. Strangely these are the same guys who half-ass the warm up when I have my back turned, and they’re also the same guys who usually come up to me midway through the season complaining about groin and hip flexor issues. Weird…

2. Twitter is so much more fun than Facebook. For one, you can see only the feeds of the people you wanna see, you don’t have to be mutual friends.  Let’s face it we all know a handful of people that we’re friends with on facebook that are just overly annoying with their status updates, but we don’t want to de-friend them because that would be rude. You don’t have that problem with twitter. I also feel like twitter is more about joking around and chirping your friends, which is fun. Celebrities and public figures are also easily accessible via twitter…if you’re the kind to stalk, you know.

3. Endeavor will be hosting the Myokinematic Restoration course of the Postural Restoration Institute on November 10-11.  If you have been following my work for a while, you should know by now that I’m a big proponent of the PRI concepts.  I will be the first one to admit that from the outside it might not be easy to get a grasp on the concept and the techniques until you’ve gone through a course.  If you live in the New Jersey/Pennsylvania area it is your chance to finally understand the concept and apply the PRI methods.  Trust me you won’t be disappointed!  If you wanna sign up visit this page.

4. Zinc is a pretty powerful mineral.  A lot of athletes are deficient in zinc, according to Charles Poliquin.  Not that I consider myself an athlete anymore, but I have noticed the benefits of supplementing with zinc.  I tend to have a weak immune system because I get sick easily when I’m tired or workout a lot, and I have recurring cold sores, which I’ve had forever.  I’ve been randomly supplementing with zinc for the past year or so and loading on it when I feel like my immune system is down or when I have a cold sore pop out.  I must say that it has made a huge difference; I have been getting sick a lot less, and my cold sores have been going away in less than 2 days when supplementing with zinc (they usually last a full week).  You need to be careful with zinc supplementation though as it can be toxic if you take too much.  My best recommendation would be to get tested to know where your level of zinc is first, then you’ll know how much to use.

5. At Endeavor we have been experimenting with Cal Dietz’s triphasic training method in the training of our athletes, as well as in our training.  Honestly, it’s still early to know about the effects on our kids’ performance, but I can personally say that as I’m entering the concentric phase I’ve been feeling a lot more explosive recently and my weights just skyrocketed!  If you haven’t already, I strongly recommend you check out Cal Dietz’s book.

6. My birthday is Thursday.  Coincidentally CM Punk’s new DVD is coming out today. You know…in case you feel like getting me something….

Yeah, I’m a wrestling fan in case you didn’t already know. Stop judging me.

7. Concussions seem to become an epidemic in sports today.  Hockey is probably leading the way with the pace constantly increasing, the players being bigger, and the presence of the boards surrounding the playing surface.  There isn’t a whole lot we can do about those factors.  But working on posture and neck strength and endurance can go a long way in preventing, or limiting the damages on some of those concussions.  Hockey players usually have pretty poor posture because of the way they skate, and because they spend a lot of time sitting on the bench.

Sitting like this for hours every season isn’t ideal for posture

That will make their posterior neck muscles overly tight, and their anterior neck muscles weak.  This could make the whiplash effect from a hard hit worse if those anterior neck muscles can’t eccentrically contract at the right time to limit that whiplash.  And the tightness of the posterior neck muscles could potentially make the concussion symptoms worse.  Therefore addressing posture, strength and endurance of the anterior neck muscles in training, and getting soft-tissue work done on the posterior neck muscles are extremely important.

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If you clicked on the link because you thought you were REALLY looking for that exercise, well…..

Seriously, you didn’t believe there was such a thing as a “magical exercise” that would FINALLY get you a 6-pack, did you?

Regardless, here are the REAL exercises that will get you a 6-pack…even better, I will them in a comprehensible program for you to follow:

A1- Eat lean meat

A2- Eat more fruits and vegetables

A3- Eat nuts

Rest for a few hours, and repeat a couple times a day.  That’s it.  To ensure you don’t fall into overtraining, you should avoid any extra exercises, like “eat processed foods”.

Rule of thumb: if you can find it in a grocery store aisle, don’t eat it

Alright, enough with this nonsense.

Hopefully you understood that what I was trying to say is that the best (and necessary) way to achieve your body composition goals is to eat a clean, healthy diet of natural, unprocessed foods.

There are no magical exercises, no special training protocol, and no miraculous supplement that will EVER compensate for a shitty diet.

Of course…

I understand that what we constantly see on TV, on the internet, and hear on the radio keeps cultivating the belief that you can achieve your body composition goals with minimal effort.

But that’s nothing but a dream.  None of these diets work without the effort.  None of these exercises will make you lose your belly fat in 5 minutes per day.  And no this “special” supplement won’t work unless you change your dietary and exercise habits, too.

All of those ideals are nothing but marketing to get to buy into whatever those companies are trying to sell.  Hear me loud and clear when I say that none of them work.

I mean, unless it’s the shake weight…..

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