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?

Sign up for my newsletter and get 3 FREE reports on sports performance training!!

As I’ve said many times before, random thoughts posts are probably my favorite type of posts to write and also my favorite types of posts to read on other people’s websites.  So here we go again!  …I obviously just made up the number 137.

Whatever Pam.

1. As much as I’ve written about breathing patterns in the past and the importance it has on your whole body, I never really posted anything about breathing drills or exercises specifically.  My colleague Patrick Ward, from Optimum Sports Performance did a great job of explaining a simple, yet extremely effective breathing drill you can use with your clients and athletes.  Check it out:

2. I have bashed aerobic training in previous blog posts and articles, and guess what?  I’m starting to think that I was wrong.  As I’m learning more about how to manage training stress and training loads, I’m realizing that doing high intensity strength and power work on top of high intensity conditioning sessions that are strictly interval-based might be too taxing on the nervous system.  Also, aerobic training improves your recovery rate between bouts of effort as well as between sessions, so I’m starting to think that aerobic work might actually have its place in a training program.  I’m still not a fan of repetitive low amplitude movements for people who are already pretty restricted mobility-wise, and I still don’t think it’s sports-specific AT ALL (unless you’re a marathon runner), but I’m gonna have to play around with it a little bit in my own training and the ones of my athlete because I’m starting to believe there are some benefits to it.  Keep an eye open for an entire blog post or article on the subject in the next couple of months.

3. My friend and colleague Kevin Neeld wrote a very interesting blog post on Femoroacetabular Impingement (FAI) yesterday.  If you’re not already familiar with FAI and you’re training high level athletes (especially hockey players) you NEED to get that piece of the puzzle figured out, as FAI should be taken into consideration when writing programs for your athletes.  And according to Kevin, there is about 1 in 3-4 male in the general population that has some sort of hip abnormality and probably even more among high level hockey players!  Kevin is so freakin’ smart, you need to check out his stuff; this particular blog post on FAI highlights the most recent research on the subject and Kevin makes it sooo easy for anyone to understand.  His blog is a valuable resource for me on a weekly basis.

Different types of FAI

4. Speaking of Kevin; if you’re training hockey players or are a hockey player yourself you NEED to pick up a copy of his book Ultimate Hockey Training.  It’s the best hockey training resource I’ve ever read and it’s under 35$!  If you don’t read it you’re missing out big time.  Enough said.

5. I talked about HRV in Tuesday’s blog post, and I mentioned that I think the future of periodization and managing training loads resides there.  Monday morning, a fellow strength coach from the area came in to Endeavor to run our training staff through the Omega Wave, a HRV measuring tool.  I was really impressed with that tool and all the information it gives you on CNS fatigue, sympathetic and parasympathetic state, and your overall readiness to train.  We are really fortunate at Endeavor that the guy took time from his schedule to come over, explain to us the way the OmegaWave works and put all of us through it.  A big thanks to him!

The OmegaWave. That’s pretty much how it goes.

6. Today is December 1st, which means one thing: Christmas is right around the corner!  To say that I’m really excited would be an understatement.  Christmas is probably my favorite time of year for a couple of reasons, especially to spend some time with my family.  This year I’m especially excited for a couple of reasons:

• I get a full week off!
• I get to go back home to Montreal to spend the Holidays with my family and see my friends (I couldn’t make it last year)
• I’m flying there, which means that I won’t have to spend a whole day in my car to get there, and another full day to come back
• My girlfriend will meet my family for the first time!

It’s usually easier for the girl…

7. Sign up for my newsletter!  Period.

This past Tuesday was my birthday, and I just turned 30.  People asked me a lot how I felt about it and if I was depressed about leaving my 20s behind.  To be honest other than the fact that I’m probably not where I imagined my life to be at 30 5-10 years ago, I really don’t care about a simple number.

Exactly how I celebrated my birthday…I guess I was a little depressed

So as usual I’ll celebrate on my blog by…….you guessed it…..A RANDOM THOUGHTS POST!!  I could put a 30 thoughts for 30 years thing, but frankly I’m getting a bit old and lazy, so I’ll make it 10!  Without further ado, here it is!

1. If you haven’t started re-training breathing patterns, you’re totally missing the boat.  This is something that the more I learn about it the more I realized its importance and how it affects everything else in the body (movement patterns, muscle elasticity, muscle tone, etc).  If you haven’t already, you should familiarize with PRI and/or DNS stuff; you’ll understand what I mean when I say breathing patterns control everything.

2. I went to the Foo Fighters concert 2 weeks ago.  Most. Awesome. Concert. Ever.

3. Learn more about the FMS.  This is the simplest, most effective tool for fitness and strength and conditioning professionals to identify movement pattern limitations and dysfunctions.  When you find the a limitation, you simply apply the corrections and you magically decrease the risk of injury of your athletes and clients.  One really doesn’t need to know everything about functional anatomy or be a rehab genius.  And it just works.  Period.

4. Periodization is not only about writing different training cycles that alternate qualities being worked on; it’s about training volume more than anything else.  Once you understand you don’t need to run your athletes to the ground during every training sessions, they start to make huge progress.  As counter-intuitive as it sounds, it’s alright (even favorable) to let your athletes leave the gym fresh sometimes.  When you understand how to manipulate training volumes to create overload and overcompensation, you understand how powerful it is.

5. I feel very fortunate to be surrounded by great people in my life.  My bosses, friends and my girlfriend all took care of me so much for my birthday, and I am very thankful to them.  A new pair of Nike Free’s and tickets for a Cowboys-Eagles game are just a few of the reasons that made my birthday so awesome.

6. Another thought on breathing; it should be trained in various positions (supine, prone, quadruped, etc) to make sure you “own the breath” in various postures.  Also, to train breathing, a balloon might become your best friend.

My new best friend

7. Right now is the best time of year for sports.  Football season is in full effect, hockey season just started and it’s playoff time in baseball.  You couldn’t ask for anything more!  ……oh, wait….maybe that your team would do better….

Not the best year to be a Red Sox fan…

8. One of the readers of my blog sent me a link to a 3D shoulder model.  When people send me stuff like that I usually assume that they’re looking for some kind of financial benefit, but this one is a totally free website and I thought I’d share it with you because it’s pretty cool.  You see the whole shoulder in 3D and spin it around, and click one button if you want to see the skin layer, only the muscles, the bones, etc.  It’s pretty cool.  Check it out HERE.

9. Next on my continuing education list for the next couple of months:

- USA Weightlifting certification
- The book Movement System Impairment Syndrome, by Shirley Sahrmann
- The Functional Training Handbook, by Craig Liebenson
- Muscle Imbalances Revealed 2.0 DVDs
- Both of Alwyn Cosgrove and Cressey, Robertson and Rigsby’s fitness business products

10. Yet another great post from my colleague and nutrition expert Brian St. Pierre on artificial sweeteners and stevia.  Definitely a must read: The Stevia Story.  I really enjoy Brian’s blog as he is as honest and objective as it gets with what he writes about on top of being incredibly smart.

That’s all for the celebratory randomness!  See you next week with some new content!

Get my 3 FREE reports on sports performance training by simply entering your information below!

To you aspiring strength and conditioning coach,

Being a successful person in this business is a hard thing to achieve.  Being considered an expert in this field is a hard thing to achieve.  It doesn’t happen over night.  You need to put your time in.

Of course, getting a degree in exercise science or kinesiology is a pre-requisite, but understand that it doesn’t make you better than the rest of us as soon as you get out of school.  The biggest mistake you can ever make is thinking that you know everything when you get out of school.  A wise man once said: “the day you stop learning is the day you start dying”.  It’s very true, and even more true in the strength and conditioning field.  Theoretical knowledge is an important thing to have, and something that is important to keep gaining through continuing education.

But continuing education alone isn’t gonna make you better than anybody else.  In our field IT IS probably more important than any other field because of the numerous gray areas and the fact that the body is complex machine.  But no matter how much you know, how much you think you know or how much you learn through continuing education, that still won’t make you a successful person in this business.  You need to put your time in.  If you’re already familiar with these names, odds are you shouldn’t worry about not doing enough continuing education: Eric Cressey, Mike Boyle, Charlie Weingroff, Postural Restoration Institute, Functional Movement Screen, Precision Nutrition, Alwyn Cosgrove, StrengthCoach.com, Janda.  The point is, if you don’t apply what you learn, it’s worthless.  “Knowing and not doing is not knowing at all.”

Putting your time in means doing actual work.  Coaching, teaching, running groups, being involved with athletes.  Mike Boyle referenced the 10,000 hours rule to become an expert in any given field that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in the book Outliers.  It’s true.  That’s how it workd in strength and conditioning, just like in any other sphere of life; you can’t expect to have success or be considered an expert if you haven’t put your hours in.  Is 10,000 a discriminatory number?  I don’t think so.  Malcolm Gladwell gives plenty of examples of highly successful people in their respective field in his book, and every single one of them reached success around that same 10,000 hour timeline.

Putting your time in also means making sacrifices, being hungry to work more.  You’re not going to get a perfect job where you work 9 to 5, earning 50,000$ a year, with paid vacations and insurance, training only professional athletes in the first 5 years of your career.  You can keep dreaming and think that you are that much smarter and better than most coaches out there, but that’s just not going to happen.  Period.  This year at the Perform Better summit in Chicago, Mike Boyle was saying how he had been working for free for Boston University for years and had to bartend during the weekends to pay his bills before they even offered him a job with a salary!  And guess what?  He was 30 years old when he got offered that job!  He said that most people quit this field before catching their big break.

One of my mentors, Todd Hamer, strength coach at Robert Morris University, once told me he had to work for 3 years full time without being paid and part-timing as a pizza delivery boy before having his first paid job as a strength and conditioning coach.  What did these 2 guys do?  They put their time in.

If you’re not willing to do that, maybe this job isn’t for you.  It’s not easy and sometimes discouraging.  Working in sub-optimal conditions, with groups too big, athletes too young, in a shitty facility (if in a facility at all) are all things that are part of the process.  It’s called putting your time in, learning, gaining experience so one day you can reach a level of success that’s gonna make you say: “I freakin’ deserve it because I worked hard to get there!”.  There are no Cinderella stories; ask any respected coach that are at the top of our business or anyone you wish you had their job.  They all busted their ass to get where they are.  They put their time in.

Who am I to tell you that?  I’m no one special.  I’m not trying to sound like I know everything or arrogant , and I certainly don’t pretend like I’m an expert or that I have reached true success in this business because the truth is that I am still working my way there.  But I’ll tell you this: I’m putting my time in (note how I said that in the present time); I have worked with 8 years old group of kids, I had to make something out of nothing when I had to run sessions without equipment or any facility with my hockey players a couple years ago, I had to spend time as a personal trainer in a commercial gym for a couple of years because I had no other opportunities to train people at the time.  But guess what?  I learned a lot through every single one of these experiences and I wouldn’t change it for the world.

I have been in this industry for over 8 years at this point.  I have struggled professionally and financially for a long time.  Only for the last 1-2 years than I can say that I’m starting to be where I want to be.  But I have been putting my time in.  And I will continue to do so.

It seems like there’s been a big issue going on on the internet in the last couple of months in the fitness and strength and conditioning world.  The issue has been about people self-proclaiming themselves experts.  People have called out other people about their expertise and/or experience in the field.  It’s a situation that’s really hard to control in 2011 where starting your own blog takes 30 seconds, and with the right tools (Google keywords, SEO pack, etc), and a couple contacts one can gain a decent internet presence pretty quickly.

You don’t need to take a class…

With all the strength and conditioning professionals out there running a blog, I can say without a doubt that it brought our industry to a whole new level!  Mostly for the better because we all have access to so much quality information; smart people can share their ideas, coaches can share their experience and we can all interact together more easily than ever before, especially we the networks being formed on Facebook and Twitter.

But as I just mentioned earlier, there have been quite a bit of controversy about the experts in our field on the internet, or should I say the “experts”.  It is indeed easy to proclaim yourself an expert with very limited knowledge or experience.  It is very easy to lie about your background, your clientele or claim achievements that you have never made .  And I think this is what has been causing some waves.

This guy calls himself a fitness expert because he went to the gym once in 1991

I don’t think there is anything wrong with sharing thoughts, ideas or experience over the internet.  Sometimes people will blame you for making statements, though, especially if you’re lacking the experience to back up your position.  And to be honest, I feel pretty irritated myself when I see people write about training athletes when I very well know they don’t.  We do need to understand that we all have different background; some of us are personal trainers and work with general members, some of us work in college or professional settings, some of us are more involved in the research side of things and we all have a different experience level.  Some strength coaches seem to have a problem with research guys being considered experts because they don’t really train anyone, and some research guys will blame coaches for the lack of scientific evidence behind their methods.  As a coach, I’m definitely biased in the way that I will sometimes have a hard time buying into what a research guy has to say about training athletes if he doesn’t train anyone, but I still understand that we need coaches and we need researchers to work together.  And that’s what makes our industry evolve in the right direction.

In my opinion, we should all keep sharing information via our blogs, websites, Facebook, Twitter, etc.  As long as you don’t try to hide yourself behind a wall of lies or pretend to be something you’re not, we should all share information and opinions with our own background and experience.  However I do have a problem with people marketing themselves as “strength coaches” or “performance enhancement specialists” when they have little to no clients or if their clients are general fitness clients.  You don’t specialize in sports performance training if you’re not training athletes, I don’t care what certifications you have or how athletic you are (and by the way, you can consider yourself an athlete, but can’t count that as training athletes).  But luckily, it’s not the majority.

Bottom line: be yourself, share knowledge from YOUR experience (coach, personal trainer, physical therapist, researcher, etc), don’t market yourself as something you’re not and be ready to face criticism if you do.  There is a way that we can all contribute to making the fitness industry a little better by taking advantage of what the internet has to offer to us in 2011.

What a beautiful concept

Don’t forget to pick up your 3 FREE reports on sports performance training!! Just enter your information below!

I wrote a blog post 2 weeks ago on corrective exercises being just one tool among others in your toolbox if you’re a strength coach.  If you missed it, check it out HERE.  Writing that post got me thinking about the other tools a strength coach should have in his toolbox, and quite frankly there are many!  There are many different systems, training methods, pieces of equipment, injury prevention methods and much more that can be used in your programs, and in the end this is what constitutes your own unique system.  Every coach’s system is different because we all learn from different people, have different backgrounds, have different mentors, different clienteles and educate ourselves through different resources.  And it’s fine.  Not every strength coach in the world needs to have the exact same system and have all the exact same tools in their toolbox.

How big is YOUR toolbox?

The more different tools you have in your toolbox, the better you will be as a coach.  Or at least, you’ll have a greater potential to be.  That’s why it’s important to not completely buy into only one system; you limit yourself.  Using only one system means confining your athletes to one training method, and ignoring everything else.  Because most training methods and systems that have been around in the business only focus on one thing.

For example, the Westside system is a great one.  Powerlifters around the world have made tremendous gains using this system and a lot of the strongest men on the planet are following the Westside template.  But there’s also a lot of strength coaches who use this method, and it’s great to get athletes stronger, but if you don’t have other tools in your toolbox to incorporate to your Westside template, your ignoring many important qualities that athletes absolutely need (speed, rotational power, injury prevention, etc).  I am not shitting on the Westside method at all (because I use a variation of it myself); I’m just saying that it can’t be the only tool in your toolbox.  The Westside method was created for powerlifters, so it’s important to keep that in mind.  Just like every method or system is usually created for one specific population.

Same goes for the Crossfit.  Personally I’m not a huge fan because the injury potential is way too high for high level athletes when you’re doing complex exercises under extreme fatigue.  There are some merits to the method for their use of compound movements and lifting circuits to as a form of metabolic conditioning.  And if you use some sort of Crossfit circuit to condition your athletes, it can be a good tool in your toolbox.  But if you’re labeled as a Crossfit guy and do nothing else with your athletes, you’re definitely missing out on the specificity of the sport and the injury prevention component of your training program.

The take home message here is not to think that systems like Westside Barbells and Crossfit and bad, but that you probably shouldn’t use exclusively those methods, just like you shouldn’t use only a TRX, or only Olympic lifts to train your athletes.  Every tool has its place (just like corrective exercises if you read my post), you just need to know how and when to incorporate each one of them in your programs.  You’ll be a much better coach, and more than anything else, you’ll have your own unique system that will make you stand out from the rest.

If you want more insights on athletic development AND receive 3 sports performance training reports COMPLETELY FREE, enter your info below!!!

This week I’m on vacation and will give you links to stuff you should definitely read!  There has been some great material on the internet the last couple of weeks, and I think you shouldn’t miss out on it.  So without further ado, there it is:

Lose Tension to Get Quick – Kelly Baggett.  To be quick, the focus is often on stiffness and rate of force development, but in this blog post featured on Eric Cressey’s website, Kelly touches an important, yet almost always forgotten point, on the importance of being able to relax to be able to get quicker.  Confused? Read Kelly’s post!

In-Season Hockey Training – Kevin Neeld.  My friend and colleague Kevin Neeld wrote a great piece about in-season training for hockey players.  Now is a great time for everyone involved in hockey to read this post because hockey players across the country are starting training camps and getting ready for the next season.  Kevin addresses what should be the focus of an in-season program.

Getting Into Your Toes – Charlie Weingroff.  Yet another brilliant post from Charlie on the importance of the foot/toes complex.  It is a very overlooked area of the body among the strength and conditioning crew.  In this one, he talks about foot and toes position during various exercises, namely exercises that are performed in the 1/2 kneeling position.

Inverted Face Pulls – Ben Bruno.  Just another creative exercise from Ben Bruno.  Ben has been posting many new innovative exercises through his blog and his YouTube channel.  He deserves some recognition for that! Aaand he’s been linking to my blog for a long time now, so I kinda owe him too!

I don’t think I’ll surprise anyone by saying that I’m a big injury prevention guy.  I do think that addressing muscle imbalances, posture and reinforcing good movement patterns are a crucial part of any training program.  Think about it: does it really matter that you get your athletes stronger and faster if they don’t play half of the season because of a hamstring pull, or whatever other injury?  No.  That’s why it should be the priority of a strength coach to address these things.

But it’s also very easy to get caught in the injury prevention mindset and focus on nothing else.  It’s important to help our athletes prevent injuries, but we’re not physical therapist.  We shouldn’t treat our athletes like patients, and they should never feel like they’re coming in for a treatment when they walk through your door, no matter what.  We have our own skill set as strength coaches, and physical therapists have theirs.  What we really need to do is bridge the gap between strength training and rehab, and not do both.  We can’t send everyone who have a slight pain in their shoulder to physical therapy.  We can however, and should be able to assess them and identify dysfunctions and/or muscle imbalances, but we shouldn’t try to “treat” someone who has all the symptoms of rotator cuff tendinosis.  That’s not our job, we need to refer out!  That’s why it is so important to have a good network of professionals around us.  But I digress.

Unless you can do it all like this guy, you probably need a good network

Despite the little aches and pains of our clients and athletes, we should always keep their goals in mind.  Foam rolling, mobility exercises, activation drills should be important tools in our toolbox, but never the bulk of our training programs.  When foam rolling turns into a 25 minute deep massage session before training and when your fat loss clients are doing more scap wall slides and ankle drills than exercises that will actually make them burn some calories, that’s when we start overdoing the injury prevention side of things.

Dude, seriously just take the roller out on a date!

This obviously applies to relatively healthy clients and athletes.  It’s a different situation when one of your athletes comes back from a sports hernia surgery.  But I think you get the point.

Make your athletes better, stronger, faster and injury resistant.  Don’t be a physical therapist.  Be a strength coach who knows something about functional anatomy.

She really wants YOU to sign up for my newsletter!!!

Stability is often perceived as a good thing; single-leg stability, core stability and scapular stability are all terms that are commonly referred to when we’re talking about functional training and we see those things as being positive outcomes we want to get out of our training program.  Referring back to the joint-by-joint approach popularized by Mike Boyle and Gray Cook, some joints in the body should be geared more towards stability and some others should be geared more towards mobility.

The Joint-by-Joint Approach

But this doesn’t mean that those joints should have only one of the two (mobility OR stability).  Every joint in your body needs a healthy balance of both; some just need more of one than the other.  It’s also important to acknowledge that every joint in your body needs some sort of stability.  As physical therapist Charlie Weingroff puts it: “you need stability before mobility”.  In other words, if you can’t stabilize your joint, taking it into a full range of motion might not be a good idea.

When this guy talks, I listen

Stability is very important per se.  But stability is not always good.  Confused?  Perfect!  Let me explain: as I just mentioned, you NEED stability in every joint in your body, but if you can’t get stability with proper muscle activation and balance around a joint, most of the time your body will find a way to get that stability.  This is when compensation patterns occur; you have the wrong muscles trying to stabilize your joints because the right muscles that should stabilize aren’t doing their job.  Some other times, when the muscles’ contribution isn’t enough your body will look somewhere else to find stability.  This is when passive structures like ligaments and bones are being used for stability purposes, and that’s when things start to get pretty ugly.

When a baseball pitcher throws a baseball at 90mph and his arm rotates at 7,000°/second at the shoulder, if the the rotator cuff and scapular stabilizer muscles can’t control the deceleration, something else in your body will, because I can guarantee you that his arm is not just going to rip off his body and go flying in the air!

That means that something somewhere is stabilizing the arm at the shoulder in the deceleration phase.  And again if it’s not the right muscles doing it, it might mean some added stress on the ligaments of the shoulder, some irritation to the labrum, compensation patterns taking place by stabilization from the wrong muscles, etc.  There are plenty of examples like this one in athletic performance.

Always keep in mind that stability will happen one way or another.  We just need to make sure it’s happening at the right places with the right structures.  Otherwise we’re setting ourselves up for injuries.

Want to know how to get that stability at right places for optimal shoulder performance?  Enter your information below to get my ‘Shoulder Injury Prevention Strategies’ report for FREE!!!

I recently received an e-mail asking a question about session breakdown when you’re dealing with groups of kids.  I thought it might be of interest to post it here as well as the response I sent back.

Q: I work with a large variety of clients and some of them are groups of young athletes 11-14.  I saw your blog post and I fully agree, however I have a question.  I do not want to fall into the category of the guy who puts the kids through cone drills and agility ladder drills for an hour straight.  My typical breakdown of the hour tends to look like this:

I don’t know how big your groups are and I know that’s it’s not always easy to have everyone in your group move perfectly, especially when you have a large group to deal with (trust me, I’ve been in this position before and it’s not an easy one), but exercise form is what you should definitely focus on.The same thing goes for speed/plyo stuff; you want to focus on their form.  You mentioned something about focusing on sticking their landing; I think that’s great and it’s exactly what you should do, make sure they jump and land the right way before progressing to more complex variations.  Same thing for the speed stuff, if you have the knowledge, I would try to coach sprint form as much as possible.

As for the agility ladders, to be honest, I’m not a huge fan, but if you do it for only 5 minutes it’s not a big deal, and if your kids are not very well coordinated this can be a great tool to incorporate in your workouts.  Otherwise I’d personally opt to spend more time on the more important stuff.  Again that all comes back to the amount of time you have available with your kids.And for conditioning, as long as you’re not doing steady state or aerobic based stuff, and that you keep things interesting for them (hey, kids still need to have fun!) you’re all set.