We’re engaging in the home stretch of the youth hockey seasons for most kids in the country.  All my athletes within Team Comcast have worked extremely hard all year, and most of them have made very good gains even though it’s in-season lifting, where our main goal is to make sure we don’t lose strength.

At this time of year though their schedule is getting a little crazy.  Club team practices, club team games, high school team practices, high school team games, and school on top of their own family and personal lives.  Not sure many of us would last long with that type of schedule!

Crazy schedule…just like what CM Punk’s new t-shirt says.

That being said, because of all that craziness going on this time of year, we often opt out of the scheduled lifting session and switch that to a recovery workout.  This doesn’t need to be fancy, but most importantly it needs to stay short.  My goals with these workouts are:

• Get the blood flowing while keeping the intensity pretty low
• Work on range of motion, which seems to be lost for a lot of players as the season goes
• Include some soft-tissue work
• Include injury prevention strategies
• Keep it short

Keeping these goals in mind, here is what a sample recovery session might look like with one of my youth hockey teams:

- Foam roll
- Dynamic warm up
- Short circuit;
A1- Lacrosse ball on posterior hip 3 x 30sec/side
A2- Glute bridge squeezing foam roller 3 x (6 x 5sec)
A3- Seated psoas lift 3 x (4 x 5sec)/side
A4- Lateral miniband walk 3 x 10/side
- Static stretching

This seems pretty short, and quite frankly it is!  The whole workout may take about 25 minutes including warm up and everything, and that’s exactly what they need sometimes.  It will help recharge their battery, while still gaining some mobility and preventing injuries.

Give this type of circuit a try in-season with the teams you work with; you’ll see that it’s very beneficial, and the kids appreciate it a whole lot when they feel beat up.

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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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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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I will be the first one to admit that this is something I’ve been fighting against for years.  We all know that it was common practice among lifters and athletes through the 70s and the 80s to static stretch before a training session or playing a sport.

This was almost a whole warm up right there!

And that was accepted as a typical injury prevention strategy before an activity.  That concept has been challenged a lot in the last decade and a half or so.  Many researches came out suggesting that static stretching may negatively impact force production output (read: strength and power).  The idea that static stretching by itself as a warm up procedure was a good injury prevention strategy has also been challenged a lot.  The result of this being that strength coaches and fitness professionals alike who stay current with the literature have abandoned the static stretching concept as a warm up procedure almost completely.  I, myself, have been supporting this theory that static stretching as a warm up is not appropriate.

But in the last couple of years, different strength coaches, like Mike Boyle have been trying to re-introduce the concept of static stretching as being part of a warm up (as opposed to being a whole warm up in itself).  Knowing what we know now about static stretching it seemed kind of counter-intuitive to me to do that.

After resisting to the concept, I finally gave it a shot.  Now I embrace it.

There’s a couple of things to take into account though, when using static stretching before training or sport:

• Even if there might be some benefits to doing static stretching before training, it cannot be used by itself as a complete warm up.  Soft-tissue work, mobility, dynamic stretching and movement preparations are all important parts of a warm up, as well.
• You don’t want to stretch for too long.  It’s called a warm up, not a cool down, so try to avoid spending over 10-15 minutes static stretching where your body might fall in sleep mode.
• Try to avoid static stretching the areas/muscles you’re going to involve in your training activity, because of the possible force production loss linked to static stretching.  Mobility and dynamic stretching drills might be better suited for these areas.

The whole reason to re-incorporate static stretching in the warm up, in my opinion, is because we spend so much time sitting in a day that there are many muscles and joint that suffer from that.  Therefore it’s important to give them length back before a training session; the last thing we want is to feel stiff and restricted from sitting all day before an activity.

Personally, I have been feeling so much better since re-incorporating some static stretches in my warm-up, and I definitely don’t feel as stiff when I train.  Here’s how you might want to incorporate static stretching in your pre-workout routine:

1. Soft-tissue work (foam rolling, stick, lacrosse ball, etc)
2. Static stretching circuit (4-5 stretches that don’t target muscles involved in your training for that day)
3. Dynamic stretching/mobility (6-8 movements that will target joints involved in your training for that day)
4. Movement preparation (If you do any kind of sprint/plyo/power exercises you’ll want to do movement prep)

After fighting against the concept of static stretching as part of a warm up for so long, I now embrace it.  You should definitely give it a shot if you’ve been in the same boat as I was for the last couple of years.

In my last post I touched a little bit on the importance of stretching.  The post was about static stretching, but I also mentioned that dynamic stretching is another important part of the puzzle.  In fact, dynamic stretching is often overlooked; a lot of people are familiar with it, but at the same time so many people use only static stretching to warm up when there’s a much better option. 

Dynamic stretching is really important to improve range of motion as it will improve stability and control within that full range of motion.  Therefore it’s also more specific to any sport than static stretching is (think about it, how many movements are done passively in sports?).  It is not only important to have good range of motion around our joints, but also to have body control within that new range of motion if we want it to be helping us perform better in the gym and when play sports.

With our athletes, we always use a dynamic stretching warm up at the beginning of every session right after doing some soft-tissue work with the foam roller to get the muscles more pliable and react better to dynamic stretching.  We try to include drills that will improve mobility mainly at the ankles, hips, thoracic spine and shoulders (which are the joints that are meant for more mobility).  And we’re also going to try to include drills that will improve stability and control within that full range of motion.

Here is an example of one of the warm ups we use with our athletes that my colleague Kevin Neeld has put together a couple of months ago:

Please note that I performed only 3-4 reps for ONE SIDE ONLY of the drills in the video just to keep it shorter. Obviously, we always perform everything on both sides usually! This is the full warm up:
- 3 ways ankle drill vs wall 5,5,5/side
- Penguin’s walk on 25 yards
- Rectus femoris mobilization vs wall x8/side
- Reverse lunges with rotation x8/side
- 2 way hip rock x6/side
- Lateral lunges x8/side
- Side-lying rotation-extension x8/side
- Side lying bow & arrow (5sec holds) x 5/side
- Yoga push ups x8
- Inverted reach x8/side

The exercises are paired in such a way that we mobilize a joint in a more passive way and we immediatly stabilize that same joint in its new found range of motion with the very next exercise (example: rectus femoris mobilization to improve mobility of the hip flexors followed by reverse lunge to get stability in that full range of motion).

This is just to give an example of what a good warm up should include to improve range of motion with your athletes and prevent the risks of injuries, but keep in mind that are tons of other options to include in your dynamic stretching routine.