Adding perturbations to an exercise basically means to manually disturb the stability of a given exercise.  The goal is to make the environment more unpredictable and increase the stability challenge of the exercise, movement pattern or muscle groups used.  I’ve been introduced to this concept a couple years ago at the Optimal Shoulder Performance seminar.  This is a concept that Mike Reinold was (and still is to this day) using for rotator cuff exercises with his baseball pitchers.

A typical exercise would put the athlete in a given position and the coach or trainer would give manual perturbations to the arm to challenge the stability of the humeral head in the shoulder joint, and improve the stabilization ability of the rotator cuff muscles for injury prevention purposes.

I immediately embraced the concept as I thought it was a genius idea, and I’ve been using rhythmic stabilization exercises for the rotator cuff ever since.

The concept can also be applied with other types of exercises…

Any exercise with the purpose of improving stability could be a candidate for a progression using perturbations.

When you’re trying to improve stability, your body and your brain need to be challenged.  This is why so many people use the stability ball; it increases the challenge of stability and makes you work harder.  The thing with stability balls is that they’re not always used smartly, and not always by smart people.  But I digress.

Hint: NOT the smart kind.

A lot of core exercises designed to improve stability can be progressed to manual perturbation.  As I’ve mentioned above, the perturbation will help improve control and stability.  When training stability, the important thing to remember is that motor control (which is the brain-to-muscle connection that works to improve stability) can not be improved unless it fails to succeed doing certain tasks.  Your brain needs to be challenged beyond its own stability limitations.  If you always work within your strengths, or your current level of stability, you’re not going to improve.  This is a great point that Mike Reinold highlighted in Functional Stability for the Core.

How do you actually apply this?

It could be something as simple as adding manual perturbations to a front plank.  A mastery of the front plank is in order before attempting any type of manual perturbation to your clients or athletes.  The same concept can also be applied to other core exercises like dead bugs, belly press, glute bridges, bird dogs, etc.

Again the important thing is to follow the progression; make sure your client or athlete is efficient at the basic exercises and doesn’t compensate in any way.  The logical progression for any exercise would be:

1. Stable
2. Stable with perturbation
3. Unstable
4. Unstable with perturbation

Using this progression with a front plank, the progression might look something like this:

1. Front plank
2. Front plank with perturbation
3. Stability ball front plank
4. Stability ball front plank with perturbation

The idea with the manual perturbations is to make it challenging and push it just beyond the point where the athlete or client maintains perfect form, but it shouldn’t be unbearable- if that makes any sense.

If you want more ideas on how to incorporate perturbations/rhythmic stabilization you should definitely check out Eric Cressey and Mike Reinold’s Functional Stability for the Core.

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The neutral spine concept has been widely accepted as one of the norms for good movement by now.  It is understood that it is one of the basics of functional movements, and it is extremely important when moving external loads.

With athletes lifting weights this would translate into making sure they always squat, deadlift, do core exercises, and any hip extension based movement with a neutral spine.  Most high level athletes don’t have a hard time at all grasping that concept, especially when they’ve learned to lift the right way.  But with younger athletes who are just learning to lift, or with deconditioned clients, what’s the first step in being able to perform lifting exercises with a neutral spine?  Well, you need to teach them neutral spine first!

This looks like a pretty solid neutral spine to me

Including exercises such as planks, birddogs, and bridges that help reinforce neutral spine seem like a good place to start, but if your athlete or client doesn’t understand what neutral spine is, odds are he won’t be able to get it.  And they won’t have the ability to keep a neutral spine under challenging situations like lifting heavy weights, or moving at high velocities.

Teaching neutral spine in different positions is the first step.  Make your athletes or clients feel what neutral spine feels like in different positions, coach them as much as possible, make sure they really get it.  Mike Reinolds delves into that stuff quite a bit in Eric Cressey’s and his Functional Stability Training DVD set.  This is a seminar they held at Cressey Performance a couple of months ago that they put on DVD and just released to the public.  Mike emphasizes the 3 step process before allowing anything to move:

1. Find neutral

2. Brace

3. Breathe

Whether you’re teaching neutral spine using a plank, birddog, bridge or dead bug you should follow the same pattern.  Make the client flex and extend his spine a couple of times, and make him find neutral somewhere in between.  Coach the client as much as possible, and make sure that in the end they can find it by themselves.  From there, brace just hard enough that you’ll maintain neutral (brace shouldn’t be a max effort unless you’re lifting max effort weights), and breathe.  As a rule of thumb, if you can’t breathe through your brace, you’re bracing too hard.

You don’t need to brace THAT hard

One tool that we like to use to teach neutral spine that I like a lot with our athletes at Endeavor is the hip hinge with a dowel.  It is very basic, it gives physical cues (with the points of contact of the dowel on your back) and it’s easy to know when you’re not doing it right.  Again the same concept applies: find neutral, brace, breathe.

If you want to learn more about that and how to train according to the neutral spine concept when training your core, your lower body and with any lifting exercise really, I suggest you pick up a copy of Eric Cressey and Mike Reinolds’ Functional Stability Training.  They just released it and you can get at the introductory price until Sunday at midnight; after that the price will go up.  You can check it out HERE.

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Just a quick post today to share with you some of my favorite exercises to develop power for athletes.  Obviously there are plenty more exercises that I like to use throughout a training year, but these are just a couple of my favorite ones if you need some variation and something different from the traditional plyo exercises and the common Olympic lifts.

Unloaded squat jumps are a great exercise that I learned from Cal Dietz, strength coach at the University of Minnesota.  It allows you to jump higher by pulling down on the bands as you jump (although it doesn’t necessarily translate into more power development), but because of the height of the jump, you have more force to absorb (or decelerate) when you come back on the floor.  That really is what’s beneficial about the exercise; an increased ability to absorb forces and react to high velocities.

The second one is more of a method than an exercise itself.  It’s called the complex method, and the concept is simply to perform a heavy lifting exercise (with about 90% of your 1RM) for 2-3 reps, rest for anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes and then perform a bodyweight plyometrics exercise.  The idea is that the heavy lifting exercise will activate more fast-twitch muscle fibers that you’ll in turn be able to use when doing the plyo exercise.  In the video I perform them within 15 seconds, but ideally you’d want a longer rest.

The third one is a medicine ball throw variation that I got from Eric Cressey. It incorporates more velocity in the movement by running a couple steps and jumping before smashing the med ball into the wall. I’ll use this variation a lot with baseball players.

The last one is a variation of an Olympic lift. The reason I like it so much is because it usually is so much easier to teach and to learn than the traditional Olympic lifts. The 1-arm DB snatch is very effective to develop power and will take minimal time to master. If you haven’t already, try it!

As I mentioned in the beginning, this really is just the tip of the iceberg, as there are so many exercises to help develop power. I just wanted to share some of my favorite ones with you if you always end up using the same ones and need variety!

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Three of the most common and effective power training methods in my opinion are:

- Plyometrics

- Olympic lifts

- Medicine ball throws

There is no doubt in my mind that all 3 methods are extremely effective, and I’m not willing to say that one is superior to the others.  The way I see it is there are different situations in which one method could be superior to another, depending on the training goal.

You might have heard of the speed-strength continuum before.  It is a fairly simple concept that helps define the different types of power.  Power being the product of the maximal amount of force you develop in the least amount of time.

Power = Force  x  Velocity

Although the equation is pretty simple, the outcome can be pretty different if the emphasis is put on either force OR velocity during a pre-determined exercise.  The speed-strength continuum represents different levels of force production and velocity of movement.  It could be represented as follow in a chart:

Power could arguably be defined as anything between max strength work and speed work.  If you haven’t seen it already, Eric Cressey posted the following video explaining the speed-strength continuum in a previous blog post:

The terminology is a little different, but it’s basically the same concept as I explained above.

All of this to say that depending on what your emphasis may be in a training program, or with a specific exercise, there might be a more appropriate choice than another.  Plyometrics are usually done bodyweight, which allows one to perform the movement quicker, although the total force production might be lower because there is no additional external load.  This would put plyometrics more towards the speed-strength end of things.  An Olympic lift like the hang clean on the other hand will use a bigger external load, but the speed or the velocity of the movement might be a little slower.  That would put the hang clean more towards the strength-speed end of things. As far as medicine ball throws are concerned, they would be a little more towards the middle because they are loaded, but always with a low to moderate weight and the velocity of the movement is pretty high, but not quite like a bodyweight power exercise.

The other thing to take into consideration when choosing which power development method to incorporate is the segments of the body involved.  To me, one of the main differences between plyometrics and Olympic lifts and med ball throws resides there.  Plyometrics use only the lower body (or upper body if you’re using an upper body exercise) to develop power; as for the Olympic lifts and the med ball throws, they use a force transfer from the lower body to the upper body in the execution of most their variations, which in the end involves the whole body.

Total body power exercises should not be ignored from a program design standpoint because they will bring a lot of benefits for sports that require such force transfers.  Tackling, blocking, pitching, swinging a golf club, taking a slap shot and throwing punches are only a couple examples of the athletic movements that require some sort of power transfer from the lower body to the upper body.  To me this is a crucial component to sports performance and being able to transfer the gains from the weight room to the field or the ice.

And lastly, another component that is worth mentioning about power exercises is the plane of movement in which the exercise and/or the sport skills take place.  Without going into too much details with this conversation, I’ll simply say that medicine ball throws offer a rotational component to power development, which is extremely important in rotational sports like baseball, hockey, lacrosse, golf and tennis.  And you don’t find that same rotational power development component with Olympic lifts or plyometrics exercises.

Hopefully I broke things down enough so that now you understand better the differences between the 3 main power development methods, and that you’ll be able to make a better choice based on your training goals!

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I’m just finishing up Joel Jamieson‘s book Ultimate MMA Conditioning, and as I’ve mentioned in a previous post, it’s definitely an eye opener for me.  There are many things about conditioning that I thought I understood well, and now I’m just starting to rethink everything.  And to be honest, it goes far beyond just the conditioning part of training.  I’m starting to rethink some of the strength stuff as well.

Ever since I read the Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual from Eric Cressey and after I interned at Robert Morris University a few years ago, I was seeing max strength as the answer to pretty much everything; if athletes just got stronger, everything else would just fall into place.  I still think that max strength is a very important part of an athlete’s training program, and has profound effects on speed, power and agility.  But I’m starting to realize that it’s not all…

With that focus on max strength, the emphasis is mostly on improving the efficiency of the nervous system, increasing the activation of the fast-twitch muscle fibers and recruiting more motor units.  All of these effects are very important for any athlete if they want to improve their performance.  And this is mostly how we usually see strength training; it’s all about the nervous system, the muscle fibers and everything in between.

What we, myself included, too often fail to consider is the energy systems part of the equation.  And I’m not talking about how we condition our athletes.  I’m talking about the implication of the energy systems in strength training.  There is indeed a big neural and muscle fiber effect that comes from strength training, but there is also a energy system effect.  Even if it’s not conditioning in it’s traditional form, your body still need to produce the energy necessary to lift the weights.  When we lift weights and train for max strength, the anaerobic alactic system is going to be the one that is used primarily, which also means that we don’t have to worry too much about oxygen utilization, the number of mitochondrias in the muscle and that kind of stuff…..but that’s for one set of one exercise.

What happens when we run out of stored ATP after one set in the anaerobic alactic system?  Your body needs to recover and regenerate that source of energy while you rest.  And how does that happen?  Because you’re resting and the demands on your body are fairly low until you start your following set, this recovery process will happen through the aerobic system.  Now can you see where I’m going with this?

This is just one example to show you that your energy systems, and especially your aerobic system are involved in strength training even if you don’t think about it.  Not because we’re using weights means no energy system work is happening.  There is not a clear line between strength work and conditioning.  There is some overlap, just like there is some overlap between each energy system when you condition AND when you strength train.

Think about the implication this can have on your max strength and ensuing effect it’s gonna have in the practice of your sport.  Training for max strength is going to improve the efficiency of your nervous system and increase the percentage of fast twitch muscle fibers activation.  But if you don’t realize the importance of the aerobic system in the recovery process after short bouts of intense activity (a.k.a the use of the anaerobic alactic system), chances are you’ll be performing your first shift (or your first play, your first punch, first set, etc) at a very high intensity and you’ll have an edge over your opponents…..and then it’s gonna go downhill from there until the end of your game, match, etc. because your body will not have been trained to recover quickly.  If your body can’t recover as fast as possible every time, your performance will only get worse and worse as your game goes on.  Nobody wants that!

This is why understanding the importance and the implication of ALL the energy systems is crucial for your performance or the one of your athletes.  And that includes being aware of the implications of the energy systems on strength training and how to maximize the performance and recovery of each one of them.

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Believe it or not, Christmas is already less than 2 week away! Crazy isn’t it?!  But that doesn’t mean I’m not happy about it; au contraire!  Christmas is by far my favorite time of year because I usually get some time off from work and that allows me to spend some time with my family and friends.  The only problem with Christmas is that I always end up being late on Christmas shopping and finding presents for my loved ones.  That being said, if you have a fitness or strength and conditioning enthusiast in your life, here’s a couple of gift ideas that are well worth it if you ask me!

Hearte Rate Monitor

With what the research tells us about heart rate variability (HRV) and the feedback our heart rate can give us about our training, intensity, recovery, etc. it only makes sense to keep track of your heart rate.  Most monitors are very convenient to use and not very expensive (you can get a really good one for less than 100$!).  I recommend the Polar RS-100.  If you’re looking for the best quality/price ratio, you can’t get much better than that one.  Also, with Joel Jamieson’s new HRV product coming out soon, it will be 100% compatible with the RS-100, so you’re killing 2 birds with one stone!

Ultimate Hockey Training

Kevin Neeld’s new book is a great gift idea for any hockey player, parent or coach.  It highlights every component of a hockey player development from the youth level to the professional level as well as going into details on the training program itself and all that should be included (foam rolling, warm up, strength and power work, conditioning, etc).  It really is the most complete hockey development resource out there, and very up-to-date as well (compared to other hockey training resources I’ve read before).  I’ve been spreading the word about Kevin’s book for the last 2 months for a reason.  And for less than 30$, it makes for a very cheap gift idea!  You can get Ultimate Hockey Training HERE.

Metabolic Cooking Cookbook

It’s no big news that nutrition is a HUGE part of the results you get from your training.  Who says nutrition also says planning.  If you don’t plan your meals ahead you’re setting yourself up for failure.  Period.  Metabolic Cooking is a great, healthy cookbook with over 250 delicious recipes that will help you achieve your health and performance goals.  You’ll be taking a huge step toward planning your meals better with this resource, as there is also different sections for breakfast, lunch, dinner and even snacks!  For less than 50$, it was way worth it to me, and I’m sure it’ll be for you as well!

Show and Go

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know that I’m a big fan of Show and Go, as I tried it myself and gained almost 15 pounds of muscle while boosting my Deadlift and my Bench Press by 20-30 pounds; all of this in less than 4 months!  It’s the best system out there of any non-athlete gym enthusiast who wants to pack on muscle, gain strength and lose bodyfat.  You get a 16-week program based on your goals and the number of times per week you hit the gym.  And on top of that you have full video support for all the exercises that are included in the program and Eric throws a bunch of cool bonuses with it.  It takes the guess work out of writing your own program and quite frankly, the results speak for themselves.  It’s the perfect gift for the fitness enthusiast in your life!

TheraCane Massager

Doing soft-tissue work is now widely accepted as part of a complete training program.  I’ve raved about the benefits of foam rolling and other similar tools to promote tissue quality.  A foam roller doesn’t work quite as well on the upper body as it does on the lower body, though.  The theracane massager is probably the best “upper body” tool I’ve come across for soft-tissue work.  I own one and I have to say that it works wonders on areas like the pecs, upper traps, rhomboids as well as the posterior neck muscles.  It’s the next best thing to getting a massage!
Training = Rehab, Rehab = Training

This last gift idea might be more for people who are serious about strength and conditioning and are looking for a great continuing education resource.  Charlie Weingroff has a way of explaining things and giving people a different perspective on things that will make every penny you spend on this DVD set worth it.  I’m not going to lie though, it’s not for everyone.  The material on the DVDs is pretty advanced stuff, and I’ll even admit that I was scratching my head a couple of times while watching Charlie speaks.  But it makes for a great Christmas present for any up-and-comer strength and conditioning coach; and trust me, they will appreciate it (it was my Christmas present last year, and I certainly did!).  You ca get Training = Rehab, Rehab = Training on Charlie’s website HERE.

Buuuuuut, the best Christmas present of them all remains a subscription to DavidLasnier.com’s newsletter!  And the best part is that it’s totally FREE!!!  All you have to do is enter the contact info below, and you’ll even get 3 FREE  reports on sports performance training!

With most of the pro leagues and fall ball seasons almost over for every player at this time of year, it’s time to start making a plan of attack for the off-season in the next couple of months, before spring training comes around in late February-early March.  There are obviously many options that present for baseball players of all ages for the off-season.

Unfortunately, season is over for most.

For the younger crowd (12 and under) it should simply be playing a different sport and changing the stimuli from baseball.  That will allow the kids to develop a variety of skills other than just throwing a baseball a swinging a bat.  This will also give a rest to the throwing shoulder, especially pitchers.

For players a little older, strength training should be a priority to maximize strength, power and decrease the risk of shoulder injuries.  Unfortunately, too many baseball players (in part because of the culture of the sport) are not going to be part taking in any strength and conditioning program.  The option of not training at all seems to be more appealing to many players, apparently.  I’m even talking about professional players.  Whether they don’t recognize the huge benefits from it or they’re just being too lazy is a totally different discussion.

Some players who actually do something and engage into a baseball strength and conditioning off season program, don’t always take the best route.  Running distances and doing some band exercises for the shoulder might sound a good program to engage in for baseball pitchers to spare their shoulder.  But what those players fail to realize is that there is a lot of factors that you need to address in the off-season, and you probably shouldn’t waste your time doing distance running.  Mobility and range of motion deficits, dysfunctional movement patterns, muscle weaknesses and joint instabilities are just a couple of examples of problems baseball players present with that need to be addressed in the off-season.

A decent strength and conditioning program in the off-season should cover the following;

- strength and power development

- mobility work

- shoulder injury prevention strategies (t-spine mobility, scapular stability, rotator cuff strength, etc)

- med ball throws

- a ton of upper back work

These are just a couple of examples that should be included in your baseball off-season training.  If your program doesn’t include at least all of the above, you should start looking for a different strength coach or trainer (or get one if you’re trying to train on your own!).

My colleague Eric Cressey put a more exhaustive list together a couple of weeks ago of what a baseball off-season training should comprise of.  If you haven’t read it, I strongly suggest you do so.

Baseball Strength and Conditioning: Early Off-Season Priorities 1-5

Baseball Strength and Conditioning: Early Off-Season Priorities 6-10

Also, by entering your information below you’ll get access to my FREE report on shoulder injury prevention strategies.  That will definitely help you build you baseball off-season training program!

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.

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!