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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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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With any exercise, at any point, form is everything. It’s basic concept behind weight lifting. If you’re not lifting with good form, you increase your risks of injuries, not only in the weight room, but also on the field. Getting stronger without consideration for perfect form is really just reinforcing bad movement pattern.
The major lifts are all occasions to reinforce good movement. This is really what the premise of strength training is about; improve the way you move, and get strong in those “good movement patterns”. All the mobility work, corrective exercises and foam rolling are tools to help you achieve that very goal. But it doesn’t need to get more complicated that that.
Whether it’s because of the physical stress that life puts on us, the overuse trauma that certain activities exert on our bodies or the sedentarity of our lifestyle in 2012, our bodies build up dysfunctions. Playing sports definitely increase the overuse stress on our body, and is really good at making dysfunctions worse. Displaying maximal effort and energy at high velocities as it is commonly seen in sports, will make your body use the path of least resistance; your body doesn’t “think” about good movement. It just does whatever it is asked to do. That’s why it’s something that needs to be reinforced.
Achieving good movement and understanding it is the first step, then you perform repetitions, and lastly you start loading to solidify those movement patterns. With practice and added strength, your brain will start to make the connections, and the automated response of quality movements under high velocities will happen.
That’s what strength training is all about. It’s not about who’s going to be able to jump on the highest box. It’s not about who can perform 50 snatches from the floor the fastest. And it’s definitely not about pushing yourself when your form becomes shitty.
I’m not pointing any fingers here.
Or maybe I am….
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I wrote a new program for the Endeavor staff a couple weeks ago. After reading Joel Jamieson’s Ultimate MMA Conditioning book, I realized a lot about energy system training and I wanted to experiment with some of stuff in the book. With that in mind, I wrote a general endurance block. I figured since none of us had good muscular endurance or conditioning levels right now that would be a good idea to work on some of that stuff for a couple of training cycles. Combined to the fact that I did almost exclusively max strength stuff for the past 5-6 years and my joints were starting to hate me recently, purposely lifting light weights for a little bit sounded pretty appealing.
Not THAT light, though!
That being said, we’re starting week 2 of this general endurance program and I will admit that I’m really enjoying the change of pace. I’m feeling really sore from squatting 95 pounds, which is completely crazy! But when your time under tension is 40 seconds per set, you have no pause between reps and your rest between sets is 30 seconds, the weights you’re using are ridiculously light! Other than that I feel really good!
As much as I believe in the importance of max strength in a training program, I’m also starting to think that there is a time and place for it; and the answer is not ‘all the time’! Working to improve your muscle endurance, power endurance, and other qualities can have their place in a yearly training program. You don’t have to put a focus on max strength in every training program. There are other adaptations that are gonna be beneficial that you won’t be able to get through max strength training (e.g. oxidative capacities of your muscle fibers, hypertrophy of slow twitch fibers, endurance of slow twitch fibers, etc, etc).
Right now, my body enjoys the break from the heavy weights. My joints are feeling better, it is not even close to being as CNS intensive as max strength training, and most of all, I feel completely out of my comfort zone, which is not easy, but it’s good. The aerobic conditioning part of the program is probably what pushes me out of my comfort the most because I probably never ran for more than 5 minutes in a row before! I get sore pretty easily with this program, but my body doesn’t feel crushed, if that makes any sense. Every training day, I’m ready to attack whatever is on the program that day, I don’t feel smoked form the previous session with no motivation to lift, like I’ve been feeling for the last 2-3 months. There’s something to be said about being able to kick your own ass, but there’s also something to be said about listening to your body when you keep feeling that way day in and day out.
This is how I was feeling recently…before I started foam rolling!
Get out of your comfort zone once in a while when you train, if you don’t already. It’s not easy and you might find it very hard compared to whatever you’re doing, but it’ll be good for you, it’ll change the stress on your body (which is necessary once in a while) and you’ll end up feeling good!
If you haven’t heard about the benefits of foam rolling to improve soft-tissue quality, you have probably been living under a rock for the past 5-10 years. Even with all the benefits of foam rolling though, sometimes it’s just not enough to take care of your soft-tissue quality.
There are a couple reason why foam rolling might not be enough:
1. The trigger point is too hard to reach with a foam roller
2. The pressure applied by the foam roller is not enough to effectively target the trigger point
3. The trigger point area is just too stubborn and won’t go away
Let’s go into a little more details for each of those 3 reasons and see the possible alternatives:
1. Sometimes, you’ll want to foam roll an area of your body that’s not exposed as much as your quads and upper back for example. Getting to smaller areas, close to the joints and the mid-line of the body can be a difficult task. A couple example could be the pecs, the high adductors, the long head of the triceps, the plantar fascia, the levator scapula and upper trap among others. These areas are located in spots where it is difficult to access with a foam roller. A good alternative would be to use a smaller surface like a medicine ball or a lacrosse ball. The lacrosse ball works particularly well on the pecs and the plantar fascia, and the medicine ball work really well for the high adductors.
2. When you’ve been foam rolling for a decent amount of time (usually 6 months or more), you’ll find that the traditional foam roller will not work your trigger points as hard as you would like (a.k.a. it doesn’t hurt anymore). There are a couple different ways to solve this problem. The first one would be to move to a denser foam roller; they sell rollers of different densities, with the foam roller plus (a PVC pipe warpped around a thin layer of foam) being the hardest one. If you feel really tough, or if even the foam roller plus doesn’t do anything for you, you can try a straight PVC pipe (which ends up being really cheap if you just get it a your local hardware store) or the rumble roller. I have yet to try the rumble roller, but I have had great comments on it.
Are you game?
Using a smaller, denser surface like a lacrosse ball might be appropriate in this situation as well. You’ll have more pressure applied on a smaller surface, which will increase the pain factor for sure!
3. That happens very often that all self soft-tissue tools won’t work to get rid of a trigger point. In this case the only option left is to consult a qualified massage therapist that will work your trigger points more in depth. An ART or Graston certified practitioner is recommended, as I feel it 2 of the most efficient soft-tissue methods available. A couple of visits might be necessary to get rid of your tight spots. And if you’re a high level athlete that imposes a lot of stress on his body, I would even recommend that you go see one on a regular basis, at least once a month; that will help keep you healthy in the long run.
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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.
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This is an analogy that I stole from my colleague and friend Kevin Neeld (who’s breathing over my shoulder while I write this). I think it clearly illustrates the message I’ve been trying to spread for as long as this blog has been going on. I’ll explain in more details after…
As requested by Kevin, a (recent) picture to give him credit for the analogy
Think of injury threshold as a bucket. All the undesired stress and faulty movement patterns or positions you impose on your body are drops of water in the bucket. As you accumulate these “bad” things it adds drops of water, and the bucket keeps filling up. Sure, doing one thing wrong (e.g. deadlifting with a rounded back) might not hurt you by doing it once (water won’t spill). You might not even get injured by doing it 100 times, but it keeps adding drops of water in the bucket, and that bucket just keeps filling up, and eventually the water will spill. This is how most injuries happen: it’s an accumulation of stresses and faulty movements that will eventually lead you to threshold.
Somebody’s filling up his bucket…
This is why I find very stupid the argument “but I’ve done this or that for 5 years; it works and I never got injured”. My first response to that would be “you didn’t get injured…yet”. Everything might feel alright…until it doesn’t.
Training athletes everyday, I realize the importance of this concept and need to do everything in my power to avoid the water spilling out of the bucket with all of them. This is why I’m very picky with what my athletes do inside and outside the gym. I wanna make sure they do everything possible to stay healthy in the long run.
The first step is to try to remove everything from their training that might contribute to filling the bucket. Whether it is avoiding Olympic lifts with my baseball pitchers because the lifts are very stressful on their elbows and wrists, or making sure my athletes move well from their hips and don’t move excessively at the lumbar spine, it is my job to avoid those additional drops of water in the bucket. Also, strategies such as foam rolling, corrective exercises and the like can play a big part in actually removing drops from the bucket.
One thing that is equally important to understand is that some sporting movements such as the skating stride (that is pretty unnatural for the hips) in ice hockey and the pitching motion (that puts tremendous stress on the shoulder) in baseball are contributing to adding drops in the bucket. This is why it is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to do everything possible to limit additional unnecessary drops in the bucket, as well as contributing to take some water out with said modalities for the long term health of our athletes.
What are you doing to avoid the spill?
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I hope everyone enjoyed Xavier’s guest blog post on Tuesday. Personally, I really liked it and it made me think about a couple of things coaches do with their athletes, where their priorities really are and that kind of stuff. So today’s post might sound more like a rant (which I don’t do very often as I try to stay away from negative stuff), but I feel like this needs to be said.
Like Xavier mentioned in his post, it’s important as strength and conditioning coaches to set our priorities straight when it comes down to the health and performance of our athletes. Yes, technically we are performance enhancement specialists, but when does performance enhancement becomes more important than having your athletes healthy (in other words, having your athletes playing on the field, instead of being sidelined with an injury)?
Let me explain myself. Having healthy athletes being our priority (or should be), it is our job to reinforce proper movement patterns, or re-train good movement patterns if these optimal patterns have been lost due to poor mobility, stability or other reason. As Shirley Sahrmann puts it, every non-traumatic injury is preventable. This means that most overuse injuries happen because there is a dysfunction somewhere, a faulty movement pattern. We can use all the foam rolling, all the stretching and all the corrective exercises in the world, if your form sucks when you lift, you’re not going anywhere. You’re just reinforcing those bad movement patterns and getting closer to that injury threshold. And when your athletes get back on the field, they’re doing the same thing and reinforcing bad movement pattern because they haven’t been corrected with proper training!
I understand that our job title is “strength coaches” and that it should be one of our priority to make our athletes stronger. But the key word here is “ONE of our priority”, and not THE only priority. And certainly not at the expanse of our athletes’ health. Even if they don’t get injured in the weight room, you still need to keep in mind that you are encouraging faulty movement patterns that will bring them closer to that threshold and lead them to injury eventually.
I don’t care how strong you are, and how impressive a strong deadlift is, when your form goes to trash, you increasing your dysfunction and increasing the chances of injury. I think there are too many coaches out there who neglect the importance of lifting with good form and are more focused on just putting more weight on the bar.
I have just seen so many coaches posting videos online about their athletes in the last couple of weeks in which they were either deadlifting or doing something with horrible form. The only thing I kept thinking about is: “how can they allow their athletes do even do that!”. It’s really cool when your female athlete can deadlift more than her body weight or when one of your football players can squat 405 for 10 reps, but seriously! We need to able to more strict about how our athletes lift. We need to realize that strength training is a tool in a toolbox for most athletes and not the end of everything. If lifting not only doesn’t help you to stay away from injuries, but actually gets you closer to one there is a problem.
Athletes lift to help them perform better on the field, or on the ice, or on the court. It’s not powerlifting. Lifting is not their sport.
Whether you’re a high level athlete, a professional bodybuilder, a recreational lifter or just someone trying to lose a couple lbs, you need to include soft-tissue work in your workouts/training sessions. Everybody and I mean EVERYBODY in the entire world has soft-tissue limitations in the form of trigger points, adhesions or knots as it is most commonly referenced to. By moving everyday (daily tasks or sporting events), by holding positions for prolonged periods of time and even by slouching on your couch for hours, your body will develop trigger points that will cause some sort of restriction in your muscles. Whether that translates into a restricted range of motion in your joints or by referred pain to other areas of your body (the most common one being headaches associated with trigger points in the upper back and neck region), trigger points affect your daily activities and your workouts, so it is very important that they are taken care of; otherwise that could lead to bigger problems like tendonitis/tendinosis, busitis, joint pain, pulled and strained muscles and so on.
The number one option and obviously the most effective one would be to get manual therapy work done. But the problem is that I don’t know too much people that can afford manual therapy 1-2 times a week! Therefore, self-usable tools are a valuable thing to have at your disposal; this way you can take care of your soft-tissue quality by yourself and not spending thousands and thousands of dollars on manual therapy. I still encourage everyone to get some manual therapy done every once in a while (once every 1-2 month if possible). As valuable as these tools are, they don’t do the same job a qualified professional will do.
That being said, there are tons of soft-tissue work tools available on the market, with the foam roller being the most common one.
I really like the foam roller, but let’s face it: when someone has been foam rolling on a daily basis for over 6 months, these things don’t do much. With that in mind, here’s my top 3 soft-tissue work tools:
1. PVC Pipe
Probably one of the cheapest options available, but also one of the most painful (read: effective) tool you can use. The PVC pipe is basically a logical progression from the foam roller. This is definitely not an option for beginners who have never used a foam roller as you will cry for your mom the first time you try it! The PVC pipe is best used for quads, IT band, calves, glute maximus, adductors and lats.
2. LaCrosse Ball
Another very cheap, yet effective tool. The lacrosse ball will do a very good (read: painful) job, just like the PVC pipe. The lacrosse ball is better suited for smaller muscles hard to target with a PVC pipe or a foam roller. As a fair warning, you should try a tennis ball first and progress to a lacrosse ball when it gets too easy. The ball is best for plantar fascia (bottom of foot), calves, glute medius, TFLs (hip flexor), infraspinatus and teres minor (rotator cuff) and pecs.
3. Thera-Cane
The thera-cane is definitely a more expensive option, but still under 40$, and totally worth it. With its very unique shape the thera-cane is built to work on muscles usually hard to access, like the ones in your upper back and neck region. It’s probably the most addictive soft-tissue work tool ever; I have one in my living room, and every single time I watch TV, I end up using it for 10-15 minutes. The thera-cane is best for rhomboids, levator scapulaes, supraspinatus, teres majors, pec minors and upper, middle and lower trapezius.
Give all of these a shot if you haven’t already, you will feel the benefits immediately!
Unless you have been living in a cave with no internet access for the past 6 years, you have probably heard of Eric Cressey before. Eric is one of the industry’s leaders in strength and conditioning. He is a well established coach, writer and business guy as he’s been owning his own facility for the last three years and has been coaching thousands of athletes in different sports. Eric is also an accomplished lifter himself as he used to compete in powerlifting and he still deadlifts well over 600 pounds to this day.
Eric is also a VALUABLE source of information with all the material he’s written. I would recommend all of his articles and products to anyone trying to become a better strength and conditioning coach. To say that I have learned A LOT from Eric during the past few years would be an understatement. Here is just a couple of things I have picked up from him lately. Enjoy!
1. Taking care of shoulder health is more than just strengthening the rotator cuff.
If you want to have healthy shoulders, you obviously need to take care of them in your training. If you do some stretching and some strengthening exercises for the rotator cuff and think it’s taken care of, well, the sad truth is that you are leaving out a lot of very important factors that play a huge role in shoudler health. Here is a list of all the things you should consider when working with people with bum shoulders or when trying to keep shoulders healthy:
1. Soft-tissue quality (primarily pec major and minor, levator scapula, scalenes, lats and rotator cuff)
2. Scapular stability
3. Thoracic spine mobility (in extension and rotation)
4. Range of motion at the gleno-humeral joint
5. Tissue length of the following: pec major and minor, levator scapula, lats and biceps.
6. Rotator cuff strength
7. Hip and ankle mobility of the opposite side (as the shoulder have fascial connections with these 2 joints)
8. Breathing patterns (as breathing through your chest instead of your belly can lead to over stressing muscles like the pecs and scalenes)
As you can see, there is a lot to address to prevent/treat shoulder injuries, and these factors happen to be even more important when dealing with athletes from sports like baseball, swimming and basketball, as these athletes put tremendous amounts of stress on their shoulders.
2. Soft tissue work and flexibility work go hand-in-hand.
Almost everyone by now knows that tissue length and tissue quality are of paramount importance to stay away from imbalances and injuries. But did you also know that these 2 need to be combined for optimal results and lasting changes. Once you work on your soft-tissue quality, whether it is with foam rolling, ART, Graston or just good ol’ massage, you should work on tissue quality right after.
Once you have removed the adhesions (or knots) in your muscles, doesn’t it make sense to stretch them right after, before you have new adhesions/knots reappear? In fact, right after soft-tissue work, your muscles are more pliable and less resistant to any change in length, so you should take advantage of that time to “re-educate those tissues on how to deform properly” as Cressey put it himself.
3. Get out of those high heels!
Wearing conventional “high heeled” sneakers with a lot of cushioning and support around the ankles are probably the worst thing you can do to your feet and ankles. It limits your range of motion at the ankle (especially in dorsiflexion) and it modifies the way you walk and run as you don’t have to absorb ground forces as much as all the padding in the soles is doing the job; your feet are basically becoming lazier. You are also losing a good amount of proprioception in your feet as they are separated from the ground by a 1-2″ cushion. And as Cressey said it himself: “…wearing sneakers has really screwed up the way people run, and in my opinion, has caused the exponential rise in injuries among distance runners.” That doesn’t mean we should all ditch our sneakers, but I think we should definitely make better footwear choices. Nike Frees, Puma flats and Vibram Five Fingers are all better options as they keep you closer to the ground.
Although not yet socially acceptable, this is probably the best footwear choice you could make!
Doing more barefoot stuff (like warm ups and deadlift) in our training is another way to go as it will reestablish proprioception in our feet.
If you’re interested to learn more from Eric Cressey, I would suggest you check out his website and sign up for his FREE newsletter!
Crazy schedule…just like what CM Punk’s new t-shirt says.
