Pretty cool blog title, huh? After hours of deliberation, DavidLasnier.com’s board of directors came up with this ingenious title that, I’ve been told, was guaranteed to catch your attention. I’ve even been told that no one would pass on this title without wanting to read the whole post!
My actual board of directors…
All kidding aside, this title is in relation to corrective exercises. If you’ve been reading my stuff for a little bit, you should know by now that I’m a big believer in incorporating injury prevention and corrective strategies in training programs to help my athletes and clients move better and lower their risk of injuries. And I’m not the only one; there is a pretty big trend in fitness world that seems to be going on right now. I think it’s a really good thing that more coaches and trainers are now aware of the importance of the glute function in hip extension, scapular stability in shoulder health, etc. With all the smart minds in this business, new corrective exercises come out every day giving us a really big toolbox to work with when it comes down to corrective exercises.
NOT what I’m talking about!
One thing I feel we don’t stress enough with corrective exercises though is that the way we perform them is crucial. It’s a good thing to include glute bridges in a client’s program that seems to be prone to low back pain. But it’s not going to do much good for him if he’s not performing it the right way, or if he just goes through the motion. Sticking with the glute bridge example, if your client doesn’t know that the whole purpose if the exercise is to squeeze his butt cheeks as he lifts his hips up, he might be compensating with his hamstrings, or even worse, his lower back. If the ribs flare out at the top, or if the client feels the movement in his hamstrings or low back, there is something that needs to be fixed. Anyway, you get the point.
For that reason, switching around your corrective exercises all the time might not be a good idea. You want to make sure that your client masters a certain movement perfectly before moving on to something else; the goal is not always to have him do something “challenging”. It’s still a corrective exercise and it should never be a max effort anyway because that is exactly when your body will look to compensate. Corrective exercises should be kept simple; you should try to reinforce the same ones with a client until there is some sort of improvement. You’re really not doing him a favor if you throw a bunch of new corrective exercises at him every couple of weeks, just for variety purposes. Keep in mind that the client doesn’t know any of that stuff, and for every new exercise, he has 4-5 different things to think about at the same time while he’s perform it correctly. If you need to stick with the good old 2-legged glute bridge for 3 months before your client really gets it and feels it in his butt, that’s what you need to do. Variety or results? Which one are you really after? Pretty simple answer.
Start with the basics, make sure the execution is flawless, that your client feels the exercise in the right spot (if needed), and never progress a corrective exercise until you see progress. In a way, it’s just like a lifting program; it doesn’t need to get fancy schmancy with tons of new exercises in every new monthly program, because you’ll never know if you’re making progress or not.
As you can see, getting fancy is not always your best bet…
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I’m in the middle of Joel Jamieson’s book Ultimate MMA Conditioning, and I have to say that (even being only 1/4 of the way through it) this book is about to be one that’s a COMPLETE game changer for me. Even though the title says ‘MMA Conditioning’, the book is not so much about specific MMA conditioning as it is about developing the different energy systems the right way. It’s making me rethink all of the conditioning I program for my athletes. And I’ll have more on the subject very soon.
While reading it though, I’ve come to a couple realizations about my job as a strength and conditioning coach that go beyond just conditioning stuff. As a professional who’s concerned about constantly thriving to get better and always do what’s best for his athletes, it’s quite important to reach out to new resources that will help you get better at what you do, especially in an ever-evolving industry like ours. In our quest to learn new information and get better, the internet has been more than helpful. It’s giving us free information everywhere in the form of blogs, articles, videos, webinars, podcasts, you name it. Of course there will always be information that’s of low quality and it makes it very easy for anyone to put information out there without any guarantees that it’s any good. But with a minimum of educational background and critical judgment, one can pretty easily judge of the quality of information he’s reading.
What we see happening with the age of the internet though, is some trends spreading virally, which can end up changing our perspective on things. One such trend has been pre-hab and corrective training. There is a LOT of great information out there on injury prevention, corrective exercises, and the like. It seems to be the cool thing to write about these days, and I am guilty as charged, like a lot of people. And don’t get me wrong, I do not think there is anything wrong with using injury prevention strategies or trying to learn more about how the body moves. But is this overwhelming amount of information about injury prevention been shifting the pendulum too far? Having all of this information available to you, and being aware of the importance of limiting injuries can make you obsessed with it…when in reality it’s only one part of the puzzle. Continuing education is not just about learning more about functional anatomy and new corrective exercise strategies. It’s about getting better at what you do. And I say this because I’m starting to realize that it’s one big mistake I’ve been making in the last couple of years. Functional anatomy is a very complex thing and it’s easy to get caught in just wanting to learn more and more about that only.
But there are a lot more components to our job that we need to consider and get better at. Conditioning is one of those areas. One of my bosses at a former job once said in a meeting: “the problem with you, personal trainers, is that you’re too good with the lifting part of the programs you write. Programing for cardio is by far your weakest link.” And if you’re wondering, yes, he did indeed used the word ‘cardio’. But when he said that, I didn’t listen for a couple of reason:
He started by critiquing us, which is never a good way to open the lines of communication
I was obsessed with strength at that point in my career, and thought nothing else really mattered
Conditioning was a very simple concept in my head, and if you wanted to improve it you just had to do intervals
He wasn’t really good at his job anyway
He was shaped like a pear and his training consisted of squats on a wobble board, Russian twists and machine chest press
“You should listen to me ’cause I know how to train right!”
Thinking back about what he said, he probably was right. But it’s unfortunate that he was such a close-minded indiviual because I probably could’ve learned a thing or two from him, but I was completely shut off because of his attitude in general.
What I’m trying to say here is that I’m not saying that injury prevention strategies (or any other component of a training program) are not important, but we need to take a step back and realize what our job is. We need to get better at what we do in a more general sense. We want to get better at preventing injuries, but we also need to get better at maximizing hypertrophy, developing speed, improving range of motion, and of course improving conditioning, which I think is too often overlooked in a training program.
Never forget that your clients are looking for a training effect. Let me say that again: your clients are looking for a training effect. Working AROUND limitation is as much our job (if not more) than working ON limitations. Your clients are not looking to do miniband exercises for an hour and half let you tell them how bad they move. They want to reach their fitness goal. They don’t want you to tell them what their goal is.
Not sure this is what your clients are expecting
Think about how you would feel if you were to go in store restaurant, order a pizza and 15 minutes later your waitress would bring you a salad telling you that it’s better for you to eat a salad! This might be a stupid example, but it’s just to make you realize that what we do is still in big part customer service (unless you’re working in a college or a pro team setting). Clients and athletes come to us to get results, whether it’s improved performance, fat loss, muscle gain or whatever else; they expect to get results because they’re giving you their hard-earned money! I think it’s important to always ask your clients what THEY expect out of your services. It doesn’t mean we can’t help them move and feel better along the way, but I think it’s important to always keep the client’s expectations in mind and do what you need to meet them.
Getting better at what we do is not only preventing injuries better. It’s making them lose fat faster, getting them bigger and stronger, maximizing their conditioning, and more than anything else listening to their needs and meeting (or should I say exceeding) their expectations.
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.
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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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For those of you who don’t already know, I’ve been writing articles for 2 different membership websites in the last couple of months. If you’re not familiar with these 2 websites, I highly suggest you check them out today, as there is a ton of great content on both of them. One is hockey specific and the other one is rehab oriented.
Hockey Strength and Conditioning is a tremendous resource for anyone who trains hockey player, whether you are an on-ice coach or a strength and conditioning coach…and actually it is a great resource for anyone who wants to know more about hockey training. The information that is available on this site is unbelievable. There are videos, audio interviews with some of the best people in the hockey training, detailed programs from NHL strength coaches, articles and much more. For me to be a part of Hockey Strength and Conditioning as a writer is more than an honor for me; having articles posted on the same website as Mike Potenza (San Jose Sharks), Sean Skahan (Anaheim Ducks) and Darryl Nelson (USA Hockey) is quite an honor. These guys know their stuff, and they stay on top of things, and when you see their programs and articles, it’s easy to tell. If you’re somehow involved on hockey, you NEED to check it out.
The second one, as I mentioned is more rehab and injury prevention oriented, but is just as good! On Sports Rehab Expert you can find articles, injury prevention and rehab protocols, new exercises, audio interviews and videos. There is some sport-specific material as well as more in-depth physical therapy protocols. With guys like Joe Heiler (who’s the founder), Eric Cressey, Charlie Weingroff and Gray Cook contributing to the site, you know right off the bat that there’s going to be some high quality information there. I still can’t believe that my articles are right there for everyone to read with all these smart guys! This is another site that you absolutely need to check out if haven’t before!
I wrote a little bit in the past how some hip restrictions can come from a structural problem rather than from just a lack of mobility in soft-tissue. Femoroacetabular impingement (commonly known as CAM and Pincer impingement) can restrict hip flexion range of motion as well as abduction and external rotation.
These structural differences are only present in a very limited number of individual, but it’s really important to assess athletes and clients who present with a lack of mobility and clear out those potential problems before hammering on the soft-tissue and flexibility work. Trying to force someone in full hip flexion in the presence of a femoroacetabular impingement can have some pretty bad consequences.
Here is a simple test you can use to clear out a femoroacetabular impingement. The quadruped rock test is very helpful in helping determine if we might or might not be dealing with one of these problems. Put your client/athlete on all fours and ask him to rock back while maintaining neutral spine. With a normal hip, no matter the stiffness, the range of motion should improve as the client/athlete rocks back multiple times. If your client/athlete gets stuck at the exact same spot, even after rocking 15-20 consecutive times, chances are that you might be dealing with a femoroacetabular impingement.
If this is the case and your client/athlete’s quadruped rock doesn’t improve, you should refer them out to a medical professional to have them confirm or clear out the problem. This type of impingement is not very well known in the strength and conditioning community and it’s definitely something we need to be aware of as coaches.
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I read Charlie Weingroff’s blog post 2 days ago that was called Putting Manual Therapy Into Perspective (make sure you read it, as it is one of the most enlightening thing I’ve read recently). For those who might not know Charlie, he is one of the smartest minds in this business and he has a unique perspective on things (I guess that’s what happens when you put physical therapy, strength and conditioning, powerlifting and manual therapy in the same person!). That being said, Charlie was discussing different manual therapy options in his blog post and when each one might be appropriate. The part of his blog post that really caught my attention though is the first part where he explains why we lose mobility in the first place.
Muscles are rarely, if ever, short. When a muscle feels stiff, it’s not necessarily short and it definitely doesn’t automatically means that you should stretch it. Stiffness can be created for many different reasons, and sometimes the cause of the problem may be somewhere else. For those who’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you know that I’m a big advocate of stretching, so that might sound confusing coming from me, but bare with me you’ll understand why I’m saying this (because it is not ALWAYS appropriate to stretch).
One other thing to understand is that a muscle that feels tight might be short, or it might actually be long. This might be a complex thing to understand, but here is a simple example: think about someone in an anterior pelvic tilt.
When your pelvis is tilted forward, your hamstrings are going to be put on a stretch. Because of that, your hamstrings might feel stiff and if you use a straight leg raise to assess their length, they will most likely test short. But if you think about it, in this specific example, your pelvic position is what causes your hamstring to test short. If the pelvis is reposition correctly with appropriate strategies (read: not stretching your hamstrings), your hamstrings will get some slack and they most likely won’t feel stiff anymore (or less stiff).
This is just one example of why muscles that feel stiff might not need to be stretched. Another reason might be when muscles get stiff as a protective mechanism or a compensation pattern. Never forget the brain-muscle connection and its importance, especially when it comes down to “stiff” muscles. Your brain might send the signal to the muscle to stiffen up because there is something going wrong around the area. This might happen to prevent a muscle to overstretch or that might even prevent you from pulling a hammy or a quad while you sprint or play hockey or whatever else you’re doing. And when you’re performing a task at high or near-max intensity, your body will always compensate in the easiest way possible. And unfortunately this is not something we have control over; your brain is the boss and he’s the one sending the signal to the muscles if they should activate, stiffen, shut down, etc. So you can stretch all you want, but the muscle in question will never loosen up.
This is why assessing and addressing imbalances is key. It’s really important to address the underlying issues to whatever problem one might have. If you don’t, you might be studying for the wrong test. You can stretch a muscle all you want and it’ll always feel tight.
This is really just the tip of the iceberg when talking about short/stiff muscles and the implications of stretching and how the brain has so much control over what’s happening. And there are so many other things to consider. Hopefully that opened your eyes a little bit on how stretching stiff muscles might not always be the solution to everything.
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Band tractions are a great tool to use to help with shoulder health. It helps mobilize the shoulder joint and you can use them in different planes of motions. The added tension from the band that kind of “pulls” the humeral head out of the socket while mobilizing the joint really helps loosening up the soft-tissue around it.
Band tractions are widely spread among powerlifters and really strong guys who bench press loads of weight. A lot of them, swear by it and say it makes their shoulders feel better. And honestly, until you try it you don’t understand how much better it makes your shoulders feel. Whenever my shoulders feel beat up I’ll just add a couple of sets of band tractions at the end of my training sessions.
Here are a couple different movements you can do with them in different planes of motion.
It should never be painful, nor hurt your shoulder at all. If this is the case, you probably have some bigger problems to deal with than just the need to mobilize your joint.
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Sometimes we get too caught up in looking at the shoulder itself only and we forget what’s happening around and further down the chain. We all know that soft-tissue work, internal rotation ROM, scapular stability and flexibility are all important factors in shoulder health. But in my experience, the thoracic spine is by far the most overlooked aspect of shoulder health. It usually affects everything around. If you take the joint-by-joint approach to training, one general take-away you can get is that a lack of mobility at one joint (or lack of stability, if we’re considering a stable joint) will generally affect it’s neighbor joint (i.e. the one closer up or down the chain) in an unfavorable way.
The Joint-by-Joint Approach
Using this approach, every joint has a neighbor up the chain and one neighbor down the chain (e.g. the hip joint is connected with the lumbar region above it and the knee below it). When taking the thoracic spine and taking this approach one step further, we realize that the t-spine, as opposed to most other joints, has 4 neighbors instead of just 2. In fact, the t-spine is directly linked to:
the lumbar region
the cervical region
the scapula (and the clavicle)
the ribcage
Because of this, the implication of the thoracic spine are major ones, as it can affect scapular positioning and stability, gleno-humeral positioning and range of motion, breathing pattern, lumbar stability and neck function. And guess what? all of these things affect your shoulder’s function and health in general!
A lot of people will benefit greatly from t-spine mobility drills to improve extension and rotation ROM, especially people with kyphotic posture because they are stuck in thoracic flexion and it will affect the whole shoulder position and how the humeral head sits in the glenoid fossa.
Many times just incorporating t-spine mobility drills will greatly improve your shoulder function and health. I’ve seen this happen on multiple occasion with someone with shoulder pain, where incorporating a couple t-spine mobility drills in his program got rid of his pain in a matter of 1-2 weeks.
Here are 2 of my favorites:
Seated T-Spine Rotation:
Prayer Position T-Spine Rotation
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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.
My actual board of directors…
NOT what I’m talking about!
Kevin Neeld from KevinNeeld.com knows how to bridge
As you can see, getting fancy is not always your best bet…
