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.

Food for thought.

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

This was almost a whole warm up right there!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We hear it all the time that athletes should train in a “sport-specific” way.  They should perform exercises that are similar to the movements they perform in the practice of their sport, and training programs for different sports should be totally different.  I flat out disagree.

We always see athletes performing these fancy exercises in the gym that reproduce the same movement patterns that they perform in playing situations.

Do you SERIOUSLY think this is gonna improve your slap shot just because it looks like it?

This kind of practice is FAR from optimal for a couple of different reasons: first, when you load a movement pattern, you affect the efficiency of it (for example, if you perform an exercise similar to a slap shot with a load, you’ll actually affect your original slap shot pattern, and you’ll be less efficient at performing it on the ice).  Second, the more you stress the same structures the exact same way over and over, it will lead to overuse injuries a lot faster.  But I digress.

Let’s take a step back for a minute, and consider what every athlete needs.  I think it’s fair to say that what any athlete is looking for is speed, power, strength, endurance (relative to their sport, obviously) and a better level of conditioning (again, relative to their sport).

The hang clean will develop power for ANY sport!

Basically, all athletes are looking for the same thing.  So why would their training be that different?  You’re going to tell me that conditioning demands are different for a football player than they are for a hockey player.  And you’re right.  Conditioning demands are different, and the energy systems used are different.  And the same thing goes for injury prevention; the overuse and non-contact injuries that happen in different sports are different, so therefore require special injury prevention strategies adapted to the demands of their specific sport.  There are also variations that are gonna take place if you play a rotational sport (think hockey, baseball, tennis) in the way you train power.  But the biggest differences pretty much stop there.

Rotational sports require more rotation-based power exercises like med ball throws

Strength training will never be “specific” to a sport.  Like I mentioned above, performing exercises similar to sport movements in the weight room is far from optimal, and even detrimental to athlete’s performance.  Speed, power, strength, endurance and conditioning are all developed through the same modalities (or pretty much) no matter what sport you play, because what you are developing when you’re training is not your sport-related skills, but rather your athletic qualities (muscular and cardiovascular), and those are not specific to one single sport, but common to most sports.

Like I’ve mentioned earlier, there are going to be some minor tweaks in the way you write performance programs for different sports, especially when it comes to conditioning and injury prevention, but the big lines and the structure of the programs might be a lot more similar than you think.

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It’s nothing new that the rotator cuff muscles (infraspinatus, spuraspinatus, teres minor and subscapularis) are very important to take care of in regards to shoulder health.  I have mentioned before that the rotator cuff needs mostly to be trained in it’s primary function, which is stability.  That’s not to say that you should drop external and internal rotation based exercises altogether, but the rotator cuff primarily needs to be trained to stabilize the gleno-humeral joint.

This is why dynamic stabilization exercises are very useful (if you’re not familiar with dynamic stabilization exercises, make sure to subscribe to my FREE newsletter and get the special report on shoulder injury prevention strategies where I go into more details about that).  It trains the rotator cuff muscles in its primary and most important function.

The problem, however, with that type of training is that it requires a partner most of the time.  One great exercise that is going to challenge the rotator cuff muscles in stabilization is the Bottoms Up Kettlebell Screwdriver. This is an exercise I stole from my colleague Dr. Jeff Cubos, and I think it is a fantastic exercise!  In the video I demonstrate the original version in the supine position, as well as a  an advanced progression in the side lying position.

By holding the kettlebell bottoms up, it makes it unstable because it wants to tip over.  Because of that you need to do 2 things; first, you need to squeeze the handle as hard as possible, and second, your rotator cuff muscles need to stabilize the unstable load.  Make sure you keep you shoulder in a packed back position, so your scapula is stable through the whole movement and go nice and slow to control effectively the load.

What’s really great from this exercise is that on top of the dynamic stabilization demand, there is an increased neural drive through the hard gripping that needs to take place to maintain the kettlebell in that position.  An that’s something that you definitely don’t get with any other similar exercise.

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I will get a little more theoritical than usual in this 2 part series; but for those of you not so familiar with geeky anatomy stuff I will still try to make it as simple and understandable as possible. 

 Synergistic dominance…what the hell does that mean? 

Synergistic dominance refers to muscle action during movement.  Let’s start at the basic: when you have muscles performing an action (flexion, extension, etc.) you will have an agonist muscle as well as antagonist and synergist muscles.  The agonist is the primary muscle involved in the movement performed; the antagonist is the opposing muscle to the one performing the action, which must relax as much as possible to let the agonist contract; and, the synergist(s) is the muscle(s) that assist the agonist in its action.  Let me give you a very simple example for those of you who that I might have already lost.  In a simple bicep curl exercise, the action performed is an elbow flexion.  In this case, the agonist muscle would be the biceps brachii since it’s the main muscle performing the action.  The triceps brachii would be the antagonist because it’s the one on the other side of the arm and one of its functions is to extend at the elbow joint; therefore the triceps must relax to allow the biceps to contract more effectively. 

The brachialis muscle is also an elbow flexor, but is definitely not the strongest one; therefore it assists the biceps during a biceps curl exercise.  In this case the brachialis would be a synergist muscle to the biceps.

This is just to give you a basic idea of what synergist muscles are and what their implication is in different muscle actions.

  So now we know that synergist muscles assist the agonist in its action; but what is synergistic dominance?

 At every joint in the body, depending on the action performed, you usually have many different synergist muscles.  The concept of synergist dominance is pretty much a muscle imbalance that refers to an agonist muscle not doing its job for different reason (dormant muscle, weak agonist, short or stiff antagonist, etc.) and the synergist taking over most of the work load to compensate for the problem.  Then, what happens when a muscle that is supposed to just assist another one in its action is forced to take over?  It puts more stress on that synergist muscle (more than it would be supposed to handle) and it puts you at risk for different types of injuries:  muscle strains, muscle pulls and

 tendonitis/tendinosis just to name a few.  And the thing is it can also create some pretty bad muscle imbalances across your body and that can lead to a lot more problems.  Therefore, it is very important to get muscles to work optimally so the athlete can perform at high level without being exposed to overuse injuries because of muscles not activated properly.

 The goal in this part one series was to give you an idea of what synergist dominance is and what can result from it if that type of imbalance is not taken care of.  In part 2, I will give you more concrete examples and how you can help fix them with proper training

Kevin Neeld is definitely one of the smartest strength coaches I know; he has a lot of knowledge, he knows how to apply that knowledge and he really understands how to train athletes as he’s well aware of the demands and reality they’re facing from competing at a high level.  Kevin is also an incredible person to talk to, and he is very generous of his time; he kindly accepted to contribute to my website and share his knowledge with you, my readers. 

Knowing that groin injuries are growing at an alarming rate in the athletic population, especially in hockey players, I asked Kevin what 3 tips he would give to athletes trying to avoid groin injuries.

Enter Kevin:

“It’s a great topic and one that I think more athletes need to familiarize themselves with. I’ve written a lot about specific strategies on how both prevent and deal with these injuries, but over the last year I’ve discovered that there are a couple more basic messages that athletes need to understand first.

1) Take time off
Most groin strains come about because of overuse, or probably more accurately, under recovery. The prevalence of groin strains amongst all athletes, but hockey players especially has drastically increased over the last 10 years. Not coincidentally, so has the emphasis on year-round sports participation and early specialization. It’s imperative that athletes play at least two sports WITH DISCTINCT OFF-SEASONS up through high school. Pairing up sports like hockey and baseball, football and lacrosse, or basketball and soccer allow athletes to benefit from the different movement strategies used in the two sports, force them to take a break from one sport while they pursue the other, and provide time for actual training (e.g. strength and conditioning) during the “third” part of the year.

Far better option for young hockey players during the summer instead of hockey summer leagues

Vladimir Issurin, world expert on block periodization and consultant to the Soviet and Israeli Olympic programs points out that we’ve replaced preparation time with competition time. No training and no rest is a recipe for groin strains.

2) Train Year-Round
This may seem counterintuitive based on the previous paragraph, but hear me out. Most groin strains come about as a result of a stiffness or an activation/strength imbalance across the hips. In the off-season, it’s important that athletes train to improve their overall athletic capacity (strength, speed, power, conditioning) to prepare for the demands of their sport. In-season athletes need to train to maintain (or continue to improve depending on the athlete) their athleticism. If athletes get weaker as the season goes on, then they will need to play at a higher percentage of their total capacity to maintain the same performance level as early in the season. Ultimately this means that athletes will have a diminished ability to perform at a high level at the end of the season, when perfect performance is most important. They also need to train in-season to REVERSE some of the undesired adaptations that result from playing their sport so much. As an example, as the season goes on some hockey players have a tendency to lose hip internal rotation ROM. An internal rotation deficit is associated with hip labral tears, and can put constant (and unnecessary) strain on the groin musculature.

The labrum is the ring of cartilage that surrounds the hip joint socket.  It prevents the femural head from moving out place.

 By focusing on maintaining strength and balance across the hips, we can help maximize performance and minimize injury risk.

3) Don’t be a hero in the 1st half of the season
When athletes don’t prepare or prepare insufficiently for the start of a new season, it’s pretty common for a few to suffer slight groin “tweaks” during pre-season camps and early on in the season. This is simply the result of a huge increase in the volume of high velocity movement without adequate preparation. These injuries tend to go away in a couple weeks if they’re handled the right way. By “the right way” I mean by taking time off from anything that causes it pain, stretching the glutes, doing psoas activation work, and strengthening the adductors in a shortened position using exercises like the 2-Way Med Ball Crush.

Preferably done with a shirt on…

I’ve seen too many athletes, high on their own enthusiasm, fight through the pain/discomfort and keep playing. I know how difficult it is to take time away from your sport when 95% of your body feels great, but it’s a necessity. Groin “tweaks” become mild tears, which become sports hernias if unaddressed. The time to fight through pain is the playoffs, not the first half of the season. An extra week off could be the difference between your tweak healing stronger or laying the foundation for surgery in the future.”

Thanks Kevin for your words of wisdom! Make sure to check out Kevin’s website HERE.

Today being the last the day of August and most of our hockey players going back to their respective team, I can definitely feel like the summer is coming to an end.  I must say that it has been an incredible summer; we had a lot of guys busting their ass in the weight room making tremendous progress during the last couple of months .  They got stronger, faster and became better athletes, and I must say that I am really proud of each and everyone of them for what they accomplished this summer.

That being said, coaching athletes for 9-12 hours a day for over 12 weeks is gonna make you a better coach and it will make you learn a lot of things.  Here is what I learned during this awesome summer of 2010:

1. There is no limit to how much you can load single-leg exercises to increase strength. I actually wrote a post about the case for single-leg training a couple weeks ago, but it never ceases to amaze me how strong you can get with single-leg lifts. This is Endeavor athlete Charlie Vasaturo doing 6 reps on a reverse lunge with a front squat grip with 255 pounds:

2.  On a related note, younger athletes can get strong pretty quickly.  You just need to make sure their form is perfect and you can start loading them up pretty good.  It is very common to have athletes under 16 get to 60lbs dumbbells for reverse lunges for multiple reps within 3 months of dedicated training.  Here is Endeavor athlete Conor Landrigan, 14 years old with 65lbs dumbbells:

3.  This is no breaking news for anyone that speed development through sprints is great to help athletes get faster.  But one thing equally important, if not more than linear speed is transitional speed.  Sports are all about quick transitions, changes of direction and reacting quickly to what’s happening on the ice/field/court.  I, myself, was focusing too much on linear speed and not enough on transitional speed.  My good friend and colleague Kevin Neeld has been doing a good job of including all sorts of start positions (2 point start, push up start, tall kneeling start, side standing start) in the sprint work we have our athletes do, as well as including different transitional drills later on as progressions.  We have seen tremendous results with our athletes using these transitional drills.  Here is an example:

4.  By now, I abandoned the idea that I would eventually be able to get rid of that french accent!  So why not just laugh about it.  Our athletes absolutely love it anyway as it can give them a good laugh.  On this video, you can hear Endeavor athlete and Colorado Avalanche prospect Colby Cohen impersonating me in the back (telling Jeff Buvinow doing the stability front plank with perturbation to squeeze his butt and keep his chest up):

2 notes on that video: First, this is a tremendous core exercise as it is very specific to the demands of contact sports like ice hockey.
Second, Colby likes to have a good time when he’s around at Endeavor, but he also means business when it’s time to work hard, especially when he hang cleans; here he is smoking 230lbs for 2 reps.

5.  Hockey players have a lot of problems with their hips, and I mean A LOT.  Whether it is sports hernia, groin strains, hip flexor strains or hip capsule problems, hockey players will have a lot of problems with their hips for 2 main reasons: First, skating is a very unnatural movement pattern for the human body and it puts a lots of stress on the hips for different reasons, mainly because your hips spend most of the time in external rotation.  Second, hockey players spend way too much time on the ice, even in the off-season where they should take some time off and focus more on training.  These 2 ingredients are a good recipe for hip injury.  That being said, hockey players need a lot of soft-tissue work (foam roller, massage, ART) done on their hips especially on their TFL (tensor fascia-latae), adductor magnus and hip external rotators (mainly piriformis).  They also need a good balance of mobility, flexilibity and strength in their hip muscles (more on that to come in an upcoming blog post).

6.  I have to give ALL the credit to Kevin Neeld for coming up with that one, but this might just be the most specific form of conditioning hockey players can do off-ice:

When you think about it, hockey is played the exact same way: holding an isometric position for a couple of seconds (while they just glide on the ice and follow the play) followed by a short burst of speed consisting of a couple quick strides. This is also one of the hardest form of conditioning you can do. Coming up with that was just a brilliant idea from Kevin!

In conclusion, summer 2010 have been amazing and made me a better and more knowledgeable coach. All of this would not have been possible without the hundreds of athletes that trained with us and were so dedicated to becoming better hockey players and athletes in general. To all of them, the best of luck for their upcoming season!