Sorry.

Wrestling reference.

That’s the first thing that came to mind when I wrote the title of this post.  Hopefully you can appreciate.

Aaaaand just so you know I didn’t write this title just to plug a wrestling reference! I promise.

In fact, I was at the BSMPG summer seminar this past weekend and I had a blast.  I got to spend some time with the smartest minds in the business including Patrick Ward, Sean Skahan, Cal Dietz (University of Minnesota), Joel Jamieson, and Jim Snider (University of Wisconsin) just to name a few.

The recurring subject that came back with a lot of these guys during conversations is that…well…you have to know your role!  What I mean is that as a strength coach you need to recognize your area of expertise, and more importantly you need to know where that area of expertise stops.

It’s really cool to learn about the SFMA, DNS, ART, Graston, Mulligans, all the rehab protocols, but we need to recognize that a lot of these things are not our job to do.  There is nothing wrong with learning from different fields, but not with the mindset of doing everything yourself!  As Patrick Ward was telling me himself: “we need to know just enough about everything to know where to refer our clients to and when”.  I couldn’t agree more with this statement.  Joel Jamieson was also telling me that coaches get too caught up sometimes trying to fix people, and their sessions turn out into an hour of corrective exercises.

Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s extremely important to be able to bridge the cap as a strength coach because there always will be some grey area, and we can’t send every one with a mild discomfort to physical therapy.  Which is why we need to understand how the body works, what is good movement, how to identify dysfunctions or imbalances, and how to use corrective strategies efficiently.  But our job is still to TRAIN ATHLETES!

I will be the first to recognize that there is a lot of incompetent health practitioners on this planet, but it doesn’t mean that you should try to fix everyone yourself.

Our job is to make athletes and clients feel better, improve their performance and lower their risk of injury.  If they’re in pain, that is not our job to take care of them and fix them.  And that’s the bottom line.

Another wrestling reference. Sorry.

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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.

HockeyStrengthAndConditioning.com

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!

SportsRehabExpert.com

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