This past Tuesday was my birthday, and I just turned 30. People asked me a lot how I felt about it and if I was depressed about leaving my 20s behind. To be honest other than the fact that I’m probably not where I imagined my life to be at 30 5-10 years ago, I really don’t care about a simple number.
Exactly how I celebrated my birthday…I guess I was a little depressed
So as usual I’ll celebrate on my blog by…….you guessed it…..A RANDOM THOUGHTS POST!! I could put a 30 thoughts for 30 years thing, but frankly I’m getting a bit old and lazy, so I’ll make it 10! Without further ado, here it is!
1. If you haven’t started re-training breathing patterns, you’re totally missing the boat. This is something that the more I learn about it the more I realized its importance and how it affects everything else in the body (movement patterns, muscle elasticity, muscle tone, etc). If you haven’t already, you should familiarize with PRI and/or DNS stuff; you’ll understand what I mean when I say breathing patterns control everything.
2. I went to the Foo Fighters concert 2 weeks ago. Most. Awesome. Concert. Ever.
3. Learn more about the FMS. This is the simplest, most effective tool for fitness and strength and conditioning professionals to identify movement pattern limitations and dysfunctions. When you find the a limitation, you simply apply the corrections and you magically decrease the risk of injury of your athletes and clients. One really doesn’t need to know everything about functional anatomy or be a rehab genius. And it just works. Period.
4. Periodization is not only about writing different training cycles that alternate qualities being worked on; it’s about training volume more than anything else. Once you understand you don’t need to run your athletes to the ground during every training sessions, they start to make huge progress. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, it’s alright (even favorable) to let your athletes leave the gym fresh sometimes. When you understand how to manipulate training volumes to create overload and overcompensation, you understand how powerful it is.
5. I feel very fortunate to be surrounded by great people in my life. My bosses, friends and my girlfriend all took care of me so much for my birthday, and I am very thankful to them. A new pair of Nike Free’s and tickets for a Cowboys-Eagles game are just a few of the reasons that made my birthday so awesome.
6. Another thought on breathing; it should be trained in various positions (supine, prone, quadruped, etc) to make sure you “own the breath” in various postures. Also, to train breathing, a balloon might become your best friend.
My new best friend
7. Right now is the best time of year for sports. Football season is in full effect, hockey season just started and it’s playoff time in baseball. You couldn’t ask for anything more! ……oh, wait….maybe that your team would do better….
Not the best year to be a Red Sox fan…
8. One of the readers of my blog sent me a link to a 3D shoulder model. When people send me stuff like that I usually assume that they’re looking for some kind of financial benefit, but this one is a totally free website and I thought I’d share it with you because it’s pretty cool. You see the whole shoulder in 3D and spin it around, and click one button if you want to see the skin layer, only the muscles, the bones, etc. It’s pretty cool. Check it out HERE.
9. Next on my continuing education list for the next couple of months:
- USA Weightlifting certification
- The book Movement System Impairment Syndrome, by Shirley Sahrmann
- The Functional Training Handbook, by Craig Liebenson
- Muscle Imbalances Revealed 2.0 DVDs
- Both of Alwyn Cosgrove and Cressey, Robertson and Rigsby’s fitness business products
10. Yet another great post from my colleague and nutrition expert Brian St. Pierre on artificial sweeteners and stevia. Definitely a must read: The Stevia Story. I really enjoy Brian’s blog as he is as honest and objective as it gets with what he writes about on top of being incredibly smart.
That’s all for the celebratory randomness! See you next week with some new content!
Get my 3 FREE reports on sports performance training by simply entering your information below!
Last week I wrote a post about the importance of the external obliques in pelvic control. If you missed it, check it out HERE. Now I wanted to give you a couple drills and exercises you can use to improve the recruitment of the external obliques in pelvic control.
The exercises that follow are not all extremely difficult to perform. It’s more about focusing on performing them the right way. The pelvis should be neutral throughout the entire movement and as you as you feel your back arching, it’s generally a sign that you’re losing the external obliques engagement. These exercises are by no means the only ones that exist to attain better recruitment of your external obliques in pelvic control, but it’s definitely a good place to start if you have no clue how to achieve that.
The first one is probably the most basic one. It’s a variation of an exercise that comes from Shirley Sahrmann’s book Diagnosis and Treatment of Movement Impairment Syndromes. The goal is maintain a very slight arch in your lower back throughout the whole movement. To engage your external obliques as much as possible, you can keep your fingers above your illiac crest on both sides; palpation always helps to feel the right muscles doing their work.
The second one is a little similar, and also a variation of the deadbug exercises. My colleague Matt Siniscalchi posted this one on his website last week. I believe that Craig Liebenson or Bill Hartman might have come up with this one. Again, the goal is to maintain a very slight arch in the lower back and make sure the arch is not increasing as your lowering your legs. The press against the wall will also favor some inner core activity throughout the movement.
The last one is definitely much harder than the previous two. I don’t recommend you try it until you’ve mastered the first 2. It’s basically a leg lowering exercise, but because of the weight of the lower extremities it makes it much harder to keep the neutral pelvis and the external obliques activation. Again the goal is to maintain a very slight arch in the lower back and make sure yo don’t lose it.
Did you get your 3 FREE reports on sports performance training yet?! If not, enter your information below!!!
As many of you already know, last weekend I was in Boston for the Boston Sports and Medicine Performance Group seminar called ‘Standing on the Shoulders of Giants’.
On top of assisting to great presentations by some of the smartest minds in the business, I also met some great coaches and other people that work in the business. It was a truly valuable experience that got me thinking a lot about many of the things we do with our athletes. Generally when listening to a presentation, I approach it with the mindset “how can I apply this stuff with my athletes?”. Sometimes I’ll get more out of certain presentations because it is more applicable to my own situation.
It would be hard for me to recap the whole seminar and explain everything I learned, so I’ll just shoot you a top 10 of the things I got from the presentations at the seminar this past weekend. Here they are in no particular order and who’s presentation it was in:
1. Thomas Myers. We need to stop thinking about the body as individual muscles; it’s not how it works and it is literally impossible to isolate just one specific muscle, no matter what. The fascial system in the body inter-connects all of our organs, tissues and joints. We don’t have 600+ muscles in our body, we have only 1, and everything works together.
2. Jim Snider (U of Wisconsin). Hill (or incline) sprints are more specific for hockey training than flat surface because of the ground contact time. A skating stride as a longer contraction time (about 387 milliseconds) than a running stride (contraction time of 90 milliseconds). Sprinting on an incline surface lengthen the ground contact time and the duration of the contraction, to make it closer to a skating stride. Hill sprints are also more joint-friendly.
3. Jim Snider. When doing an ankle mobility test (wall test is a good example), if the foot of the hockey player collapses in, it will most likely transfer to on-ice performance; meaning that the athlete will tend to put his weight on the inside edges in his skates on his gliding leg, which will in turn decrease overall skating speed.
Wall Ankle Mobility Test
4. Charlie Weingroff. Exercise form is EVERYTHING! No one should ever sacrifice form for weights or whatever reason you can come with to move poorly. The body always follow the path of least resistance, and because of that it’s way too easy let your form go to crap when doing max effort lifts. The way your body move will ALWAYS be more important than the amount of weight you’re lifting. Charlie is a very, very knowledgeable guy….and he can squat 800 pounds, so when he talks, you listen.
5. Shirley Sahrmann. When we have some sort of movement restriction or dysfunction, it’s not always about a muscle being too stiff, but it’s also about another muscle being to loose (usually one that would counteract the restriction).
7. Cal Dietz (U of Minnesota). Block periodization can be extremely complex! All joking aside, Cal’s entire presentation was about his tri-phasic undulating block periodization model that he uses with his athletes and it made me realize that there is waaayyy more to periodization than just playing around with your sets and reps. Without going into too much details, Cal uses 3 phases that each last 2 weeks and each one is focused either on concentric effort, isometric effort or eccentric effort. This method may help athletes become much more reactive in a matter of 6 weeks. This is definitely stuff that I want to play around with in a near future!
8. This is one that came up in many of the presentation this past weekend (Sahrmann, Weingroff, Myers, Clare Franks). Muscles are rarely if ever short. Stiffness (or tone, as Weingroff and Sahrmann would call it) is much more common. But most of the time, the problem doesn’t even come from the muscle itself. It comes from the central nervous system; it’s responsible for sending the signals to the muscles to get stiff when something goes wrong in your body, and it can happen for many different reasons. This is a great example to help illustrate this point: if you have someone who has tight hamstrings and can’t get his thigh to 90 degrees on a straight leg raise test when lying on his back, chances are that if the person was dead, you could crank his leg all the way up to his face. This is a pretty dark example, but a good one to get the point across that your CNS controls everything.
9. Joe Maher (Yale). Joe’s presentation was about the training model they follow at Yale and how they structure their training throughout the year. There were many interesting things that came up in Joe’s presentation, but the thing I really liked is the way he closed his presentation. He concluded by saying “I don’t care what exercises you use, but you need a plan and implement it. You need to know where you’re going and the road you’re gonna take to get there”. This is something that struck me BIG TIME this past weekend! Too many coaches and trainers focus on the exercise selection. This is such a small piece of the puzzle in training athletes. Never lose the sight of the big picture, this is what’s truly important. If a coach still back squats his athletes or not may not matter as much as you think.
10. What I’ve come to love more and more about seminars are not even the presentations themselves (even if most of them were totally awesome!), but the get-togethers that happen after the seminars that allow you to make new contacts and talk shop with the presenters and the other people who attended the event. I had the chance to spend some time with Charlie Weingroff and Jim Snider amongst others, and I was blown away by the knowledge these guys have.
Get my 3 FREE sports training reports by signing up to my newsletter! Simply enter your information below!
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.
Last week, I had one of our intern ask me a very tough question: “If you had to pick the best book ever that should be a must read, which one would it be?” ….or something like that. The truth is, with my French-Canadian origins I have a hard time remembering exact quotes when it is in English. Nevertheless, even if I think this a great question because we’re all looking for the best resources out there to better ourself at what we, this is still a very hard question to answer. The reason is simple: there is just so many books and other resources out there, and a lot of them are filled with great information…
Then, I thought a little more and two books stood out in my head. Not necessarily because they’re the two best books of all time nor because everybody in the strength and conditioning business swears by it. These two books came up first because I consider they were the two most influencial so far in my career and they have strongly shaped the way I think about training and exercise in general.
The first one, Diagnosis and Treatment of Movement Impairment Syndromes by Shirley Sahrmann, despite being a physical therapy book can teach you a lot when it comes to functional anatomy and how muscles works synergistically. Sahrmann discusses a variety of concepts that directly apply to training; for example, when you pull a muscle, you should look for a weak synergist that forces the injured muscle to compensate. You will also learn to identify faulty movement patterns that could prevent a lot of injuries in your athletes. The goal is not for the strength coaches and trainers out there to improvise themselves as physical therapists and try to treat injuries themselves. This book should rather help you identify faulty movement patterns in your athletes and help correct them before injuries happen. I feel this book is one of the most valuable tool for any trainer and strength coach working with athletes.
My second one, The Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual by Eric Cressey, was truly an eye-opener to me the first time I read it a few years ago. This book made me realize how off-the-track so many of the coaches and trainers out there (me included at the time) are with their off-season training programs. You’ll learn why training for maximum strength is so important during the off-season, the difference between spring and static proficient athletes and how you should train them differently, why athletes should minimize their specific sport practice during the off-season and you’ll get a 16 weeks of sample programming. The off-season is the most important part of any athlete’s training and it could be the decisive factor that will make them reach the next level or not; that is why I feel this book should be a must-read for every strength coaches and trainers out there.
As I said earlier, there are just so many good resources out there and you shouldn’t limit yourself to one or two; that is why I have put a complete resource page together, make sure to check it out.
Exactly how I celebrated my birthday…I guess I was a little depressed
My new best friend
Not the best year to be a Red Sox fan…
