Injury prevention strategies are an important part of a strength and conditioning program.  How important is it to get bigger, faster, stronger and more powerful if you’re sidelined with a preventable injury?  Not that important I would think…

But when including injury prevention strategies in your program or the ones of your athletes, you can face a couple challenges, mainly:

• how exactly to program those injury prevention strategies in your training
• how to not completely turn your training program into a rehab program
• not make your athletes feel like patients
• how to maintain a training effect while still working on injury prevention

Not Exactly how you want to make your athletes feel like

These are legitimate concerns in my opinion because there is a fine line between too much and too little corrective exercises.  And it’s also not easy to know where to include them in your program so you still end up with an optimal result, both from from an exercise prescription and a time management perspective.  Here are a couple of tips to help you program your corrective exercises better into your own program or the ones of your athletes.

1. Your warm up.  There is a decent amount of injury prevention strategies that can be included in your warm up, especially if they’re mobility exercises.  A warm up is the perfect time to work on soft-tissue restriction and mobility to improve range of motion.  And you’re going to use your lifting to reinforce that new found mobility with appropriate lifting exercises.

Your warm up should be a little more specific than that…

2. Your cool down.  Soft-tissue work and static stretching are great to include at the end of your training session.  It will promote recovery and limit the possible range of motion loss from tight muscles.

3. Fillers.  This is probably my favorite way to include injury prevention strategies in a training program.  Fillers are basically a corrective exercise that you include between sets of a lifting exercise.  It can help reinforce a movement pattern of your main lifting exercise, it can be a stability exercise or it can be a mobility exercise that doesn’t affect the part(s) of your body you’re training.  The reason I like fillers so much is because from a time efficiency perspective, it really doesn’t get any better.  It saves time so yo don’t have to do all of that corrective work at the beginning or at the end of your training, which would make your session time longer by at least 10-20 minutes.  It also makes your training more productive; you spend less time (if at all, when programed thoroughly) waiting and doing nothing between your sets of your main exercises.  This is something very common among most gym enthusiasts; they spend an awful lot of time doing nothing (most of the time talking, and losing focus) between their working sets.  No wonder why most people hate going to the gym and lifting weights!  I would hate training too if I had to wait 1-2 minutes between every single set of every exercise I’m doing; this is boring as hell!  Putting fillers in between your sets makes you move more, reduces your down time between sets, and makes you feel like your training was much more productive and that you got a lot more done in the same amount of time.  And you took care of the injury prevention side of things on top of that!

Here’s what a hypothetical upper body day could look like with the use of filler sets if we wanted to include shoulder injury prevention strategies (filler exercises are highlighted in green) :

Notice that you’d still get a decent training effect from the rest of the exercises while simultaneously working on lower trap and serratus anterior activation, t-spine mobility, breathing patterns and anterior chain muscles extensibility, which all play an important role in injury prevention for the shoulders.

As I mentioned above, fillers can be a tremendous addition in your training program.  Give it a shot and play around with your corrective exercises that you want to include in your program.  As long as your filler exercise doesn’t interfere with your main exercise, you should be fine.  But you might need some time to play around and find good combinations that will work for you.

If you want to learn more about injury prevention strategies for the shoulders, enter your info below and get a FREE report on the shoulders!

Many factors account for shoulder health and injury prevention.  Rotator cuff strength is only one of them.  Every rehab/pre-hab program will include some type of external and/or internal rotation at the shoulder.  It is in fact an important part of a rehab or pre-hab program because of the decelerative nature of the rotator cuff in throwing sports, and its role in stabilization of the humeral head in the glenoid fossa.

I want to bring your attention to the last part of this last sentence “stabilization of the humeral head in the glenoid fossa.  This means that the rotator cuff muscles don’t have external and internal rotation of the humerus as their only function.  Which also means that they shouldn’t be solely trained in rotation if it’s not the only function.

Stabilization is actually a really big function of the rotator cuff muscles.  And a function that needs to be trained and a reinforced.  So in conjunction with any external and internal rotation based movements, there should be a certain amount of dynamic stabilization that is included in a program.

Don’t know where to start?  Check this variations:

Like I mentioned earlier, rotator cuff work alone, whether it is rotation based, stabilization based, or a combination of both, is far from a complete shoulder injury prevention strategy for healthy and optimally performing shoulders.  There is at least 5 other strategies to help maitain optimal shoulder function that you can apply.  Enter your info below to get my FREE Shoulder Injury Prevention Strategies report to learn what they are!

I want to start things off by wishing all of you a great year 2011, and may this upcoming year bring you health, joy and success!

And now off to my special announcement I’ve been talking about for the last 2 weeks.

If you haven’t already noticed, there is a place on the right side bar of my website that says “Sports Training Secrets Revealed” and a place to sign up.  I am officially launching my DavidLasnier.com newsletter!  What it means for you, is that you will get updates directly by e-mail on sports training and athletic development tips and secrets!  That makes it a lot easier for my readers to follow my work.  I’m also going to have some exclusive tips in my newsletter that you won’t see anywhere else.

But the best part of all this is that by signing up for my TOTALLY FREE newsletter, you get 3 FREE gifts!  That is a way for me to say thank you to my readers for following my work since I put up my website last year.  I really appreciate all the support you have given me and all the great feedback I got from you.

So, what you get by signing up for DavidLasnier.com’s newsletter is 3 FREE reports on athletic development:

- 5 Secrets to Improve Maximum Acceleration: A report on how to drastically improve speed and agility through no-nonsense training.  Too many athletes make BIG mistakes when training for speed; don’t be one of them!

- Shoulder Injury Prevention Strategies: The shoulder is one of the most complex joints in the body.  There are many factors to consider when trying minimize the instance of injuries around that joint.  Make sure you are aware of all the strategies I mention in this report to keep your athletes’ shoulders and yours healthy!

- Self-Myofascial Release Routine: The use of the foam roller has become more and more popular with the athletic population, and for good reasons; it’s so important to take care of your muscle tissue quality.  This report is the exact same pre-workout soft-tissue routine we use with our athletes at Endeavor.  Check it out to see what other tools than the foam roller we’re also using with our athletes!

Make sure you sign up for my FREE newsletter to get instant access to all 3 of these FREE reports!

I will be back on Thursday with some fresh content on sports training.  Have a great year 2011!

It’s pretty obvious why taking care of your shoulders when you train is important.  It is one of the most injured joint in the  body, or at least one of the joints people often have some kind of issue with.  Let’s face it, who many people you know that play sports (especially baseball, tennis and basketball) or have been training consistently for a couple of years that has never had some sort of shoulder pain?

There is a more than just a couple of things you can do to help prevent shoulder injuries.  Scapular stability, thoracic spine mobility, soft-tissue work on key muscles, gleno-humeral range of motion and rotator cuff strength are just a couple of examples of what needs to be adressed for optimal shoulder performance. 

Let’s take a closer look at the last one: rotator cuff strength.  What’s the rotator cuff exactly? It’s a group of 4 muscles that include the infraspinatus, the supraspinatus, the teres minor and the subscapularis.

I’ve outlined in a post on Endeavor’s blog a couple of months ago that there is more than one way to train the rotator cuff, other than doing endless reps of external rotation.  If you haven’t read it, you check it out HERE.  Another problem we encounter when doing tons of external rotations is that we leave out a big player: the subscapularis.  The subscapularis is the only one of the rotator cuff muscles to perform internal rotation.   That can cause a problem since the other 2 major muscles that create internal rotation at the humerus are not part of rotator cuff; these 2 muscles being the pec major and the latissimus dorsi.  Here is why that is a problem:

If you take a closer look at the insertions of these 2 muscles, you’ll see that they do not attach directly on the humeral head, but rather a little lower on the humerus.  So what happens at the gleno-humeral joint if the subscapularis doesn’t have appropriate strength when internal rotation happens at the shoulder?  The pec major and latissimus dorsi are going to do all the work, and since they don’t attach directly on the humeral head, they can’t stabilize it.  As you’ve probably figured out by now, internal rotation plus unstable humeral head equals not very good.

The best way to train the subscapularis is when the humerus is abducted 90 degrees; that way, there are less chances that the pec major or lat will take over.

Here is one of my favorite ways to strengthen the rotator cuff:

As you lay on your back on the ground your elbow is going to be stabilized more easily and that way you’re going to make sure you don’t compensate with other muscles.  You want to make sure that your arm and your elbow are both at a 90 degrees angle and that your shoulder is pulled back against the ground the whole time.

Try to always include subscapularis work in your programs for optimal shoulder health and performance, especially for athletes in sports where the shoulders take a beating like baseball, tennis, basketball, hockey and football just to name a few.