Our General Warm Up Template

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It isn’t too often that I hear much when it comes to warming up. There is plenty of talk when it comes to Olympic lifting, strength training and some talk as it pertains to conditioning. But not so much when it comes to warming up. However, we put a lot of thought into our warm up period. We follow the same template for our warm up every single time we walk into the weight room, whether it is in-season or the off-season.

Foam Roll: We spend approximately 5 minutes on the foam roller and/or lacrosse ball, hitting every single muscle group with the hope of improving tissue quality. I would argue there is no more important quality than tissue quality and it is something we never skip, especially in-season when trying to do everything we can to keep athletes healthy and feeling well.

Breathing: We toss the rollers to the side and do some diaphragmatic breathing every day. If you aren’t aware of the benefits of diaphragmatic breathing, there is a ton of info out there that you probably want to start digging into.

Static Stretching and/or Mobility: Once tissue quality is addressed tissue length is addressed. We try to stretch the hip in all three planes, hitting the groin, hip flexors, and hip rotators. Ankle, hip and thoracic spine mobility is always on the menu with an emphasis on driving some more internal rotation of the hip with some of Dr. Andreo Spina’s 90/90 hip CARs etc.

Activation: Nothing crazy here. We perform various forms of hip bridging (typically single leg versions), lateral band walks, band pull aparts, floor slides and FMS correctives fill this slot.

Dynamic Warm Up: Depending on the day we will perform either a linear or lateral dynamic warm up. The warm up will coincide with the rest of the training session. If it is a linear warm up we will perform linear plyo’s, linear sled work, and a linear based conditioning session. If it is a lateral warm up we will perform lateral plyo’s, lateral sled work, and lateral based conditioning.

Everything is slightly different depending on the team and their specific needs, but generally speaking it looks relatively close. In this 25-30 minute period we try to address as many of the movement based needs of the athlete as we can in the warm up period before we touch a weight, so that when they do touch a weight they are moving better and thoroughly warmed up. Nothing is left for chance and there is a system for everything we do.

Turning Conditioning Into A Weapon

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“If you want to improve your conditioning and turn it into a weapon then you must work on it year round.” – Joel Jamieson

In my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes strength coaches make in their off-season programs is not maintaining adequate conditioning levels throughout the entire off-season. In a lot of cases, conditioning gets overlooked for other qualities during the off-season period, with a conditioning only becoming a focus 4-8 weeks out leading into the season.

conditioning

I obviously understand that conditioning can’t be put at the forefront during the off-season as other qualities are ahead on the pecking order, but I do believe some level of conditioning needs to be maintained throughout the off-season. Simply put, to get into the appropriate shape that will be needed to get an athlete through the rigors of the entire competitive season, and get through it as healthy as possible, a handful of weeks of dedicated conditioning isn’t going to be enough.

As an example, any college strength coach will tell you that it takes time to develop the necessary strength and power to compete at a high level in college. Additionally, any sport coach will tell you that you can’t practice your sport for a couple of weeks and think that the teams’ tactical skills will be at an appropriate level.

Why would conditioning be any different?

As Joel Jamieson states in his book Ultimate MMA Conditioning:

“You can have great strength and power but without proper cardiovascular development and muscular endurance, you won’t have the energy you need to put your strength to good use as the fight (sport) wears on.”

What coaches need to realize is that all the strength and power in the world won’t make a bit of difference if an athlete doesn’t have the needed conditioning levels to use it, especially as the game/match/competition moves to the later stages. If an athletes conditioning is a weapon for them, they’ll have more fuel and a greater ability to generate power and strength at all times throughout their sporting event.

As a result, giving an athlete to access their power and strength should be the goal of any well thought out and planned sport performance program…and most athletes need to produce power and strength for a prolonged period of time!

So what’s the point?

As a coach you need to perform conditioning year round if you want to have a team or an athlete competing at their very best. Generally speaking, aerobic and anaerobic-alactic work should be developed/maintained throughout the majority of the off-season. As the athlete or team approaches the start of the season, roughly 3-4 weeks out in most cases, the focus on the conditioning program should shift to anaerobic-lactic development.

Random Thoughts: June Edition

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It’s June, so that means another edition of random thoughts for the month. Here are a few thoughts that have been going through my head. Enjoy!

1. “Our responsibility as coaches is to close gaps that limit performance not create them. Give athletes what they need not what we like/want.” – Ryan Horn

2. We as coaches are often too worried about numbers in the weight room, rather then the effect the training is having on the athlete.

3. Hip extension is very important for athletes…but we need to make sure how glutes are the ones driving hip extension. Far too often you will find athletes substituting lumbar extension instead of hip extension which will lead to various other issues.

4. Athletes must be strong, but only to the extent that it can benefit them in their sport.

5. A question to ponder: Does it matter how much weight we can lift slow?

6. Piggybacking off the two previous thoughts, generally speaking, I think for team sports power is the most important, most crucial quality we can help develop. But you can’t have power without strength. The goal should be to get athletes strong enough to benefit them as much as possible in their sport and then make them as powerful as we can.

7. The two biggest issues in our field are stupidity and ego. Simply pull up some YouTube training videos and you’ll soon realize that a lot of programs are doing a lot of stupid things. Ego, on the other hand, may be the reason coaches/programs continue to do stupid things and are slow to evolve. I firmly believe people would rather continue to do what they’ve always done then make changes because they would look ‘wrong’. You don’t know what you don’t know. There is nothing wrong with changing, change means you are evolving and getting better…change is a good thing.

8. The weight room needs to be a fun, exciting, positive atmosphere. You catch more flies with honey then you do with vinegar.

9. I am without a doubt, a generalist when it comes to programming. I would say that 85-90% of what I do is the same across all teams. The differences from sport to sport come in that other 10-15%, but the big rocks are the big rocks no matter what team I am programming for.
10. Great strength coaches adapt to the needs of the players they coach and the coaches they work for.

1-Leg Hip Bridge Progression

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A lot of times it’s the little things that go a long way when trying to keep athletes healthy in the long term. A perfect example is a simple 1-leg hip lift.

The 1-leg hip lift is a great exercise to help an athlete use the glutes properly ➡ as a hip extensor, which most young or weak athletes are unable to do.

Because so many athletes can’t use their glutes properly we generally see the athlete substitute lumbar extension for hip extension, which can lead to lower back issues. Teaching an athlete to not use the lumbar spine to create motion will go a long way in low back health.

Another great benefit to the hip lift is teaching the athlete to use the glutes as a hip extensor instead of overusing the hamstrings. Using the glutes and hamstrings together as a hip extensor will play a role in decreasing hamstring injuries down the road.

Finally, the hip lift will help develop some flexibility in the hip flexors because of the reciprocal nature of the exercise – it is impossible to both contract the glutes while also contracting the hip flexors. As a result, we get a stretch on the front side hip flexor.

  1. Isometric Leg Lock Hip Lift
  2. Isometric Tennis Ball Hip Lift
  3. Tennis Ball Hip Lift (reps)
  4. Marching Hip Lift


Typically the hip lift is simply incorporated into the warm up period as an ‘activation’ exercise

20 Thought Provoking Gray Cook Quotes

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Recently I was skimming through Movement by Gray Cook as I typically do every once in a while with some of the better material out there. The first thing I noticed – Gray has a ton of good quotes that really make you think. And since I’m all about things that make you think a little and grow as a strength coach, I thought I would share some of the quotes that I found to be the most thought provoking. It should be noted that I also went back through a lot of my notes I have taken on podcasts that Gray has been a part of.

Enjoy!

1. Unless you find the driver of bad movement and find the thing that changes it, you’re just guessing.
2. The essence of power is efficiency.
3. Poor movement can exist anywhere in the body but poor movement patterns can only exist in the brain.
4. Strength coaches should like qualities more then they do quantities.
5. Pain is not the problem it’s the signal.
6. Load a bad pattern and your just hitting save on a shitty document.
7. Are you moving poorly because you are in pain? Or are you in pain because you are moving poorly?
8. You can often prove stupidity, but you can rarely fix it.
9. Your brain is too smart to allow you to have full horsepower in a bad body position – it’s called muscle inhibition.
10. When someone leaves the weight room they should have a stamp of durability.
11. The point of lifting weights is to force stress into movement patterns.
12. The lift is over when your prime movers are smoked – lifting is not self limiting.
13. When someone hits the end on a carry, the carry is over because the prime movers can’t take over.
14. It’s not your lifting strength that matters, its how long you can maintain integrity under load.
15. Not everyone deserves the same program.
16. Many athletes are injured, they just don’t know it yet.
17. Our number one job is to improve efficiency of movement.
18. Don’t look at my workouts, look at my outcomes.
19. Stabilizers don’t do their job by being strong, they do their job by being fast.
20. Maintain the squat, train the deadlift.

Goals of the Ice Hockey Off-Season

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It could be said, and rightly so, that hockey players are made in the off-season. The success that a player has during the season can in many cases be traced back to the work they put in as the season ended in the spring and the long summer months leading into the fall pre-season.

Whether you are an older, advanced hockey player or a young up and coming player, here are a handful of goals any good off-ice training program will have in order to have you playing at an optimal level come September/October.

Restore Balance
Due in large part to the long season spent on the ice, players typically have developed a handful of postural and muscular imbalances that need to be addressed. Anyone who works with the hockey population can rattle these areas off in an instant. Any type of physical assessment, whether it be the Functional Movement Screen or any other screening tools that you use, can quickly bring some of these issues to your attention. Typically, a handful of these issues you will find are;

• Lack of shoulder mobility
• Lack of hip mobility
• Lack of ankle mobility
• Tight hip flexors
• Weak glutes
• Over-worked/strained groins

Think about the position a hockey player finds themselves in all the time; hunched over in a flexed hip posture. Players are not only in this position on the ice, but when sitting on the bench, sitting in the locker room, and on the bus going to and from games. It’s no wonder they have so many predictable issues.

Taylor Hall

Though any well thought out off-ice program should be performing it year round, spending ample time focusing on mobility exercises that target areas prone to imbalanced and stiffness needs to be a top priority. Movements like V-Stance T-Spine, Floor Slides, Quadruped Adductor Rock, Spiderman variations, and Ankle mobility exercises are highly recommended on a daily basis to keep athletes moving well and efficiently.

In addition to making mobility a priority, a well designed strength program can help to improve many of these issues, and probably in a relatively short time. In addition to making mobility a priority, it is critical that early in the off-season hockey athletes pay special attention to uni-lateral strength training in order to help ‘balance’ an athlete out. This leads right into the second point.
Get Stronger
Not to say it is impossible to get stronger during the in-season period, cause it isn’t,  but the off-season is obviously the time that the most gains in strength will be seen. And it doesn’t have to be and probably shouldn’t be very complicated. Our basic menu of exercises are made up of the following…

• RFE Split Squat
• 1-Leg Squat and Dead Lift
• Trap Bar Dead Lift
• Chin Up
• Bench Press
• Row’s
• Anti-Extension and Anti-Rotation Core work

RFE Split SQ

During the off-season we spend a lot of time lifting and lifting heavy. Our rep ranges we rarely get above 8 reps (they may at times) for a strength exercises and will generally stay between 3-8 reps.

We also spend a ton of time getting strong on one leg. Beyond the fact that skating/hockey is a sport played on one leg, training on one leg helps to balance out some of the postural/muscular imbalanced previous discussed. Getting strong (preferably on one leg) will correct a lot of potential issues and also go a long way in keeping a hockey player healthy in the upcoming season. Just don’t be afraid to load them up!
Develop Speed/Power/Explosiveness
When young athletes walk into the weight room it is somewhat easy to get them more powerful – simply getting stronger on the basic lifts is going to accomplish the goal of increasing power and/or explosiveness.

However, as athletes get older and become stronger simply increasing max strength will contribute less and less to improving explosiveness. At some point, building a bigger bench press or a bigger squat will do very little when it comes to developing a more explosive athlete. There becomes a point where strong enough is strong enough, otherwise powerlifters would be some of the best team sport athletes in the world.

This is why placing an emphasis of movements that have the potential to increase power, increase explosiveness, increase speed need to be a part of the program. Keep it simple when it comes to developing power with exercises/movements like;

• Olympic Lifts/Variations
• Linear Speed Development
• Lateral Speed Development
• Jumps/Plyo’s
• Med Ball Throws
• Sled Work

Currently we have played around with pairing many of these power movements together in order to have our athletes working through what we would consider a ‘power’ block. After our warm up period, we will have a power period that looks something like this;

• Sled or Speed Development
• Med Ball
• Med Ball
• Plyo/Jump

Our thought process is that pairing these exercises in a sequence like this allows us to train all these qualities but also supply enough time to rest between each individual movement. I am not 100% sold on this, but it is what we tried in this previous off-season.

Improve Conditioning
One of the places that I think most off-ice programs miss the boat is conditioning – or the lack of conditioning in the off-season. Being strong is great. Being powerful is great. But you need to have the ability to express that strength and power over the course of a hockey game – you need to be in great shape and focus on conditioning year round.

Hockey is an alactic-aerobic sport, meaning an athlete needs to perform high intensity efforts for a short period of time followed by lower intensity intervals. As a result, the off-ice conditioning program needs to revolve around high intensity intervals followed by low intensity (rest) periods. Things like…

• Tempo Runs: great for slowly building the aerobic system
• Shuttle Runs: high velocity sprints along with change of direction
• Slideboard Work: conditioning in the frontal plane along with conditioning the groin for the rigors of a long hockey season

Additionally, not getting out of shape is probably the easiest way to get into shape.

Minimize Time On Ice
Though it may be unpopular with most players, getting off the ice in the off-season is one of the best things a hockey player can do for themselves. As previously mentioned, summer is the only time when the hockey player can correct some of the muscular and postural issues that occur as a result of a long season. Getting off the ice is the only way that these issues can be fixed.

As a side note, this hip flexed rounded over posture is the reason the majority of our conditioning consists of some type of running in the off-season. Getting players out of hip flexion and into hip extension is vital. In an ideal world we would spend very little time on a bike in the off-season.

Additionally, from a psychological standpoint, getting off the ice and spending some time doing other things will only help when the season rolls back around. Getting off the ice, feeling better physically, feeling rejuvenated mentally, will lead to an excited and motivated player once they hit the ice in the pre-season.

Random Thoughts: May Edition

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It’s a new month, so here are 10 quick and random thoughts that have been floating around my brain recently. If nothing else I hope it makes you think a little. Enjoy!

1. People need the simple stuff more then anything else. In my opinion, overcomplicating will just lead to undertrained athletes. Don’t underestimate the power of the basics because they aren’t as sexy as some of the other stuff.
2. Recently I heard Buddy Morris comment that his ‘skill’ guys with the Arizona Cardinals don’t squat during the pre-season period because of the eccentric load on their hamstrings through daily practice. To be honest I don’t know what to think about this, except that it does make me think.

3. General observation: if athletes are chatty and hard to focus through the warm up, it is probably a good indicator that they are recovered and ready to go. The reverse seems to also be true; if they are quiet with no energy, they probably aren’t ready and recovered from their previous training. This might sound obvious, but instead of trying to reign athletes in when they are chatty maybe we should try to use that to our advantage.

4. Athletes don’t buy into coaching, they buy into coaches. If you find yourself having to motivating a group every single day you might be better off looking in the mirror and trying to find out what you can do to make the group buy into you more. Motivating washes off like soap in the shower.

5. This spring in our ‘power’ block we paired two med ball throws, a plyo/jump and some type of speed/sled. The goal was to let the athletes recover completely after each speed/sled exercise through active recovery so that they could give a legit 100% when it came to the speed work. For what it’s worth, it seemed to work really well. We’ll see if this really did work as we thought it did when they have heart rate monitors next fall…

6. Blatantly stole this thought from ‘Strong by Science’ on Twitter…“Why do we label a 500lb squat strong and not a 36 inch vertical jump? One is arbitrary and the other is an example of power to weight ratio.” Really makes you think a little as to what is really important…

7. Sport specific training; move well, move fast, move strong, move for a long period of time. It’s that simple.

8. No matter what the sport, the best players are typically the fastest. So, does it matter how much weight we can move slowly?

9. Using the previous thought as a jumping off point, if max strength was the end all be all then power lifters would walk in and dominate sports, but they don’t. That doesn’t mean that being strong isn’t important, but at some point you are strong enough…I’m just not sure we know what that is quite yet.

10. If you are getting the training effect you are after with a ‘regression’, then why do you need to move on until that adaptation ceases?

Random Thoughts: April Edition

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It’s a new month, so here are 10 quick and random thoughts that have been floating around my brain recently. If nothing else I hope it makes you think a little. Enjoy!

1. Most elite/above average athletes have more reactability then they do stability. For example, if you have them perform a 1-Leg Linear Hurdle Hop most elite athletes will do a better job performing a continuous hop then they will sticking each landing. They react to the ground well but can’t stabilize nearly as well. We also know the lack of stability is one of the major reasons athletes get hurt. Don’t get fooled by an athletes ability to react to the ground and spend ample time learning how to stabilize.

2. The more complex the movement, the easier it is going to be for an athlete to find a way to compensate. Keep things simple. Hammer the fundamentals. Be brilliant at the basic, big bang for your buck exercises.

3. As a coach, a little humility can go a long way.

4. The field of strength and conditioning isn’t about science, it’s about people. The best coaches are the ones that can interact with their athletes the best.

5. People should spend less time on their computers, phones and watching television and spend more time reading. Reading and getting better at your job is ridiculously easy, yet so many people don’t do it.

6. I think there is a place for more explosive lower body work year round for athletes. By that I don’t necessarily mean Olympic lifts, I mean more plyo’s to help maintain and improve explosiveness as the season goes on.

7. Diaphragmatic breathing is a game changer. It does wonders for core stability. It can go a long way in improving mobility. Tie it into anything and everything you can. Stretch for breathes and not for time or reps. Work it into the activation work.

8. The psoas may be the most overlooked muscle by our field. You would be shocked by how weak people are especially when their hips are above 90 degrees. Furthermore, simple band hip flexor work above 90 degrees is important for all athletes but it is a must for soccer and hockey athletes that spend very little time getting their hips into full flexion.

9. To keep field sport athletes healthy, hammer their posterior chain. Both bilateral and uni-lateral hip hinging along with bridging variations are going to go a lot further in keeping people healthy then anything else.

10. A lot of jumping athletes (basketball/volleyball) have patella issues. I think many of these issues goes back to a lack of ankle mobility. The ankle/foot is the first thing to hit the ground and absorb the force of landing and if it doesn’t have the mobility to do its job properly the issue will just travel up the chain to the knee. Improving ankle mobility might be an easy fix to patella issues.

Shoulder Health for Contact Sports

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In sports where there is a chance for potential collision-related shoulder injuries, whether it be a collision with an opposing player or a collision with the boards in the case of hockey, a well-rounded strength program that emphasizes upper body pulling strength is crucial. The key is strength. The function of the shoulder muscles during a collision is to simply maintain joint integrity. It’s highly recommended that upper body pulling exercises are emphasized as much, if not more, then the upper body pushing exercises.

Benefits of Deadbugs

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Simple and quite honestly kind of boring, but far from worthless. Deadbugs can go a long way in improving lumbo-pelvic-hip stabilizers as well as helping to push more posterior pelvic tilting, which most all athletes can benefit from. Add in some diaphragmatic breathing and a really good code exercise becomes even better.

Performing a couple sets (1-3) on each side within the warm up or a filler between sets of other exercises. Cue a big inhale through the nose when the knees are 90 degrees with a 5+ second exhale through the mouth as you extend the leg