I hope everyone had a great week – here are a handful of articles and podcasts you can dive into!
Articles
Is The Deadlift the Real King of all Exercises?
3 Things Every Coach Should Learn From Crossfit by Joel Jamieson
5 Ways to Improve Skating Speed by Michael Boyle
15 Static Stretching Mistakes by Eric Cressey
Podcasts
Strength Matters with Charlie Weingroff
Enjoy!
“The risk reward is just in favor of the deadlift over the squat for most people.” – Gray Cook
Sport = hip hinging. Generally speaking, if you ask someone to show you their best vertical or broad jump but have them stop in the bottom position right before they were to jump, they’ll be in a great looking hip hinge – a vertical shin with the hips going backwards and the feet positioned under their hips. Why? Because this is the position where we can generate the most power. That position is a deadlift, and what you see in the deadlift is the universal athletic position.
The deadlift sets the foundation for so many athletic movements and is huge for athletic development. In the deadlift the hips travel backwards (like jumping) whereas when we squat the hips travel straight down.
Two Pre-requisites before allowing someone to deadlifting;
1. Symmetrical 2’s on the ASLR. The ASLR simple shows that our hips can move freely in their path backward amongst other things.
2. A passing toe touch that shows no points of restriction of the posterior chain as well smooth weight shift backward and a graceful bend forward.
Furthermore, we bring the weight up to a level where the athlete has the mobility to control the weight but also allows us to keep the weight heavy and get a large training effect. Don’t try to jam a square peg into a round hole by making everyone pull from the floor.
Every month I try to put out a post with 10 or so random thoughts in regards to strength and conditioning. Here is the October edition.
Anyone that knows me knows that I am a huge fan of Gray Cook – I think the guy is brilliant. Gray is the creator of the FMS, has written a book called Movement, and is generally regarded as one of the leaders in the physical therapy and strength & conditioning professions.
Over the years I have read most of his work and listened to him speak at various conferences and on various podcasts. As a result, I thought it would be good to put together a handful of some good tidbits that have come out of his mouth. Enjoy!
1. First move well, then move often.
2. Exercise is nothing more then stress on an organ.
3. Don’t add strength to dysfunction.
4. Moving isn’t important, until you can’t.
5. Maintain the squat, train the dead lift.
6. Don’t look at my workouts, look at my outcomes.
7. Stabilizers don’t do their job by being strong, they do their job by being fast.
8. If mobility is stiff in one position or pattern but wasn’t in a different position or pattern its not a mobility issue
9. A good leg lower is a precursor to a good dead lift. A good dead lift is a precursor to a good swing.
10. Do what people need, not what they want.
11. The missing link in most strength & conditioning programs are carries.
12. Your brain is too smart to allow you to have full horsepower in a bad body position, it’s called muscle inhibition
13. If you have an issue with your active straight leg raise or shoulder mobility, you don’t have the right to go anywhere else in a corrective strategy. Don’t worry about your squat, clean up the active straight leg raise and shoulder mobility FIRST!
14. When someone leaves your weight room they should have a stamp of durability
15. Don’t rehab the injury, rehab the person.
16. When someone hits the end on a carry, the carry is over because the prime movers can’t take over
17. The best athletes are the ones that can use their resources the most resourcefully
18. Why do you need to screen? Because you need to be in-tune with the group that you are training. Not everyone deserves the same program.
19. 1 in 5 individuals have pain in a movement on the screen – that’s a health problem, not a fitness problem
20. If you can’t do a bodyweight squat or push up you shouldn’t load a squat or a bench press
21. The movement screen won’t change injury rates, it changes the way you train
22. FMS isn’t about decreasing injuries…everything we do should be about decreasing injuries
23. Pain screws everything up.
24. The more complex the movement, the easier it is to find a way to compensate
25. Elevating your heels isn’t just about giving you more ankle mobility, it gives you an anterior weight shift that makes it easier to sit back when you squat.
26. Making people use their stability muscles to keep them stable instead of their global muscles will make a huge difference when it comes to injury prevention
27. Before you worry about adding correctives, stop and figure out why/what you are doing is causing these issues
28. Loaded carries show you the limiting factors with your stabilizers instead of your prime movers – how long can you maintain postural integrity under load.
29. The KB Bottoms Up Press will be huge for shoulder health, integrity and proprioception because it is a self-limiting exercise – if you don’t control the small things you can’t perform the press.
30. The number one risk factor for musculoskeletal injury is a previous injury, implying that our rehabilitation process is missing something.
“Just because an exercise doesn’t hurt it doesn’t mean it’s not causing harm.” Eric Cressey
Would I overhead press an overhead athlete (volleyball in this case) with a barbell or even a dumbbell, even if it is pain free? No, the risk is not worth the reward – your probably playing with fire in the long term when it comes to shoulder health.
Would I do it with a kettlebell? Yes, we do bottoms up all the time and is a staple in our strength program.
Why the Bottoms Up KB Press:
1️) It allows the shoulder to find the path of least resistance. Not all shoulders work the same, especially overhead athletes.
2️) It helps to facilitate more rotator cuff activation. The rotator cuff is a reflex driven group of muscles built for stability, not strength. KB bottoms up press demands stability. If the rotator cuff isn’t stabilizing, the KB will fall over.
3️) It also teaches the core and the shoulder to work together as a unit. If you lose core stability, you’ll again probably lose the kettlebell.
4) Overhead athletes tend to have cranky shoulders with pain in certain positions. Simply flipping the KB over turns a typically painful movement into a non-painful movement. Training through pain is a terrible idea. On the other hand, not training through pain is always a good thing.
Over the course of the last week I spent some time reading Daniel Coyle’s The Little Book of Talent. The book is essentially 52 different tips that Daniel Coyle has accumulated over the course of his work studying how people that are exceptional talents in their field and what it took for them to get there. This sparked me into thinking what it takes for a coach, more specific a strength coach, to be great at their jobs. Here are four quick thoughts on what it takes to be great in our industry.
Connect
The first thing a coach should try to do is connect with their athletes when they first see them. The field of strength and conditioning is less about science and exercises and more about relationships, connecting with people and earning their trust.
In the world of strength and conditioning connecting with your athletes on a daily basis can be relatively easy. For example, as our athletes walk into the weight room the first thing they do is grab a foam roller to foam roll and then go through a series of stretches and mobility drills – this is a perfect and easy time to coach less and connect more. You have to show that you care before you teach and/or coach.
Be Quick & Direct
When it comes to actually giving direction make it short, sweet and direct. No one wants to hear a long winded speech or some long description of the exercise or exercises that you are about to perform – plus we know attention spans leave a lot to be desired. Explain it and explain it quickly. Explain it to them in a direct manner. John Wooden was known to show something correctly, then not what to do, then show it correctly again – a shit sandwich. Do this, not this, do this is what Coach Wooden’s philosophy was. Be quick, direct and to the point as often as you can.
Aim to be Useless
At the end of the day, I want the athletes I work with to be able to do exactly what I want, with great form/technique, without me standing by their side taking them through it. I should be able to sit there and watch them take themselves through the program and do it 95% correctly. Why do I aim for this and essentially make myself useless? Because this means I have done a great job of teaching them what they need to do to be successful and how they should be doing it. Is this every going to happen? Probably not as programs continue to evolve as we learn more about the human body as well as a new set of freshman coming into the program every year, but its still a goal that I keep in the back of my mind.
Catch People Doing the Right Thing
As coaches we are essentially around to help athletes improve both as athletes and as people. In doing so we spend a ton of time correcting what it is that they are doing wrong. If you are coaching a big group like a football team, you know you can literally walk around from platform to platform correcting something – and this is a good thing. However, I think as coaches we don’t spend enough time praising things that athletes are doing well. As hard as you work to fix things
