I think I am going to try to start a new series here, calling it Monday Musings (obviously). Here is my thought; after a week in the weight room, listening to podcasts and reading, I’ll dump a quick thought or two or three things that are going through my head.
- Lots of really smart people keep talking about Isometric work. Anthony Donskov did in the Hockey Strength Podcast. Matthew Van Dyke and Max Schmarzo did on Robbie Bourke’s All Things Strength & Wellness Podcast. One of my goals this upcoming year is to try to strategically place more isometric work in training programs throughout both the in-season and off-season training cycles because I think most athletes could benefit from performing more isometric work.
- A minor programming change we’ve made this off-season is adding vertical pulling to our lower body days (4 day lifting schedule). I think it is safe to say that athletes need more pulling then they do pushing to help keep shoulders healthy, potentially going as far as saying I may recommend all athletes performing a 2:1 pull:push ratio in their strength program. In order to do so, we do vertical pulling on our lower body days and only horizontal pulling on upper body days. Do I think this will eliminate any and every potential shoulder injury? No. But I do think more pulling and/or pulling strength will doing nothing but benefit athletes from both a health and performance perspective.
- Sean Skahan posted something about no longer performing chin ups with bands for athletes that can’t perform the programmed number of reps. Jon Blair, Assistant Strength Coach at UNH, really pushed me to do this about a year ago. What we’ve done is added eccentric reps if an athlete can’t get the desired number of reps. For example, if 3 sets of 5 is programmed and the athlete can only complete 2 body weight chin ups, they finish the set by doing the other 3 reps by doing eccentric only chin ups. It is still yet to be determined if this is working, but I am confident that having athletes use bands doesn’t work very well, so this is worth a try.
That’s it for this week, Happy Monday!