Happy Monday! Here are a few thoughts bouncing around in my head after a week of reading, podcasts and other continuing ed. Enjoy!

1. Coaches constantly talk about the importance of getting athletes to train in the frontal plane, and for good reason – I think it is extremely important to get athletes to do more then train in the sagittal plane and on two legs. But I wonder if we actually train as much in the frontal plane as we claim we do? Are we including lateral squats in the program? Med ball side tosses? Med ball scoop tosses? Slideboard for conditioning? Pure 1-leg strength exercises like 1-leg squats or 1-leg RDL’s that may not be specifically or exclusively frontal plane but are asking the hip the stabilize in all three planes? Don’t get me wrong, there is absolutely a place for both sagittal and bilateral exercises, but it should be a part of a well rounded strength training program, not the majority of a strength training program.
2. Lorne Goldenberg said something along the lines of the need of the last rep of a set needs to look exactly like the first rep of a set – which I couldn’t agree more with. If reps start to look like shit, shut the set down. Technical failure – once technique starts to fail you are getting better at performing crappy reps. Quality over quality.
3. Along the same lines as potentially not training enough in the frontal plane, I wonder if we do enough carries in our programs? Don’t take this too literally – I don’t think we should be performing carries for an entire training session or anything close to that, but I find it hard to believe that doing some type of carry every single day would be beneficial for both athletes and general population clients. Gray Cook says that we don’t want to train beyond our stabilizers – and carries are one of the best ways to train our stabilizers to fire and do their jobs.