"Just Do It!" ... With a Purpose

As a clinician and a coach, I am constantly looking for new and more effective ways to improve my athlete's health and performance. It can be extremely easy to get bogged down and lost in the many treatment options and training techniques that exist and continue to appear. All too often, I see programs and treatment plans that are either haphazardly put together or loaded with multiple activities for the same end. There does not seem to be a plan or purpose. I can be just as guilty about losing sight of the method to my madness. To keep focused on the task at hand, I ask myself a couple questions when developing overall general training plans and putting together the more specific daily activities: (1)What is my overall goal? (2) What are the need to do activities? In the treatment and care of injuries, athletic trainers and physical therapists use therapeutic modalities each with a specific reason for its use. Is there still an acute inflammatory reaction? Is there swelling? Are there soft tissue restrictions? Is there weakness? What is the underlying cause of the condition the athlete is in? Answering these questions will help outline the plan to answer the focus questions: "What is my overall goal?" "What are the need to do activities?"; and guide you to a purposeful treatment plan. The same is true with the performance training of athletes. "What is my overall goal?" "What are the need to do activities?" These questions can be answered by knowing other more specific details. What is the developemental stage of the athletes you're working with? What are the sport-specific demands (movement patterns, metabolic needs, strength requirements, etc)? What is the training cycle (in-season, off-season, etc)? Don't just do it. Do it with a purpose! David Yeager, ATC, CSCS Co-Founder BaseballStrengthCoaching.com

Long Toss

This week, I have decided to post a question and my response from a recent forum post discussion that I was involved in. Feel free to comment and keep the discussion going.

Proposed question / topic: "What is a good way to throw long toss? I've heard many different things. I'm specifically asking whether or not to throw rainbows or line drives once you get to long distances but if anyone has anything to add on the subject, feel free to add in."


My response: "In a nut shell, my philosophy is line drives. Biomechanical research indicates that the rainbow delivery does not mimic the normal delivery and place undue stress on the shoulder and elbow joints. Long toss needs to be viewed as high intensity exercise. When an athlete is in the weight room and working out for power and strength, he will typically perform high weight / low repetition training (i.e. 3-6 reps). I believe that a long toss program should follow this same model. Once the player gets loose, he should gradually progress back performing 3-6 throws at each distance until he can no longer maintain the ball on a line or at the very least 1-hop the ball to his partner. Also, since this is a high intensity activity, care should be taken to monitor the number of times per week this is done. During the off-season a maximum of 3-times per week is appropriate. However, during the pre-season (once bullpen sessions become more frequent) and in-season, a maximum of 2-times per week may be more appropriate depending on the pitcher's outing frequency and workload."

Below is a link to an article at www.BaseballStrengthCoaching.com that addresses throwing programs:



The Throwing Conditioning Program



David Yeager, ATC, CSCS
Co-Founder
BaseballStrengthCoaching.com

End of Season Training Strategies

With the playoffs upon us in the Minor Leagues, our role as strength and conditioning coaches changes from earlier in the season. Just as marathon runners and elite weightlifters taper training volume in preparing for competition, steps should be taken to ensure the optimal performance of baseball players when winning matters most.

Two goals for end-of-the-season training are:

(1) Maintain or improve the team energy level into September; and
(2) Be proactive towards overuse injuries which can cause players to miss time.

Maintaining the Team Energy Level

One misconception is that baseball is not a taxing sport on its athletes. With only 5-10 days off over a 140 game regular season, fatigue is a major factor during August and September. A 6-month in-season period is too long to be a single training phase. Therefore, the traditional model of “in-season vs. off-season” training does not apply in professional baseball.

Using a tapered volume approach allows players to maintain their energy level to perform with high intensity late in the year. The chart below shows some examples of how volume can be tapered as the season progresses.

Examples of Tapered Volume:
Strength Training Frequency
Early Season = 2 Total Body/wk
Mid-Season = 1.5 Total Body/wk
Late Season = 1 Upper & 1 Lower/wk
Core Lift Repetition Volume
Early Season = 4x 8,6,4,4
Mid-Season = 4x 7,5,3,3
Late Season = 4x 6,4,2,2
Assistance Lift Rep Volume
Early Season = 2-3 x 10
Mid-Season = 2-3 x 8
Late Season = 2 x 6-8
Sprint Pole Interval Volume
Early Season = 10x Poles (2000y)
Mid-Season = 8x Poles (1600y)
Late Season = 6x Poles (1200y)
Sprint Workout Volume
Early Season = 10 x 60y (600y)
Mid-Season = 10 x 45y (450y)
Late Season = 10 x 30y (300y)

The psychological stresses of professional baseball’s schedule mimic an endurance sport, consisting of high volume training ‒ fieldwork, batting practice, throwing, strength and conditioning sessions, and games. The limited time for recovery and sleep, due to night games and travel, requires that coaches be tactful in planning workouts around baseball activity, promote restful sleep habits, and encourage adequate nutrition.

Preventing Overuse Injuries

In the final month of the season, breakdown must be avoided at all cost. The focus shifts from encouraging players to challenge themselves with strength and conditioning sessions to maintaining consistency in corrective exercise and tissue maintenance programs (areas players should keep up with all season). Any workouts during this phase should be volume controlled and not for the purpose of being metabolically taxing.

The following are examples of common end-of-the-year ailments and prevention strategies:

• Aches, Pains, and General Tightness occur when the tissues of the body are placed under frequent stress from activity. Using a rolling device should be a daily occurrence to prevent the buildup of adhesions within the muscular and connective tissues and improve mobility. Contrast bathing is another common strategy to regenerate the tissues of the body.

• Hip and Low Back Pain are common late in the season. Ankle band (mini-bands) walks, quadruped hip mobilities, and glute bridging exercises are low intensity enough to incorporate in the daily team warm-up, and, through activating the glutes, will protect the muscles of the low back from being over-stressed during movement. Athletes with hip flexor tightness and an anterior pelvic tilt are more prone to low back pain.

• Oblique and Intercostal injuries in baseball are most often exposed during the rotational movements of throwing or hitting. Performing multi-planar torso rotations in the daily team warm-up and in medicine ball core routines is an effective strategy to prepare the trunk for rotation. Trunk rotations while pivoting the back foot create a similar range of motion to throwing and hitting.

• Shoulder Pain can most often be avoided through strengthening the rotator cuff and improving scapular control. Shoulder tubing routines and prone body weight scapular stability exercises are efficient and can be performed in the weightroom, training room, or team warm-up.

Other aches and pains do arise throughout the year. However, a focus on players’ most mobile joints, the hips, trunk, and shoulders, will provide a solid injury prevention approach for a team program.

Eric McMahon, MEd, RSCC
Minor League Strength and Conditioning Coach
Texas Rangers

Approaches to Core Training

As an incoming college freshman, I was sent a manual through the mail with my football team’s workouts for the summer ahead. The manual was about 75 pages of mostly strength routines and information about the testing we would undergo once we arrived for pre-season training camp. The only core routines were hand-jotted at the bottom of the typed lifting program sheets, on a single line reading, “Abs: 250 reps”. Even at 18 years old, with no formal training in exercise, I remember thinking... Gosh, there’s got to be more to it than that!

What Are the Goals of Core Training?

As with every area of strength and conditioning, the common answer, “To Enhance Performance, and Prevent Injury” applies here. A performance goal of core training is to strengthen and support the middle of the body for improved coordination of the body as a whole. Many coaches aim to prevent injury by adding support to the mid-section’s structural beam, the lumbar spine, by using draw-in and bracing techniques, emphasizing stability exercises (i.e. planks), and ensuring that training does not compromise the natural anatomical arch of the low back. Other considerations may include improving hip mobility or scapulothoracic stability, depending upon how broadly the core is defined in your program.

A Movement Balanced Approach

This approach is about being anatomically balanced in all movement planes. Historically, exercise menus of various sit-ups, crunches, and twists have focused on building the endurance of the abdominal and oblique muscles. The erector spine, quadratus lumborum, and transverse abdominis, for example, have been more often neglected by traditional core routines. There are a few ways to create balanced core routines, either by incorporating all movements of the torso into each core program, or by equally dividing the movements throughout the training week. Here is a list of core movements to build exercise menus upon:

o Flexion: (e.g. Sit-Ups)
o Extension: (e.g. Superman)
o Lateral Flexion and Extension: (e.g. Side Plank Hip Lift)
o Rotation: (e.g. Medicine Ball Side Tosses)
o Low Back Support: (e.g. Supine Dead Bug Progressions)
o Hip Mobility: (e.g. Quadruped Hip Abduction)
o Scapulothoracic Stability: (e.g. Front Plank Scapula Pinch)

The goal is to diversify the types of core exercises being performed, as no one method of core training has been deemed most beneficial in scientific literature.

Rotational Core Training:

There are two predominant approaches to rotational core training: (1) Rotational Power-Endurance, and (2) Anti-Rotation. Rotational power-endurance exercises are dynamic in nature and most often include twisting movements using resistance. Some examples include medicine ball (MB) side tosses, MB standing torso rotations, “Russian twists”, and supine “knee-up” low trunk rotations.

Anti-rotation, or rotational stability, exercises include stability movements of the torso against rotational forces created from the momentum of the limbs. Common examples include, Grey Cook’s kneeling chop and lift exercises (from his menu of FMS corrective exercises), Convertaball twists, cable core presses, and Keiser push-pulls combinations.

What’s the difference… Rotation vs. Anti-Rotation? Rotational exercises train the concentric and eccentric nature of the twisting torso, while anti-rotation exercises are focused at stabilizing the rotation of the spine to best maintain the upright posture of the body. For example, there are anti-rotational elements to many functional single limb weightroom exercises (i.e. one-leg squats or deadlifts, lunges, one-arm presses, etc.). While rotational power-endurance exercises (i.e. MB throws) are excellent to develop rotational range of motion and explosiveness, developing anti-rotational stability should first be addressed to ensure the body can handle the force production of repetitive twisting.

Eric McMahon, M.Ed., RSCC
Minor League Strength and Conditioning Coach
Texas Rangers

Webinar Presentation (January 11, 2011)

Name: Functional Training and Progressions of the Shoulder and Upper Extremity in the Overhead Athlete

Featured Speaker: David Yeager, ATC, CSCS Co-Founder, BaseballStrengthCoaching.com Certified Strength & Conditioning Specialist and professional baseball Athletic Trainer

Course Objectives:

- Define function, functional training, and the components of sport-specific training in baseball.
- Describe the criteria for beginning or advancing exercise / activity progressions.
- Describe the general characteristics and key components of the overhand throwing motion.
- Explain the Kinetic Chain Concept as it relates to exercise training in baseball.
- Define the goal and key components of sport-specific shoulder girdle training.
- Illustrate sample exercise progressions for the overhead throwing athlete.


When: 01/11/2011 8:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Time Zone: (GMT-06:00) Central Time (US and Canada)

Be sure to log on to www.baseballstrengthcoaching.com in order to register and receive an email containing the session link.

Hope to see you there!

BaseballStrengthCoaching.com

What's Your Max?

This blog has two purposes, one is asking the question do we really know what our athletes maxes are? And second if we don’t know, are we doing our athletes a disservice by not testing them?

I ask the question do we really know what our athletes maxes are because I have been noticing a trend that more and more schools are using estimated maxes. In the past, this technique was used mostly in high school at the freshman and sophomore level but it has been slowly moving to the older athletes and I have been hearing it is being used to a greater extent in the college ranks. I am not saying the technique should not be used. It has many uses and is a great tool. But, when it is the only technique used, I believe we are not giving the athletes a true look at what their maximal strength is. I have been getting more and more athletes through my program both in person and athletes that I plan programs for that give me these estimated maxes but cannot really lift that weight. Many times I have found the athlete to be 20-30 and even 40 pounds off the estimated weight. This can be very significant considering that if the athletes max was say 250lbs and they could really only do 220lbs. This is more then a 10% mistake, and if these maxes are used for calculating workouts through out the week, in most cases the athlete would not be getting the proper stimulus.

This leads into the next question. Is this a disservice to the athlete? In my opinion the answer is yes. If they do not perform true maximal’s at least a few times a year, the athlete may never know where they really stand and when they move onto the next level have to move backwards in order to move forward. This can be very frustrating. In many instances, if we are able to get the athlete on track and work from their true maxes, the athlete sees greater gains in shorter periods of time, as well as, giving the athlete a greater confidence in their lifting ability.

I just want to leave you with one more thought. As coaches, would we be ok if we used estimates of speed or velocity????????

Brian Niswender, MA, CSCS
Co-Founder
BaseballStrengthCoaching.com

My Top 5 Program Progression Mistakes

The goal of any training program should be the improvement of strength, power, and work capacity. Without an increase in training loads positive adaptations will never occur. However, the training stimulus should be adjusted in a gradual and progressive manner to avoid overtraining which can result in lack of energy, poor performance, fatigue, depression, aching muscles and joints, and injury. This week’s article will attempt to address my top 5 areas of attention to insure improvement and limit the risk for injury.

#5 Perform a Proper Warm-Up

Muscular stiffness and lack of joint mobility result in greater muscle damage after exercise. A dynamic warm-up increases the body’s global core temperature, as well as, the localized tissue temperature for the specific muscles that will be active during sports movements. When the muscle tissue is “warm”, it becomes more elastic, more flexible, and less stiff. This greater elasticity means less tissue damage and less potential for injury. Aside from the overall increase in tissue temperature, an active warm-up prepares the muscles and joints for performance by “turning-on” the neuromuscular (brain-to-muscle) connections that will be utilized during training.

#4 Monitor Technique

Emphasis should be placed on “quality” over “quantity”. Often athletes will sacrifice movement technique for 5-10 pounds of resistance. Improper exercise form can lead to injury when the exercise pattern exceeds the limitations of a joint or muscle. Mechanical errors that create inefficient movement sequencing and timing will lead to a decrease of transferred energy and subsequently an increase in the torques and joint stresses produced. By stressing the importance of proper technique, not only will you limit this potential for harm, but the brain will ingrain and store more accurate movement patterns for future use. Ultimately, the use of proper technique can lead to more accurate programming of motor unit activation and much greater improvements in exercise performance.

#3 Adjust the Training Load

The amount of training load applied is very important. Too little exercise will have no effect on training. Yet, too much may cause injury. The Overload Principle states that the training stimulus must be greater than the normal level of function for the athlete’s body to adapt. The amount of the stimulus will depend on the athlete’s current fitness level. When working with the less experienced a lower intensity should be utilized. However, the more experienced athlete can use a greater stimulus. The training load should be adjusted in a gradual and progressive manner. One technique that can be used is to highlight the “Sets and Reps” scheme. For example, if the session or movement outlines “3 sets of 10 repetitions”, choose a resistance or weight that will allow for the performance of the designated number of repetitions (i.e. 10). If the athlete is unable to perform the 10 reps, then the resistance is too great and needs to be adjusted to a lighter weight on the next set. If he is able to perform more than 10 reps, the load is too light and needs to be adjusted to a greater weight on the next set. When progressing from session to session, begin with the training load used in the second set of the previous workout and adjust accordingly.

#2 Master the Fundamental Pre-Requisites

Choosing the proper initial movement “level of difficulty” is important. Too often, coaches and trainers choose an exercise or movement because it has “sizzle”. When in reality, the athlete may not have the proper functional platform of strength, stabilization, or mobility to perform the activity. An easy illustration is the athlete who cannot perform a Body Weight Squat without significant foot pronation and inward collapse of the knees. Yet, for some reason, his coach has him performing Resistance Band Jump Squats. Training progression should be viewed as an Inverted Pyramid. Without the mastery of the fundamental pre-requisites, the pyramid will topple over and fall. The end-result movement pattern can be broken down into smaller, simpler “building blocks”. Proper movement sequencing should progress from the improvement of isolated muscle strength to the more complex movement. In the Jump Squat example, initial focus should be placed on strengthening of the gluteal and hip abductors muscles. Next, the athlete may perform a Wall Squat exercise progressing to a Body Weight Squat followed by a Free Weight Back Squat. Once the athlete, can perform a proper squatting movement with external load, then he may progress to a Jump Squat and ultimately the Resistance Band Jump Squat.

#1 Allow for Rest and Recovery

Training is the application of stress. The constant exposure to physical stress results in a lack of energy, poor performance, and fatigue leading to eventual tissue breakdown and injury. Repair and regeneration occurs between training sessions. This cycle of stress and recovery progresses the athlete’s fitness level. The more fit the athlete, the greater the training stimulus needed for adaptation. Greater intensity or stress increases the need for rest and recovery. Monitoring the athlete’s training loads, performances, and his physical and mental responses can help to identify the need to adjust daily plans and stresses for maximal training efforts and optimal results.

David Yeager, ATC, CSCS
Co-Founder
BaseballStrengthCoaching.com