Joint ill-health interferes with our ability to detect external and internal forces from the ground, the wind, an opponent, or our own inertia. Our ability to take in everything that occurs in wrestling, grappling, combat situations, or any situation with a direct opponent is measured in sport as an output.

The essence of an athlete is the ability to process internal and external sensory stimuli (inputs) into gross or fine patterns (outputs).

The essence of an athlete is the ability to process input stimuli into output patterns.

Poor Movement Isn’t Poor Coaching

Every effort to regain mobility improves the ability to detect subtle and not-so-subtle movement. Once athletes regain this movement, cues to improve skill will be more effective due to increased sensory input.

Once athletes regain mobility, cues to improve skill will be more effective due to increased sensory input.

How Ido Portal Helps Conor McGregor

Ido Portal and Conor McGregor both look as if they have excellent mobility in key areas (ankles, hips, thoracic spine, and shoulders). This means they will benefit from training in free movement and natural environments.

Following this sequence results in an improved readiness to display fine and gross motor patterns.

Conor McGregor demonstrates the value of mobility first, followed by the implicit cues that natural freeform movement provides. Following this sequence results in an improved readiness to display fine and gross motor patterns – in other words, the patterns that land or dodge a punch at the right time.

You’ll also enjoy:

• Stability Versus Mobility: The Bigger Picture is Movement
• Move Your Body, Move Your Brain: Training for Neuroplasticity
• Motor Control and Movement Patterns: A Must Read for Athletes
• New on Breaking Muscle AU

Photo courtesy ofAndrius Petrucenia on Flickr (Original version) UCinternational (Crop) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

The post The Essence of an Athlete: How Ido Portal Helps Conor McGregor appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

The one-arm press.

Whether you’re looking for performance through strength or power, or rehabilitation through patterning, the kettlebell one-arm press covers so many bases. This exercise could quite simply be the best thing you can do for your shoulder. 

I’ve used this drill to offset the high-volume throwing, spiking, serving, and contact of international handball and volleyball players. Even if you’re a recreational athlete, you can reap the benefits on posture and shoulder girdle strength. When the chips are down, I’ve found it to be unbelievably restorative. Athletes who do the one-arm press regularly in their programming discover more hitting power and durability.

The one-arm press is great because it meets the following four criteria:

1. Start and finish position
2. Safe movement patterns
3. “Clean” power
4. Protection

The one-arm press will improve your shoulder strength and health, whether you’re a pro or an amateur. (Photo courtesy J Perez Imagery)

Start and Finish Position

The start and finish positions of the one-arm press are safer than other favoured shoulder strength exercises, such as the front and side raise. The long leverage of weights lifted in front and side raises often causes the scapula to tip away from its stable position at the start and finish of the movement. That’s like allowing a crane to come loose from the ground before lifting a large building. Front and side raises cause more trouble with shoulder blade positions than any other exercise, affecting the muscles that attempt to hold the shoulder to the neck and trunk, the trapezius and rhomboids.

The scapula’s main job is to support the arm. It can move freely to position the socket appropriately for the ball of the humerus to be supported. If a scapula “wings” (the medial border comes away from the rib cage, or tips forward), or the medial/superior part of the scapula gets higher than the lateral part, this places the socket in a position that limits elevation of the arm. This is not appropriate, nor is it stable. In this position, the scapula has lost its appropriate alignment.

Contrast that lack of alignment with the positioning offered by the one-arm press. In the one-arm press, the scapula is dynamically stable. This means it displays unrestricted freedom of movement in a supportive situation while also maintaining appropriate alignment. The movement begins with the kettlebell in the rack position, just in front of the shoulder. The kettlebell rests on the upper arm, outside the fist. The elbow faces forward. The palm side of the hand points towards the face. In the finish position, the kettlebell is directly above the shoulder, elbow straight. Both of these positions, start and finish, place the scapula in a stable position.

Safe Movement Patterns

The movement pattern of the one-arm press is safe. Pressing from the rack to the finish position should be vertical. The elbow faces forward at the start, yet at the finish it faces to the side. This means the shoulder joint moves from a neutral position to a laterally rotated position, whilst the scapula moves into an even safer position of retraction and upward rotation, opening the space for the shoulder joint to spin and glide into a well-balanced position.

This coordination takes reflex-driven rotator cuff coordination and ideal scapula movement. During the pressing pattern, the scapula starts flush against the rib cage – not elevated, depressed, retracted, or protracted, but somewhere in the middle. At the start of the press, the spine of the scapula should incline approximately ten degrees. At the finish, it should incline approximately seventy degrees without tipping forward or losing its flush connection with the ribcage.

Another Beneficial Overhead Press Variation:

Bottoms-Up Kettlebell Presses for Solid Shoulders

The position in the one-arm press means the neck doesn’t need to pigeon. Many shoulder strength exercises that require lifting a weight from below the neck lead to the athlete attempting to bring the neck to the weight. The resulting movement is akin to a pigeon poking its head and neck forward, hence the name pigeoning. Pigeoning leads to neck joint shearing and upper neck muscle recruitment, resulting in limited neck movement, pain, and headaches. If you think you don’t pigeon your neck, check yourself neck time you do upright rows or front raises. In the one-arm press, the kettlebell is pressed from the neck position to overhead, so pigeoning doesn’t happen.

The scapula tips further back during the pattern of pressing, clearing the space for the rotator cuff to operate and minimizing the risk of impingement. Not only does it tip further back, but it also rotates upwards, opening the space even more. It takes coordination of all of the back muscles to cause this rotation. The interesting thing is that the kettlebell can’t be pressed overhead when this scapula pattern doesn’t happen, so the drill is limited by scapular stability. This is contrary to upright rows and front raises, where the upper trapezius, pec minor, and deltoids can still lift a long-leveraged weight when the pattern coordination is poor.

Clean Power

This drill is great for development of “clean power.” Power is work done in a set period of time, so it requires strength, speed, and controlled movement. Controlled movement means the activity has appropriate timing, sequencing, and coordination.

Determining if a pattern of movement has appropriate timing, sequencing, and coordination is nearly impossible. However, if a pattern is shaky, jerky, or occurs in stages, we call it “dirty and difficult.” The opposite is a path of smooth movement, which we call “clean and easy.”

Another advantage of a vertical press is that it allows higher weight than a front or side raise because the lever is so short. The stimulus to the upper arm is higher, and the scapula remains stable. When the weight gets too heavy, the movement loses speed, and therefore power. It will become dirty and difficult. By that stage, more work has been done with a stable scapula and higher weight than the rival exercises of upright row, front raise, or side raise – all of which lose involve neck pigeoning and deviations of the scapula from appropriate alignment.

Protection Against Weak Links

The last benefit of this great drill is that it reveals weak links that present injury risk.

When the weight gets too heavy for the normal pattern, there are some compensation movements that can occur. Most compensation occurs with the person leaning backwards to turn it more into an incline chest press. When this happens, the neck starts to pigeon, the lower back hinges, and the scapula gets away from its ideal position. The pigeoning neck is a dysfunctional compensation for poor trunk stability. This can lead to pain, limited movement, and altered motor control – three well-established risks for injury.

There’s two easy fixes for this fault:

1. Sit down and finish the set. This removes the stability requirements of the hips and pelvis so the low back can’t give up its stable position. Or you can keep the hips and pelvis involved by standing on one leg and resting one foot on a high chair or bench. The hip flexion position of the raised leg minimizes the possibility of tilting the pelvis forward and hinging at the back.If a hinge still happens, simply lift the foot off the chair or bench to stop it. I prefer this one-legged variation since it connects the press to the ground through the feet, ankle, knees, and hips, rather than through the sit-bones of the pelvis. It’s a more holistic exercise, challenging more than just the shoulder girdle.
2. The second fix is to lower the weight and finish the set with cleaner form. This one is a less favoured option, since a person can still compensate with a lighter weight if they are chasing reps. It’s also less favoured because it requires conscious control of form. Self-limiting fixes always have more carryover to adaptation than conscious control fixes. The first fix is self-limiting, as it automatically won’t let you disconnect from a stable trunk. This helps to save the pattern into your nervous system better than lowering the weight.

Placing one foot on a box can help correct pelvic rotation. (Photo courtesy Greg Dea)

A Balanced Shoulder is a Strong One

It’s common for individuals to want bouldered shoulders, but nothing kills shoulder gains more than neck pain and shoulder impingement. The rounded shoulder appearance associated with front raise and upright rows should be nowhere near as attractive to an athlete as a well-balanced shoulder girdle.

If you favour the latter – and you should – switch to the one-arm press for your pressing work. 

I’ve used this simple strategy to support high-volume shoulder use for many athletes for years. The combination of positions, patterns, and power adjustments has proved protective for athletes in pre-season training, and as a superset for other prime lifts. I’ve had a Chinese national handball superstar demonstrate clear gains in throwing capability using the one-arm press with a torn labrum and rotator cuff tendon. I’ve used it for my own development, and had no trouble surprising bigger lifters with starting weights greater than their front raise peaks.

Whilst the position and pattern is clearly challenging, none of my athletes who’ve pressed to failure have suffered injury or post-training soreness. Trust this drill. It works.

The post The Best Exercise for Shoulder Strength and Health appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Speed thrills. Watching an athlete chase down an opponent, or dash away from someone chasing them, is an iconic and exhilarating element of sport around the world. An athlete with acceleration to burn will always raise eyebrows amongst coaches and scouts, and there’s no athlete who doesn’t want to get faster for his or her sport.

Professional sprinters aren’t the only athletes who could benefit from a faster running speed.

I’ve used the same program for developing faster running speeds in athletes for over fifteen years. The program produces incredible results for any athlete looking for more speed. The specifics of the framework have altered with experience, but the overall framework remains the same.

By following the five steps of this program, the athletes I’ve trained have found an extra gear when they need it. And even if you’re not blessed with good genetics or a long training history, you can too.

The First Gear: Getting Started

We begin with interval training. Luckily for you, the pace starts off slow.

Find yourself a rectangular space of about 30 metres by 50 metres.

• Each lap in your space should consist of two 50 metre jogging sections and two 30 metre side skipping, or lateral movement, sections.
• Jog for the 50 metres section.
• Skip sideways for the 30 metres section.
• Do 4 to 6 laps total.

That’s it. This phase should be done on a day-on, day-off schedule.

When to Go Up a Gear:

Every runner is different and will take his or her own amount of time to adapt to training stressors. If you have a decent training history, it’s likely you can move through this gear quicker than others. Given it’s a low stress session, your progression to the next gear can be as little as four days. If you’re new to running, you’ll need to spend about three months on this phase – and I’m not joking about that. The fibres that make up your tendons and ligaments are made of collagen, and when put under new stress, they take up to three months to adapt and improve enough to handle it.

My general rule is to be able to do this session once, take a day off, then repeat a second time, followed by another day off. If you aren’t in pain or sore, you’ve proven you can tolerate this stress level and can move up a stage.

The Second Gear: Finding Your Tempo

When you’ve decided you’re ready to step up the speed, find an area of about 150 metres in length. In Australia, that’s about the length of an oval football field. The second gear stage uses tempo running: running at a pace that stays consistent from start to finish. There shouldn’t be any significant changes to your running speed throughout the 150 metres.

This phase should feel like you’re running at about 60-70% pace of your maximal speed. If you don’t know what that means for you, here’s a simple way to think of it: if you feel like you’re jogging, you’re going too slow, and if you feel like you’re sprinting, you’re going too fast.

• Run at a tempo for 150 metres. Rest for 30 seconds. Repeat 4 times.
• Rest for 2 to 3 minutes.
• Repeat another 4 tempo runs of 150 metres with another 30 seconds of rest.
• Rest again for 2 to 3 minutes.

You can stop here, or continue on for another four tempo runs of 150 metres with 30 seconds recovery in between each one. Twelve tempo runs for this session is the absolute maximum. This stage is intended to be done on a day-on, day-off schedule, but you can do cyclic aerobic training and strength training on your day off if you wish.

When to Go Up a Gear:

This phase doesn’t need as long an adaptation period for new runners, providing you’ve taken the right amount of time to build your running base up in the first stage. If you do 12 repetitions of the 150 metres tempo run and you don’t feel sore the next day, take a non-running day as per the day-on, day- off schedule, then repeat the session again to make sure the lack of soreness isn’t a fluke.

The progressively higher impact forces at work on this program can take time to build up on your tendons and joints, which is why soreness might be delayed. If the soreness isn’t a fluke, this phase’s duration can be as little as four days. If it is, continue along the schedule until the soreness isn’t an issue before moving ahead to the third gear of the program.

The Third Gear: Ramping It Up

This phase is designed to step your pace up to about 75-85% of your maximal speed, moving you out of a “running” gait pattern and into more of a sprinting pattern. Here, you stick to the day-on, day-off schedule with a maximum of 3 running days per week.

These sessions will see you step up to a total of twenty-four runs of 100 metres each in length.

• Find a space of around 100 metres in length.
• Place a marker at the start, the 40 metres point, the 60 metres point, and the 100 metres point.
• This creates three zones – the first is 40 metres, the second is 20 metres, and the final is 40 metres. We’ll call them the acceleration zone, the holding-speed zone, and the deceleration zone.
• From a standing start, accelerate gradually through the first 40 metres.
• Stop accelerating and hold the speed for 20 metres.
• Gradually decelerate over the last 40 metres until you come to a complete stop by the final marker.
• Take 30 seconds to recover.
• Repeat this acceleration-hold-deceleration run 6 times.
• Take 3 minutes of full rest.

Let’s call this set of splits the (40-20-40) x 6.

From here, in the same session, you adjust the markers to change the length acceleration-hold-deceleration zones as follows:

• (40-30-30) x 6
• (30-40-30) x 6
• (30-40-20) x 6

That’s twenty-four runs in total. Use the same recovery and rest protocol. Take 30 seconds recovery after each run and a full 3 minutes of rest after each batch of 6 runs.

Record your time splits through the zones by having a friend or training partner time you. Alternatively, carry a stopwatch as you run, starting and stopping as you pass the markers of the middle zone. This is important, as progression from this phase depends on your ability to stay within a recommended time range for the middle zone for each split.

The recommended ranges for each zone are below.

• 20 metres zone – range of -/+ 0.5 seconds between each split
• 30 metres zone – range of -/+ 0.75 seconds between each split
• 40 metres zone – range of -/+ 1 second between each split

This time range is the margin of error allowed between splits. For example, if you run the 20 metre zone in 3 seconds in one split, then 3.6 seconds in the next, you’re out of the recommended range by 0.1 seconds. These recommended ranges are to make sure you’re not overdoing it and to give an indication of when you can progress to the next phase.

When to Go Up a Gear:

If one of your run split times falls outside of the recommended range for that middle zone, be careful. You get one more run to be able to bring your time back down. If you fall outside the range twice, your session is over.

It’s typical for most runners to have completed all twenty-four runs in this session within one to two weeks. If you find you get to twelve runs and you can’t keep your speed up for your usual middle zone range, that’s perfectly fine. Hold to the day-on, day-off approach and repeat the session until you can do all twenty-four runs within your timed range for the middle zone.

Continue to Page 2 for the Fourth and Fifth Gears in the System

There isn’t an athlete out there who doesn’t want to get faster. This program will get you there.

The Fourth Gear: Time to Get After It

The fourth phase is nearly identical to the third, except now you try to approach a speed above 85% of your maximum speed. If you’re unsure of your maximum speed, aim to drop 0.5 seconds from each of your split times from the last phase as a rough guide.

When to Go Up a Gear:

You’re now fully in a sprinting pattern but not completely putting your foot down. At this level of speed and subsequent stress to your body, change the frequency to a one-day-on, two-days-off approach. As for the previous phase, you stay in this phase if you can’t complete twenty-four runs whilst staying within your timed range for the middle zone in the interval. You can keep your cyclic aerobic and strength training going if applicable on your days off.

The Fifth Gear: Flooring It and Braking Hard

In this final bout of speed training, I recommend using a similar approach of acceleration-hold-deceleration. It’s this pattern that carries over well to sport, with deceleration mechanics coming into play.

You’ll only need a space of up to 70 metres maximum. You will use a similar session outlay as in the third and fourth steps, with the same recovery and rest protocol, but with the following changes in distances:

• (20m-30m-20m) x 6
• (10m-30m-10m) x 6
• (5m-20m-5m) x 6
• (10m-40m-10m) x 6

You’ll see that the middle zone is similar to before and between 20 to 40 metres. Take your best time for each of the 20 to 40 metre zones from the fourth stage and use it as a target range for this final phase. You will have completed this phase if you can stay within 0.2 seconds of your best time for each zone on each run.

Cycle Through the Gears

It’s common for athletes to plateau with extended speed training. This means your nervous system needs a rest. If you find yourself losing speed or unable to complete a phase as recommended in the final stage, drop back two stages for one week, then move up to the next phase for the next week until you return to the stage your were previously struggling with. Use a cyclic approach to balance your stimulus and recovery and get the most out of this program.

I’ve used this simple repeat sprinting program for many athletes for years, with only a few subtle variations as required. Its progressive nature has proved very forgiving for athletes in pre-season training and returning from injury. Whilst the program is clearly challenging, most of my guys who’ve done it have told me that they don’t feel like they’re doing enough.

I recall one Australian footballer telling me he was concerned that when he returned to the main squad for the season he would be undertrained. He needn’t have worried. He ran far quicker and longer than others who had done infinitely more volume at God-knows-what intensity. I’ve used it for my own development and had no trouble going from a football season to a half marathon without no specific training. Trust this program. It works.

More Like This:

• Move Really Quickly: Short Sprints for Long Term Awesomeness
• It’s the 23 Hours a Day You’re Not Running That Count
• Become a Lion: Build Your Aerobic System
• New on Breaking Muscle

Photo 1 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Photo 2 courtesy of CrossFit.

The post Need Speed? A 5-Gear System to Become a Faster Runner appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

The true answer is, it depends. Everyone is different. Everyone’s jogging is different. Everyone’s training history is different. Everyone’s movement behaviour is different. And everyone requires an individual approach to waking up the nervous system so it can be at its most efficient.

What’s the best way to warm up for jogging? The answer used to be to stretch and start off slow. More recently, the answers are clouded in clinical studies, systematic reviews, and expert opinion.

The true answer is, it depends. Everyone is different. Everyone’s jogging is different. Everyone’s training history is different. Everyone’s movement behaviour is different. And everyone requires an individual approach to waking up the nervous system so it can be at its most efficient.

Preparing your body for the repetitive impact of jogging is critical if you want to improve.

However, there is one way to warm up for a jog everyone should include in their routine – skipping. Read on to understand why.

Download the Right Preparation Software

It is critical that your body is prepared for the force of jogging movement. Preparing your body means adapting it to hit the ground quickly and repetitively. That requires a nervous system with healthy hardware to detect contact from pressure on the skin, ligaments, tendons, and muscles. Your nervous system also needs a software program that enables it to rebound off the ground quickly when it detects that contact.

Failing to have this hardware and software means inefficient jogging, wasted energy, faulty biomechanics, slower times, and increased soreness due to stress on tissues that shouldn’t have been stressed. For jogging, the hardware is doing other warm up elements like mobility preparation and light aerobic activity such as walking beforehand. The favourable software program is skipping.

Why Static Stretching is a Waste of Time

Your pre-jogging routine is likely one of two things – static stretching or dynamic movement. One of them wastes your time. The other enhances your results.

Let’s look at the time-waster first. One argument for static stretching is that it improves your range of movement. Well, jogging doesn’t actually require much range of movement. It only requires control of a short range of movement. So range of motion is not the reason you don’t jog well. That’s one argument for static stretching out the window.

“Foregoing skipping is fine if you’re an experienced jogger who rebounds from each step perfectly and doesn’t fall on each step. But those joggers are few and far between.”

Contrary to popular belief, having a better range of movement doesn’t protect you against injury. Indeed, having too much range of movement can be a risk factor for injury and decreased performance in some populations. In other populations, having more movement is associated with better performance. My point is that mobility is individual and context specific. Though there is evidence that static stretching might reduce musculotendinous injuries, static stretching probably improves range of motion through affecting the nervous system, not by lengthening muscles or tendons. And there are better ways of preparing your nervous system.

Your Feet Need to Bounce, Not Fall

The scientific literature points to dynamic movement preparation being the better option. The term dynamic means characterized by constant change, activity, or progress. This means actually moving, not standing and stretching. It means preparing your body fully for the demands of the upcoming task, with short and long-term performance gains as known side-effects. It’s not mobility we should be chasing, but control of that mobility, and this is where dynamic warm ups come into their own. For a morning jog, your nervous system just isn’t ready for the fatiguing reflex-driven control of the forces at play on your foot. You’ve got to help it out, and skipping is just the dynamic warm up to do so.

If you can’t hop on one foot repeatedly, your jogging is really just controlled falling onto your feet instead of rebounding from them. If you fall enough times, you’ll get hurt. So you must learn to bounce. A hop, as we do in skipping, requires control of a one-leg landing, using the elasticity in the tendons of the foot, ankle, knee, and hip to rebound you off the ground. You can’t skip by landing on your heel, so it forces you to make use of the elasticity in your feet.

Skipping encourages your foot tendons to activate and control your movement.

When you activate these elastic reflexes in your foot tendons by skipping it triggers a reflex to control movement at the knee and hip as well, resulting in better landing control and more efficient biomechanics. This is exactly what thorough movement preparation should do: address impairments like lack of movement in a joint or tissue. It then needs to challenge that joint or tissue to coordinate within a pattern of movement at speeds and loads approaching that of the main element of training. The latter area is where skipping plays a particularly crucial role. It links the whole leg and core at forces above your bodyweight with a speed of foot contact similar to running.

The Ideal Skipping Prescription

How much should you skip? I’ll give you an answer: not just when your body is warmed up and you’ve broken a light sweat. Where I live, that can result from a minute or two of just walking. Your body is only fully prepared for jogging when you’ve maximally activated your nervous system to handle repetitive landings.

Skip for twenty percent of your warm up routine, or better yet, skip for twenty percent of your entire jogging time. This can be done all at once, or in small portions of minutes. For example, if you want to warm up for a ten-minute jog, skip for two minutes, or do thirty seconds for every two minutes of jogging. There’s no science to this twenty percent, but it does align with ratios of cardiovascular training for improved performance: approximately eighty percent of aerobic activity and twenty percent of a much higher demand activity.

You Can’t Afford to Skip Skipping

When Gray Cook said “you can skip a step, but don’t miss a step,” he meant that it’s okay to not do some elements of evaluation, if you know that you won’t miss something very important.

When you don’t skip in your jogging warm up you do miss something important: the signal to your nervous system to control the landing of your feet. Foregoing skipping is fine if you’re an experienced jogger who rebounds from each step perfectly and doesn’t fall on each step. But those joggers are few and far between. It’s likely that you can’t afford to skip skipping.

More Like This:

• Why Trail Running Improves Your Movement Control
• Stretching Doesn’t Work (the Way You Think It Does)
• Impact Forces: Simple Exercises to Strengthen Your Feet
• New on Breaking Muscle

Photos courtesy of CrossFit Empirical.

The post Why You Should Skip Your Jogging Warm Up appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Let me tell you a story that will surprise you. It’s about a performance athlete, whose rehab after a calf injury was targeted in a bizarre way and demonstrated extraordinary results. I say this rehab was “bizarre”, because it wasn’t mainstream. The athlete in question was a footballer who had injured his calf and came to me for treatment and rehab. He had a tremendous capacity to run, jump and play in one of the toughest games on the planet – Australian football.

You need strong calves to play a sport like Australian football.

Here’s what he told me:

“My calf hurts, and I can only do 22 slow rep calf raises on that leg, compared to 28 on the other.”

22 to 28 calf raises. A 21% asymmetrical deficit. I got to work, performing a test to demonstrate deficits in control of movement at the limits of stability, then put a handful of targeted correctives in place to improve stabilizing performance after initial assessment. After these stabilizers were put in place, I retested the athlete’s performance.

In three days, we reduced this asymmetry from 20% to 6%, increased load tolerance by 75%, and his speed under load by 9%. If it only matters what I can prove, that’s the proof. Here’s how the story unfolded.

My Problem with the Calf Raise

It turned out the athlete in question had injured his soleus. The soleus muscle has multipennate fibres. This means instead of the fibres converging into one tendon and one point of attachment, the fibres converge on several points on more than one tendon.

Multipennate muscles like the soleus aren’t designed to contract and relax in movement like a slow rep calf raise – they’re designed to contract and hold length, strongly, to give the Achilles tendon something to grab against so it can act like a spring. It’s an isometric muscle. A stabilizing muscle. With this in mind, I would argue the calf raise, this athlete’s test of choice, asks the soleus muscle to work in a way it’s not designed to. So I used another method.

A Better Test: The LQYBT

The test I used was The Lower Quarter Y-Balance Test (LQYBT), an extensively researched and reliable test that highlights increased risk of future injury. A key element the LQYBT tests is whether asymmetries exist between the left and right foot in balance. It tells me how well the athlete can balance on one leg and reach the other foot forward as far as possible without losing balance, then return to the starting position. It also tests how well they can control movement, and how far out of their comfort zone of control they can get. In other words, how good their stabilizing muscles are at providing support as their bigger “prime mover” muscles reach.

This athlete reached 50.5cm on his injured side and 63cm on his other side. We see right away the glaring asymmetry working out at around – you guessed it – 20%. The echo of the calf-raise test is clear, and the LQYBT has far more research supporting its results.

The Hierarchy of Performance Rehab

Now, traditional rehab or training for a calf injury of this nature at this point would be to strengthen the muscle. Calf raises and stretches, right? Well, this established powerhouse running athlete had a mature training body, so strengthening would take about six weeks to see significant improvement.

I took a different approach. I didn’t have six weeks, I didn’t think we needed that long, and I didn’t know that the reason for the calf injury was a strength issue. I also didn’t know that the calf injury wasn’t related to weak links elsewhere in his body.

Training stability is critical to any functional rehabilitation.

The hierarchy of approaching this task is to restore freedom of movement of limited body parts, then retrain the body to control this movement. After restoring mobility in a joint, or set of joints/tissue, there’s a window of opportunity to take the increased feedback from local “movement detecting nerves” and improve control of the joint. The first step is to coach and cue the athlete to demonstrate minimal to no movement at the joint(s) of interest, maintaining appropriate alignment in the presence of other body part movements.

When this static stability is achieved with competence, it’s then essential to coach dynamic stability – where the athlete demonstrates unrestricted freedom of movement in a supportive situation while also maintaining appropriate alignment.

Evaluation, Mobilization, Stabilization

According to this hierarchy, I evaluated the athlete for weak links and attempted to clear them up first. His potential weaknesses fell into three categories:

• Pain: The athlete had local muscle pain. It is well known that pain affects signals to the body, muscle co-ordination, and force output, so I needed to treat this effectively to support full nervous system involvement.
• Blocked movement/mobility problems: The athlete had mobility issues. Limited joint hinging, joint sliding, and joint gliding dampens the movement feedback that the central nervous system receives. If a joint is limited, the small nerves that detect movement in that joint will not send signals to the central nervous system about how to behave around that joint.
• Leaked forces/stability or control-of-movement problems: These issues inevitably lead to inefficient control of movement of that joint and poor stability, and control-of-movement problems were evident in the athlete’s evaluation.

Here’s what we did to address these issues.

• Dry needles were used for the trigger points in the calf to address pain.
• Mobility problem areas were addressed with manual therapy and self-directed tissue desensitization via foam rolling.
• Finally, we incorporated some static stability and mobility drills, including leg lowering, toe touch progressions, half-kneeling presses, farmer’s walks racked with a kettlebell, and lunges forward single arm down with a kettlebell. Note that all of these drills included elements of mobility, static stability, and dynamic stability work.

No performance training was included at this point -yet.

The Result: Asymmetry Abated

After treatment concluded, we re-tested the athlete’s performance capacity.

Here are the results of the LQYBT testing:

To summarise:

Single leg movement control capacity (measured in the LQYBT) improved from a 20% asymmetry to a 1.5% asymmetry in just 11 days.

This is Not a Hypothesis

I put it to you that training stabilizers can improve performance. Training mobility, static stability, and dynamic stability of the whole body improved this athlete’s performance and reduced his injury risk. I can hear the detractors gathering. They can argue with those numbers. This is not a hypothesis anymore. This actually happened.

Here is the continuum of performance rehab:

1. Remove pain – it interferes with control of movement.
2. Restore mobility.
3. Create tasks and environments to challenge static stability and dynamic stability.
4. Measure to ensure the rehabilitation and training is on track to release the athlete to higher levels of testing.

What came next for our athlete?

• Reconditioning his running specifically so he could adapt to the imposed demands of running, with a body that is better prepared.
• Continuing to work his single leg capacity.

Prepare to perform. Measure it to prove you’re on track. Follow a system. Simple.

More Like This:

• Let’s Kill the Calf Raise
• Complex Drills For Better Human Movement
• Everything Is Connected: Fix Weak Links to Prevent Injury
• New on Breaking Muscle

Photo 1 courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Photo 2 courtesy of Greg Dea.

The post Stability For Symmetry: The Continuum of Performance Rehab appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

I can hear the yogaphiles beating at their keyboards already, denouncing me for having no idea what I’m talking about. Beat away. In the meantime, I’m going to explain why yoga can have no benefit for a performance athlete.

Yoga should give an individual more ownership of their body, not a lesson in how to cheat their way into positions they can’t sustain. Those who handle yoga poses well have the requisite tissue flexibility, joint mobility, stability, and motor control to do so and so reap the full benefits. For athletes without the flexibility it fundamentally requires, the benefits of a yoga prescription can be limited.

The Problem with Yoga for Most Athletes

How have I reached this conclusion? If you haven’t read my bio, you won’t know that I have provided performance physical therapy services to the best martial arts and gymnastics athletes in China, and have also conducted yoga classes for elite handball and volleyball athletes. I understand fully how to use yoga to address an individual’s movement, nervous system, and breathing requirements. In practice, I have noticed that the most favourable changes in yoga practice only occur in athletes who already possess a decent range of motion.

Most athletic disciplines are built on fierce competition, not movement perfection.

For example, my athletes in gymnastics and martial arts seemed to take to yoga very well, as their sport requires a certain focus on movement. Conversely, the field-based performance athletes brought their training-induced restrictions to the same movements, often achieving positions by giving up stability somewhere else because they lacked the appropriate mobility. Let’s look at this movement compensation in a bit more detail.

Challenging Versus Difficult

Here’s the thing. Great yoga practice only occurs when a task and environment facilitates a position or movement where breathing is challenged, but not difficult. A challenging task is a task pitched just beyond our level of skill that causes us to rise and meet it. A difficult task is a task that far outlies our skill set. If we complete a difficult task, it doesn’t enhance our skills – it just forces us to compensate around our deficiencies. Breathing with difficulty may teach the performance athlete a skill in compensating, but yoga is not about being a better compensator.

“Yoga is not a conditioning practice, unless your athletic endeavour is yoga, or at least a yoga-like activity.”

Yoga is about being a better breather and mover, and most athletes are supposed to move more freely and have better stability in some joints more than others. If they run out of free motion somewhere and try to keep moving beyond that limitation, it follows that they have to give up range of motion somewhere else to do so. With this in mind, we need to ask whether allowing athletes to attain yoga positions by getting looser in the wrong areas of their body is appropriate. I can’t see it being right.

But Doesn’t Yoga Correct Movement?

Correction is defined as a change that rectifies an error or inaccuracy. And it’s true, yoga is a great corrector of breathing and movement control with its challenging postures.

The underlying joint and tissue compliance highlights reflexes that allow for errors in movement to be detected – but only in athletes where tissue flexibility and joint mobility is already present. So its corrective benefits for the less mobile athlete are debatable.

Yoga is intended to take mindful ownership of the body – not to force it into unsustainable positions.

Yoga Isn’t a Conditioning Activity

Yoga is not a conditioning practice, unless your athletic endeavour is yoga, or at least a yoga-like activity. In which case, you’ll only become conditioned to do a lot of yoga. When I specify yoga is not a conditioning practice unless your performance is yoga-like in its nature (such as in the case of martial arts and gymnastics), I’m not saying that as a brush off.

A general principle to apply when wondering whether an activity is a correction or a conditioning activity is this: if they specialize in the technique of the activity, they are conditioning. If not, they are just correcting.

An Alternative Prescription

Should more immobile athletes keep attempting yoga? No. In my opinion, these individuals are better off dialing their positions right back and getting their mobility restrictions reset with the help of self-care or professional techniques.

More Like This:

• Mobility Work: You’re Doing It Wrong (and Too Long)
• You’re Not Getting Stronger Because You Don’t Know How to Move
• How and Why to Use All 3 Planes of Motion to Improve Your Mobility
• New on Breaking Muscle

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Why Yoga Isn’t Useful for Most Performance Athletes appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

The calf raise is an exercise that is widely and incorrectly used. In its most common form, with the athlete standing, and moving up and down like a dancing cockatoo, the calf raise only contributes to the problem it’s intended to remedy.

We need more than calf raises to improve foot feedback and reactive strength.

What the Calf Is Designed For

Biomechanics and physics help us understand why the calf raise won’t strengthen the calf properly, or at least usefully. The calf muscle exists as a spring tensioner for the nearby Achilles tendon. When the calf contracts, it doesn’t shorten but braces itself against the back of the shin bone and behind the knee. Anatomy indicates that this is just what the calf is designed for: each muscle fiber is lined at a slant, not vertically, producing an oblique tug on the surrounding tissue, not a longitudinal one. This brings a tension to the attached tissue and gives the Achilles tendon something to grab onto so it can work like a spring to propel you forward or up. This a crucial contraction for fundamental movements in sport and exercise.

The issue is, in modern times, we’re not using the calf muscle to brace the Achilles as well as we used to. In specialist jumping animals like the wallaby, the equivalent tendon reutilizes about 95% of the energy that goes into it with each step – a huge amount. But we’ve become used to not running and jumping and we’ve become accustomed to wearing shock-absorbing shoes instead of employing our Achilles to effectively recycle force impact from the ground.

Loading the Spring

We need more than a calf raise to fix this. We need exercises to create a calf that is repeatedly available to brace for every step so the Achilles can spring effectively. The exercises I would recommend are barefoot or minimalist shoe impact activities on firm surfaces, preferably on one leg to improve foot feedback and reactive strength.

These include:

• Fast skipping rope
• Hopscotch
• Agility ladder drills
• Small hurdle hops
• Stair running
• Pogo-hops
• Dancing
• Barefoot or trail running

The simplest of all of these is to go barefoot or trail running. When we run, each step causes a huge shock to the leg known as ground reaction force (GRF). On average, GRF is about four times your bodyweight. The foot contacts the ground for anywhere between a tenth of a second and a quarter of a second, so you get four times your body weight in force applied for a fraction of a second. A calf raise simply cannot replicate that. It is worth noting that barefoot running has a high risk for injury, and the first time you decide to run barefoot, the length of your driveway is a good distance to start. Sudden changes to training circumstances are a high risk for injury and you can’t be too careful.

That is why these drills are so good. They are self-limiting. The moment your feet can’t keep up with a jump rope, it clips your feet and you stop. Trail running is similar– tripping will catch you out. The failure of your nervous system to get the signaling right will be the reason you can’t keep up and that’s the best feedback to your current level of capability that exists. Hopscotch has less feedback because you can hop through it in a pretty ugly fashion, as with stair runs and dancing – but they’re still infinitely better than performing calf raises.

You can hopscotch your way to stronger calves.

The Proof Is In the Wild

So do calf raises just generate fatigue and trigger points and poor firing? Doesn’t that just cause weakness? Here’s what I think. Calf raises do more harm than good and they don’t transfer to the demands of sport. The proof is in the wild: long tendons supported by reactively bracing calf muscles exist in the best running and jumping animals and humans.

We can’t change our tendon length, but we can improve the reactive bracing behavior of our calves through integrated exercises like those above. But before y’all get out your shotguns for blasphemy, there is a place for them. When you’ve had a calf or lower leg injury, the area of the brain responsible for organizing nerve signals to the calf can suddenly go quiet and shrink in activity. Doing good old calf raises can reorganize this part of your brain, restoring nerve activity and the number of nerves involved.

Beyond that, isolated calf training fails the litmus test for an effective exercise for running and jumping sports.

More Like This:

• Building Better Calf Muscles: How the Calf Works and How to Work It
• Why Trail Running Improves Your Movement Control
• 3 Not-So-Obvious Exercises to Combat Achilles Pain
• New on Breaking Muscle

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Let’s Kill the Calf Raise appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

In performance terms, running is a pursuit. It’s a distance, for time. In mindset terms, running is a chance to be free from any situation. In system input terms, running is an opportunity to create positive or negative change.

These are true of all running. But if you also want to improve adaptability of your feet and lower limbs to improve both your running and other tasks, then introducing an environment that forces you to be aware of where your foot is going to land is beneficial. If you desire for adaptability of movement control from your feet up, trail running is for you.

Trail running forces you to be aware of where your foot is going to land.

Do You Trust Your Feet?

Your first consideration is whether you trust your feet. Think of Kayla Montgomery, an award winning cross country athlete with multiple sclerosis. As her body heats up, she loses sensation from the waist down. Not being able to feel her feet means an enormous amount of trust that her primitive reflexes are working for her with each step. That’s a stupendous amount of trust. Running on a trail, with tree roots, potholes, and undulations in any combination of directions requires an acceptance of weight to accommodate the shift in surface. That requires reflexive adaptation and some pre-planning of foot placement. It’s particularly neurologically stimulating.

The intensity that occurs with trail running is typically nowhere near track or pavement running by necessity. You have to dial it back to avoid tripping over. When you run on a pavement, you trust that the surface is consistent, so the automatic pattern of running is set in motion and you can put your foot down, literally. You can trust that you don’t need to adapt, so the purpose of each step is to reuse the elasticity of your tendons to quickly spring off the surface.

Why Slack-Lining Isn’t the Answer

But wait a minute. I hear my slack-lining friends asking, “Well if it’s foot adaptability you want, look no further than the slack-line!” Well, my friends, here’s why slack-lining is not a good exercise for runners.

Slack-lining is great for slowly-applied load to the feet where dynamic control of the subtalar joint and midfoot joints is required. Having a supple foot helps keep you on the line. But that’s not beneficial for running. In running on pavement, having a supple and adaptable foot is wasted energy – we need the midfoot NOT to be supple, but stiff. Not to keep you on the surface, but to bounce off quickly.

In running on a trail, we need a bit of both. The midfoot still needs to be stiff enough to bounce us off the ground, but supple enough to adapt to the surface. That mix of demands makes it very neurologically demanding, and great for increasing your foot adaptability.

Activation for Adaptability

To obtain the foot adaptability a runner dreams of, we have to trail run – and we have to ensure the foot has enhanced mobility of the small middle joints. Like any fitness endeavor, failing to prepare is to prepare to fail. The old trick of rubbing the sole of the foot across a golf ball is a very good one. To massage the feet is to enhance the sensitivity of them and to ripen the nervous system to reflexively react to the forces applied to it. This acts as a reset of the foot, and we used it successfully in the Chinese women’s volleyball team in preparation for our victorious FIVB World Cup.

Then comes activation. As Perry Nickelston says, we should follow a reset with activation before integrating it into more complex tasks. Activation can be as simple as scrunching and spreading the toes. It could also be walking on the ball of the feet, or on the heels for a short distance. It could be incorporated into split kneeling tasks like a halo, a curl to press, or a Turkish get up.

The final integration is as simple as double leg bounces transitioning to skipping before you head out onto the trail. Then locomotion. The quick foot rub with a golf ball, field hockey ball, cricket ball or even a tennis ball should be a key part of your pre-trail run routine.

Slack-lining is great for slowly-applied load to the feet – but it won’t help your running.

Appropriate activation enables you to pay better attention to the terrain, and this is complimented by having a sensitive interface with the earth with your shoe. I’m guided in this by the excellent podiatrist Tim Bransdon of The Running Lab. On his recommendation, Vivobarefoot shoes fits the four rules of simple footwear – light, flat, flexible and shaped like a foot, but these shoes protect the sole of the foot from sharp objects. Like all minimalist shoes, however, if they are a change from your usual shoes with a positive heel (where the heel section is thicker than the forefoot section), you have to dial back on volume (distance and time) and intensity (speed).

Trust In the Trail

Trail running is an invaluable inclusion to track or road running programs. The adaptability required on less trustworthy surfaces is neurologically challenging, which is great for learning. The physiological demand is lower than pavement or track, and there’s an opportunity to switch up your regular conditions and just get out there. Hit the trail to discover the great adaptability benefits running can provide.

More Like This:

• Fix Your Hill Running Technique for Faster, Smoother Runs
• The Pros and Cons of Barefoot Running: What the Research Says
• 2 Critical Exercises to Prepare Your Feet for Minimalist Footwear
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Why Trail Running Improves Your Movement Control appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

You would think every exercise that could be done to strengthen the core has already been done. Since Charles Atlas first advertised his bodybuilding programs in the 1970s and 1980s, training the midsection has become one of the biggest areas of fitness, right alongside arm training.

Back then, not getting sand kicked in your face was the emotional tug used to convince people to buy fitness programs. These days, the tug seems to be closely tied to social media. Photographs of chiseled abs and sculpted trunks are posted to harness short-term likes, retweets, and hearts. Hopefully, social media attention will eventually translate to YouTube views and advertising revenue.

These misguided attempts at gaining long-term followers may have a legitimate basis. We know the core looks great when there’s proportion. Mini-waists have had their turn. Bloated mid-sections appeal to the hedonists, who love their food and drink a little (or a lot) more than they love exploration of the “moving arts.”

So, what could be done differently? The current appeal is right on the money – thick, powerful cores built for show and go. That means muscle development and body fat reduction. Nothing covers those two more than exercises driven by both arms and legs. This year is about combinations. The core is involved in everything, so it makes sense to know how to get it involved in a variety of exercises for maximum benefit. Here are five of those exercises.

5 Cutting-Edge Core Combinations: Groundwork on Hands and Feet

Eminent clinicians and strength coaches Dr. Mark Cheng and Dr. Jimmy Yuan recently produced groundwork progressions for prehab and rehab. These progressions dial the right numbers when it comes to safely bringing arms and legs into specific injury-prevention core exercises.

Combining these great exercises with other ground-based workouts like Animal Flow ticks the boxes for injury prevention, dynamic strength, mobility with stability, and aerobic conditioning. Doctor Cheng says, “If you don’t own it, you’re correcting. If you own the movement, you can condition.” The combination of these programs is game changing – think push ups meets crawling meets wrestling with the earth.

When the Chinese women’s volleyball team wanted an abdominal workout to supplement their performance training, I included this at the heart of a brutal twelve-minute workout. This stoic group of highly trained athletes, who never complained during their grueling seven-hour training days, let out all sorts of groans, huffs, and puffs, patting their stomachs like a tap out.

Combine groundwork with workouts like Animal Flow for injury prevention, dynamic strength, and mobility with stability.

5 Cutting-Edge Core Combinations: Tall Kneeling Rotations With Load

The tall kneeling position is simply kneeling down with an upright trunk. Being in the tall kneeling position places the hip joints in extension – a rarely used posture that counteracts the sitting epidemic of our current lifestyle. It also replicates the start and finish position of squatting and jumping.

In this position, you can fall either forwards or backwards. That means muscle activation has to stop you from falling from the knees to neck, as well as in front and behind the hips, spine, and shoulders. This low-level reflexive stability is at the essence of core stability exercise.

When you add deep breathing exercises and rotation of the eyes, head, neck, and trunk, the brain and central nervous system light up like a New Year’s Eve fireworks display. There are so many benefits to this movement that teaching and cueing it will fill an entire workout.

Left: When you add rotation, the CNS lights up; Right: A kettlbell plus rotation gets deep into reflexive stability.

When you hold a kettlebell in front of or behind you, you tap into a further supply of muscle activity that was previously asleep. Add in rotation, and you get even deeper into the reflexive stability of the deeper core. That means you switch on a deep-seated metabolism. Watch the sweat pour out when the core furnace is turned on.

These exercises are best suited for warm ups, in between heavy lifts, and as an additional corrective or conditioning exercise when fatigued from the main training workout.

5 Cutting-Edge Core Combinations: Split Kneeling Rotations With Load

Shifting from tall kneeling to half or split kneeling challenges stability in the lateral direction, bringing the inner thigh, pelvic floor, and lateral hips more into the picture. Loading the movement with a kettlebell in one hand causes a disturbance to the trunk position, so the amount of muscle activity skyrockets in order to constantly adjust the vertical position.

Holding a kettlebell in one hand causes the muscle activity to skyrocket.

5 Cutting-Edge Core Combinations: Single Leg One-Arm Lifts

The natural progression in difficulty from split or half kneeling is to reintroduce the knee, ankle, and foot to the challenge, then remove one leg from the support. The kettlebell, being a distance from the axis of rotation (the hip), demands exceptional core control against rotation and flexion. That means the obliques, back muscles, lateral buttocks, hamstrings, and even inner thighs all work together with the pelvic floor, diaphragm, shoulder stabilisers, neck muscles, and feet. You name it, it’s involved. It’s a core party, and everyone’s invited.

Single leg one-arm lifts demand exceptional core control against rotation and flexion.

5 Cutting-Edge Core Combinations: The Turkish Get Up

The greatest quality of the Turkish get up is it is a self-coaching exercise. It says to you, “Lay down, hold this weight above your head, get yourself off the floor until you’re standing up, still holding it above your head. Now reverse it. Don’t drop the weight.” There are optimal ways to do it, but there are also many variations. No single repetition is perfect, and that is where the money is. If you’re not shaking, you’re not learning.

From a professional coaching and clinical point of view, there are screening elements within the Turkish get up that tell a coach how to add squatting, deadlifting, pressing, and all overhead work into a training program. If you’re a swimmer, there are elements that show your weak links in the pool, or on the road if you’re a runner. Combine that with eye and neck movement, bearing weight through the hand, ground working from the bridge, to split kneeling then standing up in a lunge, and you could have the greatest exercise to go missing for 300 years.

The greatest exercise to go missing for 300 years.

How to Bulletproof Your Workout

If you think the Pilates revolution is the fix-all for core stability, you’re playing right into the hands of countless health clinics who know you’re a sucker.

Abdominal exercises that are done on the floor use the ground to provide stability. If you’re laying on the ground and not rolling around with purpose to restore rolling patterns, you’re not getting the most from your groundwork.

If you’re low on time and want to add some bulletproofing to your workout, you should emphasise the tall kneeling and split kneeling positions due to their ability to stress or recruit the smaller stabilising core muscles. In contrast to standing core exercises, tall kneeling and split (or half) kneeling offer narrowed bases of support. This adds a challenge because the knee, ankle, and foot are unable to provide stability. Combining these narrow bases with loads and movement of the trunk and arms will magnify any core stability problems.

Improvements in timing of muscle activity and control of the spine will warm the hearts of rehabilitation professionals who like to see the core involved in injury prevention. Injury prevention means less trips to the clinic, and that’s money in your pocket, in every sense.

More Like This:

• Do You Know What Your Core Really Is and What it Does?
• At the Core of It: Creating Strength and Tension in the Body
• Everything Is Connected: Fix Weak Links to Prevent Injury
• What’s New on Breaking Muscle Today

Photos and collages 1-4 courtesy of Greg Dea.

Photo 5 courtesy of Andrew Read.

The post 5 Cutting-Edge Core Training Progressions appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Joint ill-health interferes with our ability to detect external and internal forces from the ground, the wind, an opponent, or our own inertia. Our ability to take in everything that occurs in wrestling, grappling, combat situations, or any situation with a direct opponent is measured in sport as an output.

The essence of an athlete is the ability to process internal and external sensory stimuli (inputs) into gross or fine patterns (outputs).

The essence of an athlete is the ability to process input stimuli into output patterns.

Poor Movement Isn’t Poor Coaching

Every effort to regain mobility improves the ability to detect subtle and not-so-subtle movement. Once athletes regain this movement, cues to improve skill will be more effective due to increased sensory input.

Once athletes regain mobility, cues to improve skill will be more effective due to increased sensory input.

How Ido Portal Helps Conor McGregor

Ido Portal and Conor McGregor both look as if they have excellent mobility in key areas (ankles, hips, thoracic spine, and shoulders). This means they will benefit from training in free movement and natural environments.

Following this sequence results in an improved readiness to display fine and gross motor patterns.

Conor McGregor demonstrates the value of mobility first, followed by the implicit cues that natural freeform movement provides. Following this sequence results in an improved readiness to display fine and gross motor patterns – in other words, the patterns that land or dodge a punch at the right time.

You’ll Also Enjoy:

• Let’s End the Stability Versus Mobility Debate
• Move Your Body, Move Your Brain: Training for Neuroplasticity
• Motor Control and Movement Patterns: A Must Read for Athletes
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

Photo courtesy of Andrius Petrucenia on Flickr (Original version) UCinternational (Crop) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

The post The Essence of an Athlete: How Portal Helps McGregor Win appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

But there have also been some exceptions, and they provide us with social guides as to how to elevate our species. For example, when Phil Walsh was tragically killed by his son, the entire AFL community was galvanizing in its actions, by people of all levels of involvement in sport. It was a case of people involved in sport realizing being a better person was more important than anything else, and it started with the coaches and their charges.

Another instance: On the night of England Netball’s opening win in the recent World Cup, England’s coach, Tracey Neville, rushed to the bedside of her suddenly ill father, who died that evening. Neville Neville was also the father of Manchester United legend, Gary and Phillip Neville. England goalkeeper Sonia Mkoloma summed up the rousing power of the situation when she said “We’re all about the team. So we’re sticking together and working hard.”

But despite these exceptions, some of the great turbulent events in world sport have yet to be resolved. So, where do we go to draw guidance? Simple. We go to some of the greatest coaches of modern society. Here are five of their most potent messages.

1. Good Coaches Build Rapport With Their Athletes

When athletes are included in the decision-making process regarding team issues, such as tactical options and alternative training drills, they are given meaningful choices. When they understand the logic behind key coaching decisions, such as team game plans and team selection, they are able to grasp the rationale for tasks and learn about limits and rules.

Better coaches understand, experience, and get involved in the building of this rational learning with their athletes. The change that comes with improving athletes starts with managing the outlook of athletes and people around sport.

Soccer managers Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger, and Jose Mourinho all played an extra five minutes each game – the five minutes immediately after the game, when everyone was watching to see the managers’ outlook on the results of the game. Sir Alex Ferguson noted, “This is part of the tapestry of Manchester United: the recovery. I always kept in mind that it was not all victories and open-top parades.”

Success in managing people’s outlook in the face of pressure helps those involved with sport, and society in general, deal with change. When an athlete or team suffers setbacks, a good coach has the immediate opportunity to change the perception about what that setback means. Creative genius Edward de Bono has found in his own studies that ninety percent of errors in thinking are due to the perception we hold. “If you can change your perception, you can change your emotion, and this can lead to new ideas,” de Bono has been quoted as saying.

2. Coaches Know Success Doesn’t Happen Overnight

“Success is not a goal, it’s a byproduct,” said Coach Eric Taylor. Sport gives us the opportunity to do simple things savagely well, for the benefit of achievement through process. “If you do the simple things savagely well, you may not be able to extend your life, but you can certainly expand your life,” said Mark Verstegen. The expansion of life starts with the support of a coach, with the words he uses with his athletes. Ferguson said, “Manchester United never gets beaten. We may occasionally run out of time, but we never believe we can be beaten.”

“Sport gives us the opportunity to do simple things savagely well, for the benefit of achievement through process.”

There are no more important people to share this message with than children involved in sports. Child development occurs faster when confidence is raised, which is why we need coaches around to restore confidence when losses occur. “Every man, at some point in his life, is going to lose a battle. He is going to fight and he is going to lose. But what makes him a man is that, in the midst of that battle, he does not lose himself,” said Coach Taylor.

3. Coaches Bring Athletes Together for a Good Cause

A good cause teaches us that the ego needs to be kept in check. In team sports, we have the opportunity to set competition goals that are bigger than the individual, minimizing ego-involvement and directing energy towards others less fortunate than ourselves.

Whatever the good cause might be, it needs clear direction towards a destination. It needs a positive theme and galvanizing effort to achieve greatness with ripples beyond the singular effort. A good cause is a place to start to build connections, and connections start with individual output. As Coach Taylor said once:

If you give a hundred percent of yourself tonight, people are gonna look at you differently. People are gonna think of you differently. And I promise you, you’re gonna look and think differently about yourselves.

The ability to coordinate competition goals bigger than the individual with those that are specific to the individual can only be done by a great coach. A coach who helps an athlete set competition and training goals that are related and referenced to the athlete is a better coach.

Athletes can also learn to avoid intra-team rivalries and social comparisons, which further minimizes ego-involvement. The coach-led development of individuals through self-referenced goals and self-set training empowers individuals to use sport for the greater good. The CrossFit community is particularly strong in this element.

4. Coaches Understand the Power of “Inverse Paranoia”

Sport provides the opportunity to understand that the world is literally conspiring to do us good, all the time. In popular psychology, it’s called “Inverse paranoia,” and it’s a hidden gem within sport. Regardless of the situation, each situation provides the opportunity for good, for better, and for best.

Nobody sums this up better than Mark Verstegen:

Your best isn’t good enough. That sounds harsh, and indeed it is. But having worked with the best of the best over the last two decades, I’ve learned what it takes to be the best. Anyone can hit excellence for a day, even a week or a month. That’s easy. But a high performer is one who does it consistently for years over the course of a career. You can be talented, work hard, and do all the right things, and it might not be enough. Not anymore. These days, performance is about results. It’s not just showing up every day, working hard, and doing the right things. That’s great. That’s expected. Performance is about showing up every day and hitting the bull’s eye regardless of the situation.

A coach is the perfect person to remind people in sport that, as W. Clement Stone once said, “Every negative event (that’s just made up, we decide it’s negative) has within it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”

5. A Good Coach Is Always Looking Forward

When you continue to do the same thing you have always done, you will mostly get the same result. The nature of achievement means reflection on results and adjustment. Sport is a great practical learning environment to get better. And when the downs of sport have the potential to upset the momentum towards being better, there’s always Coach Eric Taylor:

Listen to me, I said you need to strive to be better. I didn’t say you needed to be better than everyone else. But you gotta try. That’s what character is. It’s in the trying.

When a loss happens, the focus is often on continuing the evolution towards strengths, and that’s important. The weakness, however, are where the great coaches shine – they find those weaknesses and shore them up. Gray Cook calls it “managing your minimums.”

After losing the League title to Blackburn Rovers and FA Cup to Everton in 1995, Alex Ferguson said:

That’s in the past and I’m more interested in tomorrow. We’ve got to look forward now. There are big opportunities at this club and we have a lot of challenges ahead of us. You never go through a season where everything is rosy. When you get the bad moments you have to recover from it. The ability to do that is a tremendous credit to every player we’ve had here.

Final Reminders

With all the sociology around sport, it’s often the minimalist messages from a coach to an athlete that are the best reminders of what’s important:

• “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.” – Coach Eric Taylor
• “Just spend more time being cool.” – Coach Rett Larson

And therein lies the big opportunity for sports coaches to make a difference. There’s something in that for all of us.

More Like This:

• Drug Use in Sports: Can We Ignore It Any Longer?
• How to Be Coachable: Advice From Expert Coaches
• Dan John’s Guide to Building an Intentional Community
• New on Breaking Muscle Today

Photos courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post 5 Ways Coaches Can Make Our World Better appeared first on Breaking Muscle.

Supersets don’t have to blast the nervous system. This is contrary to popular belief in a fitness industry that prioritises working out over training. Coaches are in the business of coaxing performance from the nervous system – managing the process of giving as much as a sport requires as often as possible to get the fastest gains.

When the balance between stimulus and recovery is lost, supersets can become damaging to your athletes, your reputation, and potentially the bottom line of both the coach and athlete.

The Relationship Between Performance and Recovery

EXOS founder Mark Verstegen often states, “Recovery is the limiting factor on performance.” Brandon Marcello, PhD, has said, “I think Pre-covery is the limiting factor. Sleep & nutrition are the foundation for performance and recovery.” While both are true to some extent, it’s important to remember pre-recovery can’t be influenced once you’re working out. But recovery can be influenced at this time.

When we include supersets however, they can do one of two things:

1. Continue to blast the nervous system and lengthen the time to full recovery
2. Caress the nervous system and shorten the time to full recovery

In order to enhance recovery rather than delay it, select movement drills that require control and challenge stability.

“Be warned, if your athlete moves worse after their training session compared to when they started, your training program balance is tipped too far into the stimulus and far away from the recovery.”

A superset that puts the athlete at the edge of their ability to control forces in multiple directions says to the nervous system, “I want you to pay attention to your environment again, and to adapt to internal and external stimuli. This is function. I want you to recalibrate your ability to withstand adverse conditions. This is robustness.”

When we use this style of superset, we also speak to the nervous system in the way it learns best: subconsciously, by reflexes. Our primary strength exercises are not reflex driven. They’re conscious efforts. Superset movements that are performed on the edge of ability, where the athlete needs to manage their mistakes, are done reflexively and subconsciously. These rich stimuli stimulate the nervous system and set the athlete up for better recovery.

A great example is the Turkish get up (TGU), or indeed any transitional phase of the TGU. Holding a kettlebell overhead at a distance is a wobbly task that requires control. The wrist would prefer to fall into extension. The shoulders would prefer to fall in any direction. The trunk and pelvis have to align themselves in a constantly changing, yet reflexively stable position under the weight. The TGU is particularly challenging to the nervous system after performing any task that requires great exertion, like a bench press or deadlift.

The TGU is particularly challenging to the nervous system after performing any task that requires great exertion.

The Role of Primary Strength Exercises

It’s a different theme for strength-biased supersets. Primary strength exercises are usually biased towards producing or absorbing force in one direction. A push. A pull. A press. A lift. Fine motor control is not required. Indeed the nervous system does its best to avoid fine motor control. It just needs to exert maximum effort in one direction.

Recalibrating the Nervous System

There are plenty of other useful superset exercises that start in a position similar to the transitional stages of the TGU. Each exercise plays a role in recalibrating the nervous system after it was blasted by a primary strength set.

Here are some examples:

• The kettlebell arm bar
• A split kneeling one-arm press
• A farmer’s carry/one arm overhead carry/one arm carry
• Narrow stance split squats

Even the ground-based positions play a role in resetting the nervous system. Animal Flow is one example. Ground Force Method is another. Athletes who normally handle Animal Flow and other ground-based work can try these drills as supersets.

“But if you train hard and then expect your athletes to train again before they’ve had a couple of days to fully recover, then you’re training them to become better compensators.”

Assess the athlete’s performance by watching for the following:

• Poor performance after primary lifts will tell you how fried the athlete is.
• Doing them well says the athlete has room for more blasting.
• If an athlete comes into training the day after a big session and still can’t to ground-based work, you know his or her nervous system has not recovered.

If you need more convincing, consider that the neuromuscular system learns best and quickest under the following circumstances:

1. When more than one joint is involved in the drill.

• For example, not an isolated elbow curl, but a curl to press.

2. When both an arm and a leg are involved.

• For example, a curl to press in narrow split kneeling or split standing.

3. When the arm and leg are on opposite sides of the body.

• For example, left side curl to press, right side single leg stance.

4. When the moving limb crosses the mid-line of the body.

• For example, a split kneeling or split standing chop or lift.

5. When both arm and leg are moving around a stable core.

• For example, single-leg, single-arm RDL, or even better yet, a full Turkish get up.

Targeting Recovery Based Supersets

As you can see, there are many positions and variations that can be used for recovery-biased supersets. Each one creates a stimulus that provides neuromuscular learning, as opposed to neuromuscular oppression. An oppressed nervous system does not grant you strength.

Many coaches ignore this recovery-superset concept because they think they have too little time to do fewer blasting exercises. Be warned, if your athlete moves worse after their training session compared to when they started, your training program balance is tipped too far into the stimulus and far away from the recovery. You’re not preparing them to perform. You’re preparing them to need more recovery.

Doing It Right the First Time

“If you don’t have time to do right, where will you find the time to do it over?”
John Wooden

More blasting is fine if they have days to recover. But if you train hard and then expect your athletes to train again before they’ve had a couple of days to fully recover, then you’re training them to become better compensators. That will eventually cost you and them. Their movement will be worse, due to soreness. This will lead them to work around their limitations. They’ll find movement in areas that aren’t supposed to move. They will run out of movement where they should have plenty. This will not only negatively affect their durability, but it will also negatively affect their efficiency.

“You can condition through sloppy form, or condition through impeccable form. Same time and energy spent. Not the same level of efficiency though, and therefore, not the same level of performance or safety.Anyone can go hard, but is it that hard to go smart after all? And above all, is it very smart at all to NOT go smart?”

Erwan Le Corre

Choose your supersets wisely. Your athlete’s career could depend on it.

More like this:

• 100 – Your Magic Number for Everyday Strength
• It’s Not About Today – 5 Excellent Strength Training Finishers
• The Secret of Badass Force Production
• What’s New on Breaking Muscle UK Today

Photo 1 & 3 courtesy of Jorge Huerta Photography.

Photo 2 courtesy of Andrew Read.

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