These guys aren’t hockey or lacrosse players in Pittsburgh, they are actually wrestlers in Cleveland.  Next time that you are upset about something get this video out to put things back into perspective!

Check your friends and ask yourself would they do this for you?  My mother always said that a real friend will answer the phone and help you at 3:00 in the morning.

Coumpy said it best referring to so few of our friends being like Tracy Lawrence’s song “Find Out Who You Friends Are”.

Enjoy!

This is an awesome article recently published on Elite Fitness Systems website.    When Charlie Francis(top speed coach in the world), Matt Nichol(Toronto Maple Leafs), and Milo(Cleveland Browns) all agree on something- I would pretty much hold it as gospel.

Since almost all high level hockey player have labral tears why would you do over speed on a hockey treadmill?  Doesn’t make sense there either…

In my track days, I personally used the bands for overspeed work and I felt “myself holding myself back”.  Kind of weird when I was attempting to program my body to move faster.?.?.?

Enjoy…

http://www.elitefts.com/documents/gimmick.htm

I’ve been annoyed by two issues that I’ve been “around” this week.

The first is a client’s doctor telling him not to train with me because I loaded his spine with to much weight during one training session.  Did I push the issue?  Yes.  I had him walk with sandbags the were pretty heavy for a 15 year old.  The total load wasn’t much greater than his body weight.   Considering that he’s pretty strong for a 15 year old and the heaviest thing that he came in contact with all week were 40 lbs DB’s that he lunged with rather easily.  Honesty, I’m just annoyed.  Shouldn’t the question be asked about the loads and volume being experience over the coarse of the week or month?   I guess I’m a dumb “personal trainer” who beats athletes up.  I guess when I deload certain athletes every 4th week its my horoscope aiding me in that decision.  I love stars…. Thanks to Dr Stuart McGill and his cutting edge research on the spine, my major concern with any athlete is spine compression and spine health.  I have eliminated and alerted several different exercises because of his research.  I would hope to think that “an expert” would ask a bit more than a basic question or two regarding my methodologies.

The other issues is an athlete that has a Labral tear(hip).  He probably needs surgery.  Why?  Because he never leaves the ice.  His heart and love of the game is tremendous.  His love and hard hardheadedness have caused his overuse injury and it really bothers me because he wasn’t a client and should have been.  It’s frustrating when there is an athlete that works his butt off and hurts himself from doing to much of one thing.    There are too many athletes that aren’t willing to earn it, he is and that sucks.

How much can you play?  Youth hockey players in Pittsburgh play 60-70 AAA games plus 18-25 high school hockey games and practice on the days that they are off the ice.  No comment on the High School Hockey for a AAA players.  Lets face it, the body needs a rest.  The young athletes need to get off the ice.  Americans don’t get it.  Europe/Russian countries produce so many more highly skilled players than we do with less ice and skaters.   Look at the Olympic roster.   The Russian team looks like a freaking NHL All Star Team.  I guess our kids need to go to 5 summer hockey camps to get more hockey.

Here are a few comments regarding taking some risks in regards to training an athlete who isn’t 6′4″ 230 and hasn’t signed a professional contract and isn’t entitled to one-yet.

http://ericcressey.com/newsletter157.html

I had similar issues when I played Legion Baseball right after the high school season.  We played 60 games every summer.  This translates to a game ever night and double headers on the weekends.  I choose to play football and run track in college.  Let me ask you this,  how do you think I felt about baseball at the end of the summer?  Let me tell you it wasn’t positive.   I appreciate the time invested by our coaches.  They loved the game and wanted the best for us.  The problem is that they didn’t know all that much regarding skill development and burning kids out.  A 16 year old kid doesn’t have much of a social life when the game is over between 8-8:30 and has to shower after before being a kid.  At the time, a 16 year old couldn’t drive past midnight.  How about playing double headers 2-3 hours away on the weekends?  That’s the social aspect,  what about the skill development?

Playing that much didn’t allow me to practice my skills.  Who wants to practice skills when I didn’t have time to work/make money and be a kid.  I loved baseball and spent thousands of hours hitting and throwing and training while growing up.  During the season we should have played league teams and a few very good programs.  Playing 30 games and practicing would’ve been great.  Instead, to many teammate of mine didn’t go on to play in college that should have.  Why do I feel these coaches telling me that we didn’t love it enough?   If you have read anything that I have wrote, you agree that this wasn’t the case.  This is how I feel about living and thinking inside the box!

I had a great conversation with an NHL strength and conditioning coach who has spent over 20 years being involved with hockey and the NHL.  We talked for about 30 minutes on topics ranging from Olympic Lifting to “Sport Specific Training”.    We discussed several athletes that he has worked who have trained with “experts” on “balance and sport specific training”.  The funny thing  that these athletes weren’t any more prepared than other hockey players.  They were actually weaker in the lower body.  Isn’t hockey a unique sport that’s played on two blades?  Isn’t leg strength a key component in being a better athlete let alone a better hockey player?

As a performance specialist, I don’t have an unlimited window with my athletes.  With hockey, the season lasts over 7 months-depending on the level.  You can’t get strong during such a  long and demanding season.  The US developmental program does a great job of developing its athletes by not forcing them to play too many games.  They spend time in developing the athlete! The US Program gets them strong and then gets them explosive.  Not the opposite.  By the way, these are 17 and 18 year old athletes.  At an age when one could argue the need for sports specific, they don’t really get very sports specific.  The theme is athlete specific.  A stronger athlete can learn the specificity of their particular sport!

I was on the ice working with a female athlete who plays major DI hockey this week.  She wasn’t strong enough to take pass, settle the puck, and snipe.  Funny thing is that I didn’t want the puck to settle at all.  Should she squat on a BOSU ball or a stability disk?  Hell NO!  She needs to get as strong as possible as soon as possible!  Until then, she is only using a small percentage of what God gave her.

Moral of the story,  hockey players aren’t powerlifers, strongmen, or Olympic Lifters.  They do however require many of the qualities(strength, explosiveness, power) that those strength athletes share.  The art is finding what mix works best. Pittsburgh hockey players need to be strong two way players in order to have chance a earning playing time in college let alone having an NHL career.    Last time I checked, the next scoring phenom isn’t coming out of Pittsburgh or the US for that matter.  Know your role and ditch the sport specific marketing shit and work your butt off in the gym and on the ice.

some issues may exist in internet explorer while I update the site…  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Eric Cressey published this article on T-Nation and it’s worth your time to read it.

I particularly enjoyed his comments about stability training.

Great squatting form here!

“So, I guess the question is why bother doing this stuff if there really isn’t any evidence to suggest that it directly improves performance? I could take the “it may lead to injury” perspective, but I think that the “why waste your time?” mindset is far superior. Of course, if you’re training with unstable surfaces just for comedic value, carry on.”

Also consider that Eric is an expert on the subject completing his Masters Degree at UConn which very well may be the top Exercise Science Program in the country.

“I’ve spent a good chunk of the last five years studying unstable surface training (UST). In fact, the results of my master’s thesis were published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research in 2007, and I’ve written an entire e-book about the topic.”

Hockey players, just because you skate on two thin blades doesn’t mean that you should spend your entire life training on them.  There’s a time and place and that’s on the ice!

Here’s the article, enjoy!

Bulletproof That Back
by Eric Cressey

http://www.tmuscle.com/bulletproof_that_back

“Sport-Specific” Training for Youth: Athlete and Parents Beware, Part 1

By Brett Klika

For www.EliteFTS.com

“Sport-specific” is the new marketing buzzword when it comes to strength and conditioning programs for youth. Uneducated masses of parents and coaches herd their sports teams at a young age into “athletic performance” programs that supposedly address the strength, movement, and speed demands of one specific sport. The idea looks great on a marketing flyer, particularly in the American youth sports culture of “win right now.” Unfortunately, the notion of early specificity ignores well-established pedagogies of child development and motor learning—the foundation of youth sport skill acquisition and application. The fact is most trainers implementing these programs aren’t qualified to implement programs for anyone, more less youth.
Most of the time, they are ex players in the specific sport. They find exercises that they think are “cool,” slap the term “functional” on them, tie some colorful equipment in, and bingo! You have yourself a sport-specific program! Their “program design,” if any, is based on the cool toys and “secret exercises” they employ with kids who can’t do a push-up! That’s like teaching a child to read by giving them US magazine! There’s no valuable content and no skill acquisition…just stuff to get their attention.

Training that is specific to the demands of a particular sport does have merit at the higher levels, assuming the athlete is developmentally sound. The purpose of Part I of this article is to discuss the role of a general strength, conditioning, and movement program in a young athlete’s development and how attempting to get too specific at a young age can be detrimental to future performance. Part II will discuss how implementing certain “sport-specific” protocols at the appropriate phases of competition and development can be beneficial to performance.

A good athlete is a combination of raw athleticism (big, strong, fast, adaptable) and sport-specific skill (skill involved with a specific sport like hitting, kicking, or dribbling). When parents and athletes are looking for a coach to help them be better at their sport, they must realize the difference between the two factors involved with being a good athlete. Sport-skill coaches (baseball coaches, basketball coaches) are specialists in developing the specific skill sets needed for that game. Athletic performance coaches or “strength and conditioning” coaches are
specialists in making an athlete generally faster, stronger, more mobile, and more reactive. Unless either of these coaches has extensive, qualified experience in developing both factors of athleticism (raw and specific skill), they can’t create a program that optimizes both.

A sport-skill coach should teach youth developmentally appropriate levels of sport skills and tactics. An athletic performance coach should help develop youth’s general physical proficiency. The idea of “sport-specific” training for youth suggests that an athletic performance coach can help develop and improve specific sport skills by simulating them in the weight room. As mountains of research as well as empirical evidence will state, this is a flawed notion when considering the developmental needs of young athletes.

One of the well-established laws of motor learning is that the only way to improve a skill is to practice that skill as accurately as possible. For example, if you want to hit a baseball, learn the mechanics of hitting and practice them over and over in as realistic an environment as possible. Swing with a bat that you will use in a game and hit off a pitching style similar to what you will see in a game. This teaches your neuromuscular system “patterns” that get stored in your brain like computer programs. The more you practice a certain way, the more grooved and automatic these patterns become. This is where the idea of sport-specific conditioning in the weight room becomes a problem.

Coaches will take an athlete and try to replicate the baseball swing with cables, medicine balls, and other implements. If this move is replicated enough, the neuromuscular system thinks, “Is this a baseball swing? It’s slower and more loaded so maybe we should adjust the ‘baseball swing’ program in the brain to allow for a different pattern.” This confusion causes the actual baseball swing pattern to be compromised. That isn’t my “opinion” or “approach.” It’s actually a well-established “fact.” That doesn’t mean that doing rotational work isn’t good for baseball players. After all, lumbar stability and thoracic mobility is essential for swinging athletes. Weight room drills such as Kaiser chops and medicine ball throws can help create this. Realize that these drills are done to improve mobility and core strength, both attributes that can prevent injury and promote performance. They aren’t implemented to copy a baseball swing.

Beginner athletes need a program that begins with general physical skill development. Basic aerobic fitness, coordination, and motor skills such as throwing, kicking, catching, and climbing are the foundation of physical development, regardless of what sport an athlete plays. Establishing a level of proficiency in these foundation activities at a young age lays the framework for an improved ability to learn sport skills quicker and more effectively. For example, a 10-year-old should learn how to kick a target, even if he is a baseball player. The hip flexion, knee extension, hamstring flexibility, and contra-lateral leg balance involved with kicking lays the foundation for coordinated lower body movement and power development. This can help him learn to run faster, jump higher, or be more agile in the years to come. This can help him in any sport he decides to play.

As athletes get older, their physiology allows for the development of skills requiring a greater magnitude of mental focus and physical output. This is a period of development in which techniques for effective movement can be introduced and adapted. Proper movement technique for running, jumping, acceleration/deceleration, throwing, and strength activities should be introduced. Again, this is regardless of the sport that the young athlete plays. Once techniques of different skills are mastered, maximizing their output is the goal. For example, once sprinting technique is learned, timing a 40-yard dash and aiming to improve that time would be an example of maximizing output. Another example would be getting stronger in the weight room on certain lifts. Giving the athlete these greater output capabilities with efficient biomechanical movement allows them to adapt these new skills to the needs of their sport.

Athletic development should focus on creating a sound physical specimen with the appropriate mobility, stability, coordination, strength, and movement efficiency in order to promote performance and hinder injury. It is up to that specimen’s ability to apply these attributes toward sports skill. The more thorough and appropriate the developmental program, the better their ability to adapt.

Coach Brett Klika is the director of athletic performance at Todd Durkin’s, Fitness Quest 10 in San Diego, California. He specializes in youth fitness and athletic performance, overseeing a staff of eight strength coaches developing programs for over 300 youth per week, both athletes and non-athletes. He has authored articles for a variety of publications, produced four DVDs on fitness and athletic performance, and presents around the world on topics in fitness and sports performance. Brett can be reached at brettklika@hotmail.com.

Special thanks to Cal Dietz at the University of Minnesota.

With proper diet you shouldn’t need this crap anyway!

http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2009/NEW01977

http://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20090501/hydroxycut-recall-due-to-liver-injuries

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30518843?GT1=43001

I got this from David Robinson(not the NBA guy) via Mikey Serafin… it comes from the “dairy of a mad man” on the animal pak website.

I saw the wrestler as well.  Great flick.  It left me with an uneasy feeling…

http://www.animalpak.com/html/article_details.cfm?section=livin&id=215

Entry #152
“With my boots on. Recently, I had the pleasure to view the film “The Wrestler” with my lady. While we both thought very highly of the movie, we each came away from it with a different feeling. My girl seemed to see it in a sad and depressing light whereas I found it inspiring in a tragic and melancholic sort of way. Randy “The Ram”, while damaged and reeling, was nonetheless a warrior who for all of his heartbreaking flaws was intent to live and die true to himself, as he saw fit, the judgment of society be damned. There is a somber beauty in that which speaks to me. They used to say that the only way for a true gunslinger in the old west to go out was to die with his boots on. That always sounded right. There is a beauty in doing you until your day is done. To wander aimlessly through life devoid of passion or dreams or goals, bitter and unmotivated, broken and apathetic–that is no way to live. To conduct yourself in accordance with the expectations and standards of another is the ultimate sell out, the sale of your soul. I pray that I can only be so lucky as to struggle and strive and fight. To rise and fall, to bleed and sweat and cry to the heavens. To spend my numbered days and expend my indomitable life force in the unyielding, unapologetic, dogged pursuit of my destiny on my terms. To live like a man, to die like a warrior. At high noon, in the warm rays of the sun, smelling the smoke from my barrel, looking up at the bluest of skies… With my boots on.”