Today's guest post comes from Cressey Sports Performance - Florida coach, Eduardo Valle.
Coaches and athletes often get fixated on power production and forget about force absorption, or deceleration. Deceleration is an important quality for athletes to possess, as it will help them stay within themselves when performing a task and lessen injury risk. A pitcher or a hitter that can't decelerate may spin wildly out of control. A rotator cuff that can't slow your arm action down is a recipe for an arm injury. A hitter that can't decelerate sufficiently can't check his swing. There are countless other examples - and this is why we take deceleration training quite seriously. With that in mind, here are five non-traditional drills to implement dynamic trunk deceleration into your training.
1. Anti-Rotation Landmine Windmill: With this drill, you are trying to control the weight on the way down without rotating through your hip, as this will promote trunk deceleration without hip involvement. This is also a good strengthening exercise as you have to then rotate back to the center and repeat to the other side. Choose your weight carefully, as this is an easy one to cheat.
2. Split Stance High to Low Aquabag Chop (over Front Leg): This is a more dynamic exercise overall and one that has immediate transfer to the field, as every baseball player throws and needs to be able to decelerate properly to avoid spinning out of control or missing their target. This will also help athletes to learn how to absorb force into that lead hip.
3. Pallof Press with Deceleration: This exercise is reactive in nature. You're going to set-up like a normal Pallof Press, and then you're going to let go and rapidly catch the handle again. This will challenge your core to quickly stop your trunk from going into excess rotation.
4. Proteus Straight Arm Anti-Rotations: This is a more dynamic progression from the landmine anti-rotation drill I demonstrated earlier. Here, we're rotating our upper body as fast as possible and coming to an immediate stop at end-range. This is extremely challenging because if you are unable to stop properly, you simply lose your balance and fall off to the side. We want to ensure that our trunk can stop itself independently from our hips so as to not put too much stress or rely too much on our hips when everything is working together.
5. Proteus Split Stance High to Low Chop (over Front Leg): Similar to the Aquabag chop, we are going through a modified throwing motion, trying to exert as much force as possible. If we are able to properly absorb our high output here, then we should be able to have more success on the mound maintaining good posture after a pitch instead of spinning uncontrollably.
The lighter/faster drills here typically work well as part of "pre-work." In other words, we'll integrate them after warm-ups and before we get to our lifting for the day. They pair well as fillers between medicine ball drills, too. Conversely, if the loads are heavier, they're best integrated as assistance exercises during strength training sessions.
About the Author
Eduardo Valle is a strength and conditioning coach at Cressey Sports Performance - Florida. He graduated from the University of Virginia with a BS.Ed in Kinesiology. A Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist through the NSCA, Eduardo also works as part of the UVA Sports Medicine Staff as an Athletic Training Student; this experience helped shape his view of exercise as medicine being an integral part of both mitigating injury and maximizing performance. He's currently in a Master's program at Florida Atlantic University for Exercise Science and Health Promotion. You can follow him on Instagram at @edu_valle2.
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With my last post, I kicked off the "Best of 2019" series with my top articles of the year. Today, we'll highlight the top five videos of the year.
1. Glute-Ham Raise with Banded Reach
If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you'll know that I'm a big fan of training the posterior chain and also working on getting serratus anterior firing to improve scapular upward rotation. So, you can imagine how excited I am to present to you a video that hits both. Mets pitcher Noah Syndergaard offered a great demo:
The subscapularis is the largest of the four rotator cuff muscles, but it might also be the most misunderstood. This excerpt from my Sturdy Shoulder Solutions resource will bring you up to speed on it.
3. 1-leg Dumbbell Pullover - The 1-leg dumbbell pullover is a nice variation on a classic. It’ll add a rotary stability challenge to what is normally considered an upper body and anterior core drill. I’m using this variation a bit more in the late offseason (with throwing volume and intensity ramping up), as you can get a good training effect with less external loading.
4. Half-kneeling Cable Lift with Flexion-Rotation Hold
The half-kneeling cable lift w/flexion-rotation hold is a new variation on an old drill, and we've been implementing it quite a bit with athletes this year. It's a creation of CSP-FL co-founder and pitching coordinator Brian Kaplan.
5. Landmine Squat to 1-arm Press
It's not secret that I love landmine presses, and this is a great progression. This drill fits well as a first exercise on a full body day and pairs well with horizontal or vertical pulling. I really like it late in the offseason when we’re trying to keep sessions a bit shorter and get extra bang for our training buck. I’d do sets of 3-5 reps per side.
I'll be back soon with the top guest posts of 2019!
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EC on the Lift the Bar Podcast - I joined Stuart Aitken on his podcast to chat about fitness industry success and building up career capital.
Gym Owner Musings: Installment 14 - My business partner, Pete Dupuis, always shares some good nuggets in these brain dumps. They're must-read for gym owners.
Top Tweet of the Week
In training, we can’t just think about the positions we achieve, but also 1️⃣ how we get to them and 2️⃣the direction and magnitude of the forces acting on us in these positions. https://t.co/fgnsz2ae4Jpic.twitter.com/05Lqu2TPlV
It's time for this month's installment of my random thoughts on sports performance training. In light of my ongoing sale on my Sturdy Shoulder Solutions resource, I thought I'd focus this edition on the shoulder.
1. If you want a healthy shoulder, getting tobacco products out of your life is a good place to start.
The research is pretty clear: smoking is a bad idea (and an independent risk factor) if you're looking to stay healthy from a musculoskeletal standpoint, or have a good outcome in rehabilitation (whether conservative or post-surgical) . Here's an excerpt from a recent study with an excellent review of the literature:
"Cigarette smoking adversely affects a variety of musculoskeletal conditions and procedures, including spinal fusion, fracture healing, surgical wound healing, tendon injury and knee ligament reconstruction. More recently, smoking has been suggested to negatively impact rotator cuff tear pathogenesis and healing. Tobacco smoke contains nicotine, a potent vasoconstrictor that can reduce the blood supply to the already relatively avascular rotator cuff insertion. Furthermore, carbon monoxide in smoke reduces the oxygen tension levels available for cellular metabolism. The combination of these toxins may lead to the development of attritional rotator cuff tears with a decreased capacity for healing."
Many times, we're looking for the best exercise, rehabilitation protocol, soft tissue treatment, or volume amounts - but we really ought to be looking at lifestyle factors.
With a large baseball readership on this site, the logical next question: are these harmful effects also noted with smokeless tobacco (i.e., dip/chew)? The research is somewhat sparse, as it's harder to study a younger, active population than a bunch of middle-aged post-operative rotator cuff patients. However, it's hard to believe that the aforementioned carbon monoxide implications would cause 100% of the issues and that the nicotine would serve as just an innocent bystander. So if you're looking to check every box in your quest to stay healthy, it's not a bad idea to lay off the dip.
And, if healthy tendons aren't enough to convince you, do yourself a favor and read this article by Curt Schilling.
2. The 1-arm, 1-leg landmine press isn't a mainstay in your training programs, but can be a perfect fit in a few circumstances.
This looks like kind of a wussy exercise, but I actually really like it in two circumstances.
a. It's awesome in a post-surgery period when you can't load like crazy, but still want folks to be challenged in their upper extremity progressions. The single-leg support creates a more unstable environment, which means that antagonist activity is higher and there is more work going to joint stability than actual movement. In other words, it makes pressing safer.
b. Once we get to the inseason period, it allows us to check two boxes with a single exercise: single-leg balance and upper body strength (plus serratus activation/scapular upward rotation).
I've written about it a lot in the past: core positioning has an incredibly important impact on shoulder function. Check out this study on how reducing anterior pelvic tilt increases lower trapezius activation during arm elevation and the return from the overhead position.
In my experience working with extension-rotation athletes (particularly baseball players), one of the biggest risk factors for shoulder injury is when the lower trapezius can't keep up with the latissimus dorsi. Just consider the attachment points of the lat in the picture below; as you can imagine, if you posteriorly tilt the pelvis, the lat is inhibited, making it easier for lower trap to get to work.
The lower trapezius is very important for providing posterior tilt (slight tipping back) of the scapula and assisting in upward rotation. These two functions are key for a pitcher to get the scapula in the correct position during the lay-back phase of throwing.
By contrast, the lat has more of a "gross" depression effect on the scapula; it pulls it down, but doesn't contribute to posterior tilting or upward rotation. This might help with an adult rotator cuff pain patient who has an aggressive scapular elevation (shrug) substitution pattern, but it's actually problematic for a thrower who is trying to get his scapula up and around the rib cage to make sure that the ball-on-socket congruency is "flush" when it really matters: the maximal external rotation position.
As such, you can say that the lat and lower trap "compete" for control of the scapula - and the lat has a big advantage because of its cross-sectional area and multiple attachment points. It's also much easier to train and strengthen - even if it's by accident. Upper body work in faulty core positioning (in this case, too much anterior pelvic tilt and the accompanying lumbar extension) shifts the balance to the lats.
We'll often hear throwers cued "down and back" during arm care drills. The intention - improving posterior tilt via lower trap activation - is admirable, but the outcome usually isn't what's desired. Unless athletes are actually put in a position of posterior tilt where they can actually feel the lower traps working, they don't get it. Instead, they pull further down into scapular depression, which feeds the lat-dominant strategy. This is why we teach almost all our throwers to differentiate between depression and posterior tilt early on in their training at Cressey Sports Performance.
If you're looking to learn more about how I assess, program, and coach at the shoulder, be sure to check out my popular resource, Sturdy Shoulder Solutions. Learn more at www.SturdyShoulders.com.
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I'm working on getting back on an every Monday schedule with this recommended reading feature. Here goes!
8 Training Tips for the New Dad - My wife is scheduled for a C-section this Friday as we make the Cressey crew a party of five. It seemed like a good time to bring this article I wrote back in 2016 (two years after our twin daughters were born) to the forefront again.
Continuing to train power with aging clients is incredibly important. It's also, however, a quick way to injure people if you don't use the right methods to do so. Embrace options like med ball throws, hill sprints, KB swings, etc. as joint-friendly ways to get the job done.
Anyone who's followed this blog for any length of time knows that I'm a big fan of landmine presses for a number of reasons:
1. As a "free scapula" pressing exercise, they're an effective way to train scapular upward rotation.
2. They're much more shoulder friendly than overhead presses.
3. They provide a great core stability challenge.
4. You can implement a lot of variety in terms of stance (tall/half-kneeling, standing, split-stance, rotational, etc) and lower body contributions. This week's feature is a great highlight in this regard:
This drill fits well as a first exercise on a full body day and pairs well with horizontal or vertical pulling. I really like it late in the offseason when we're trying to keep sessions a bit shorter and get extra bang for our training buck. I'd do sets of 3-5 reps per side.
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I hope your weekend is off to a good start. It's been a while since I published a compilation here, so there was quite a bit to sift through. Here's a little recommended reading and listening from around the 'net.
10 Tips for Better Sleep - This solid article from the crew at Examine.com includes a lot of strategies that are easy to implement.
If I had to estimate, I’d say the landmine press offers 90% of the benefits of overhead pressing - plus some unique benefits of its own. And, it does so at a fraction of the shoulder health risk. And contrary to popular belief, you can load it up for some heavier work w/low reps. pic.twitter.com/SLXh4f7HcQ
At a seminar a while back, a college pitching coach said to me, "Well, I know that you don't like overhead lifting for pitchers, so what do you do instead?"
It's something that's falsely been attributed to me in the past, so let me go on the record by saying that I don't think all overhead lifting is created equal. Rather, I think there is a continuum we have to appreciate as we select exercises for our clients and athletes.
At the most aggressive end of the spectrum, we have overhead pressing with a barbell or dumbbells. They allow a lifter to take on the most load, and in the case of the barbell, they have the least freedom of movement (especially if we're talking about a Smith machine press). Moreover, they generally lead to the most significant compensatory movement, particularly at the lower back. I don't love these for baseball players, but don't have any problems with using them in healthy lifters from other walks of life.
However, in these more at-risk populations, we have some options as more shoulder friendly exercises that can deliver a great training effect. The bottoms-up kettlebell military press delivers a slightly different training effect more safely because more of the work is devoted to joint stability. And, I've found that the bottoms-up set-up helps the lifter to engage serratus anterior more to get the scapula "around" the rib cage.
Landmine presses are another good alternative, as I see them as a hybrid of horizontal and vertical pressing. The torso angle and "lean" into the bar help to optimize scapular upward rotation with less competing directly against gravity.
Bottoms-up carries and waiter's walks are also good options for driving overhead patterning without beating up on the joint. We use them all the time.
Regressing even further, something like a yoga push-up is technically an overhead lift because of the finish position.
So, the take-home message is that I'm not against overhead lifting; in fact, we do it all the time on a number of fronts. Moreover, these examples don't even take into account things like TRX Ys, pull-ups, and overhead medicine ball throw/stomp variations - all of which we incorporate on a daily basis with our athletes and general population clients. Not all overhead work is created equal!
To learn more about how I assess, coach, and program at the shoulder, be sure to check out my popular resource, Sturdy Shoulder Solutions.
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Happy Memorial Day! I hope you're enjoying the long weekend with friends and family and, more importantly, honoring those we celebrate today. Here are some good reads from the fitness industry over the past week:
EC on the ABCA Calls from the Clubhouse Podcast - I was on a podcast interview with Jeremy Sheetinger, Alan Jaeger, and Kyle Boddy to discuss arm care and the long-term development of pitchers.
Hit Makers - I just finished this audiobook from Derek Thompson up and really enjoyed it. I found the following quote to be really logical, yet insightful: "A reader's favorite subject is the reader."
It's time for the October edition of this sports performance training series. I've been doing a lot of early off-season evaluations for pro guys, so a lot of conversations and assessments on that front are at the top of my mind.
1. Communication can be good and bad.
One of the biggest complaints I hear from professional athletes about their "employing" organizations is that the communication isn't good. They get mixed messages from different coaches and don't know where they stand on a variety of things. More than any of the amenities they could request, they really just want everyone to be on the same page and for the plan of attack to be related to them - and with frequent updates.
Interestingly, though, in the gym, athletes (especially more advanced athletes) usually want you to communicate less. They need clear, concise coaching cues so that you don't overwhelm them or kill the training environment with "nit-picking." Too much communication can actually be just as problematic as too little.
If you look at the typical training session for one of our athletes, I think you'd find that 80% of all the words spoken occur during the arrival, warm-up, and post-training cooldown periods. During the training session, it's time to get after it. Those 20% of words are implemented tactfully.
2. Many athletes don't have "clean" hip extension - and your exercise selection should reflect that.
Around this time last year, I posted this video of an MLB pitcher who was just starting up with us:
After seeing quite a few guys who look like this, it's really made me reconsider whether going directly to a Bulgarian split squat (rear-foot-elevated split squat) in these guys is a good bet in the early stages of the offseason. This exercise requires a lot of not only hip extension range of motion, but also the core stability to make sure that ROM is actually used (the concept of relative stiffness in action). This is something we touched on on in Mike Reinold and my recent release, Functional Stability Training: Optimizing Movement.
With all this in mind, I've been using more regular split squats - which require less hip extension range-of-motion - in the first month of the offseason for even some of our advanced guys as they work to reestablish cleaner lumbopelvic movement strategies in the early off-season. That said, regular split squats can be a little harder on the trailing leg toes than the rear-foot-elevated version, so individualization (as always) is super important.
3. Sometimes, efficient transfer of force - and not joint-specific coaching - delivers the good positions for which you're looking.
I've often written about how we have both specific and general assessments in our training arsenal, but it's actually somewhat of a continuum. Specific assessments would be more along the lines of classic joint range-of-motion measurements. Shoulder abduction or flexion would be slightly more general, as these screens involve multiple joints. Finally, an overhead squat, overhead lunge walk, or push-up would all be very general screens that look at multiple joints and help to evaluate how well an athlete transfers forces.
Interestingly, though, very often, we see coaches and rehabilitation specialists who only have specific correctives even though they utilize a load of general assessments. The goal should be to ultimately get athletes to the point that efficient movement on general tasks delivers the positions you're hoping to safely achieve. As an example, we will use wall slide variations as part of our warm-ups to teach athletes how to get upward rotation of the scapula. A progression would be landmine press variations; usually in half-kneeling or standing:
Eventually, though, athletes are ready to "sync" these movements up in a scenario where transfer of force from the lower body up through the core and to the arm allows that upward rotation to happen.
In short, a good reminder is:
[bctt tweet="As is the case with your assessments, your correctives should range from specific to general."]
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