Strength Training Programs: You Can’t Force Adaptation

Written on December 12, 2011 at 7:17 am, by Eric Cressey

A few weeks ago, when we handed a relatively new athlete his second strength and conditioning program from Cressey Performance, he asked:

What different things are we working on this month, compared to the last month?

I was candid with him and emphasized that we’d be working on some of the exact same stuff – but progressing on what we did in Month 1 with new strength exercises and subtle shifts in what was prioritized in light of where he’d improved the most.  In short, the answer was to trust in the program, and allow time for adaptation to occur.

“Assuming” adaptation is one of the biggest mistakes I see coaches and athletes make in strength training programs, as the truth is that everyone responds to a given stimulus differently. 

For instance, I’ve had professional baseball players come back from long seasons with horrendous rotator cuff strength that takes a good 10-12 weeks to get back to baseline.  On the other hand, I’ve had guys come back from the same long season with outstanding cuff strength.  It’d be a disservice to these two types of athletes to hand them the same arm care programs, at the same time, with the same progressions.  Unfortunately, it’s something that happens all the time in a wide variety of strength and conditioning programs simply because folks may be married to a long-term periodization approach, when more of a short-term “wait and see” methodology may, in fact, be far more effective.

In a linear periodization model (which research has proven inferior to an undulating approach in terms of strength and muscular endurance), one might approach the baseball off-season with the following progression: muscular endurance training (sets of 12-15) in September, hypertrophy training (sets of 6-12) in October-November, strength training (sets of 1-6) in December-January, and then power training (lower-load sets of 1-8) in February-March.

The problem with this model of athletic development, of course, is that you get very proficient in one quality at a time while detraining the others.  And, each athlete may not need a specific phase of this scheme.

For instance, a baseball player who is an insanely reactive athlete might not need any true power training; he could get that from his sport exclusively – and would therefore be better off emphasizing maximal strength.

Conversely, an athlete who is insanely strong, but slow, would need more power training and less work on maximal strength.

Finally, baseball players don’t really need much, if any, muscular endurance training.  They build that in a more specific approach later on with the volume and intensity progressions in their throwing and hitting programs.

These are just a few of the many reasons we use a concurrent periodization model for all the strength training programs we write at Cressey Performance.  This broad approach affords us the flexibility we need to make specific changes for each athlete based on the adaptations we observe, not something we assume has taken place.

It’s perfectly fine to implement variety to keep training fun, expose an athlete to a rich proprioceptive environment, and ensure that overuse injuries don’t occur, but never lose sight of the goals of any good strength and conditioning program: addressing an athlete’s most glaring weaknesses.

If an athlete is painfully weak, don’t stop all strength work 6-8 weeks out of the season because you’re supposed to be working on power and conditioning at that time period.  Just tinker with things; don’t overhaul.

If an athlete is strong as a bull, but always deconditioned, you may need to cut back on the maximal strength work and prioritize metabolic conditioning more.

The body will always have a limited recovery capacity, so when it comes to writing strength and conditioning programs, one must always prioritize the most pressing needs, not simply adhere blindly to a long-term plan that doesn’t take into account these opportunities for adaptation.

To learn more about sequencing an athlete’s yearly training calendar, check out The Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual, now available as an e-book for the first time ever!

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The Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual: New Site, New E-Book Format

Written on June 2, 2011 at 6:13 am, by Eric Cressey

I’m psyched to announce that The Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual is now available as a digital product.  Until this point, the book had retailed as a hard copy version for $99.99 plus shipping/handling – but from here on out, you can get it for just $57 since we don’t have any production or shipping costs.  This manual includes 30 weeks of sample programming based on the results of your self-tests.  Whether you’re looking for off-season training for basketball, football, or some other sport, it’s an excellent read.

And, we’ve got a new site to kick things off with the e-book version; check out www.UltimateOffSeason.com.

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Making the Case for Long Toss in a Throwing Program

Written on December 12, 2010 at 12:05 pm, by Eric Cressey

Long toss may have been scorned by quite a few baseball traditionalists, but I am a big fan of it – and our guys have responded outstandingly to the way we’ve used it.  Perhaps it’s just my “1+1=2” logic at work, but I just feel like if you can build up the arm speed to throw the ball a loooonngggg way, then you’ll be able to carry that over to the mound as soon as you get your pitching mechanics dialed in.  And, this has certainly been validated with our athletes, as we have loads of professional pitchers who absolutely swear by long toss (both off- and in-season).

So, you can understand why I got excited when my good buddy, Alan Jaeger – a man who has devoted a big chunk of his life to getting long toss “accepted” in the baseball community – was featured in this article at MLB.com about what a difference it makes – including for the Texas Rangers on their road to the World Series.

I was, however, not a fan of this paragraph in the article:

“Former Red Sox pitcher Dick Mills has a business built around teaching mechanics and maximizing velocity, and he is a staunch opponent of long tossing. He has released countless YouTube videos angrily decrying this practice. In his latest, ‘How Long Toss Can Ruin Your Pitching Mechanics and Your Arm,’ he says, ‘Why would you practice mechanics that are totally different and will not help a pitcher during a game? And why would you practice throwing mechanics that are clearly more stressful where the arm does most of the work?’”

Taking it a step further, here’s a Dick Mills quote I came across a few years ago:

“Training will not teach you how to apply more force…only mechanics can do that. And pitching is not about applying more effort into a pitch but is about producing more skilled movements from better timing of all the parts. That will help produce more force. No matter how hard you try, you will not get that from your strength training program…no matter who designed it, how much they have promised you it would or your hope that it will be the secret for you.”

While I agree (obviously) on the importance of mechanics and timing, effectively, we’re still being told that long toss, strength training, and weighted balls are all ineffective modalities for developing the pitcher – which leaves us with what, bullpens and stretching? It sounds like every youth baseball practice in the country nowadays – and all we’re getting now are injured shoulders and elbows at astronomical rates.  Something isn’t right – and the message is very clear: specificity is a very slippery slope.

On one hand, when it comes to mechanics, you need to throw off the mound to get things fine-tuned to achieve efficiency.

On the other hand, research has shown that arm stress is higher when you’re on the mound (there is less external rotation at stride foot contact with flat ground throwing).  Additionally, every pitch that’s thrown is really a step in the direction of sports specialization for a youth baseball player – and something needs to balance that out.  Why?

Well, specializing at a young age is destroying kids.  As a great study from Olsen et al. showed, young pitchers who require surgery pitched “significantly more months per year, games per year, innings per game, pitches per game, pitches per year, and warm-up pitches before a game. These pitchers were more frequently starting pitchers, pitched in more showcases, pitched with higher velocity, and pitched more often with arm pain and fatigue.”  And people think that kid need more work on the mound?  What they need are more structured throwing sessions (practice, not competition) and a comprehensive throwing and strength and conditioning program to prepare them for the demands they’ll face.

But those aren’t specific enough, are they?!?!?!  Well, let’s talk about specificity a bit more.  Actually, let’s read – from renowned physical therapist Gray Cook, a guy who certainly knows a thing or two about why people get injured:

The physical presentation of differently trained bodies often provides a signature of the type and style of activity that developed it. Those who are exclusive in their activities seem more often be molded to their activities, and sometimes actually over-molded. These individuals can actually lose movements and muscles that would make alternate activities much easier.

Specialization can rob us of our innate ability to express all of our movement potential. This is why I encourage highly specialized athletes to balance their functional movement patterns. They don’t so much need to train all movement patterns, they just need to maintain them. When a functional movement pattern is lost, it forecasts a fundamental crack in a foundation designed to be balanced. The point is not that specialization is bad—it only presents a problem when the singular activity over-molds to the point of losing balance.

While there are probably 15-20 awesome messages we can take home from the previous two paragraphs, here’s the big one I want to highlight: it’s our job as coaches to find the biggest window of adaptation a pitcher has and bring it up to speed – while simultaneously keeping other qualities in mind.

If he’s stiff, we work on mobility.  If he’s weak, we get him strong.  If he’s a mechanical train wreck, we get him more bullpens.  If his arm speed isn’t good, we work more on weighted balls and long toss.  If you just take a 5-10, 120-pound 9^th grader and have him throw bullpens exclusively, he’ll get better for a little bit, and then plateau hard unless you get him bigger and stronger.

How does this work?  It’s a little principle called Delayed Transmutation that Vladimir Zatsiorsky highlighted in Science and Practice of Strength Training.  Zatsiorsky defines delayed transmutation as “the time period needed to transform acquired motor potential into athletic performance.”  In other words, expand and improve your “motor pool” in the off-season, and it’ll be transformed into specific athletic performance when the time is right.

And, as I wrote in The Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual, “the more experienced you are in a given sport, the less time it will take for you to transform this newfound strength and power [and mobility] into sporting contexts.”  This is why professional pitchers can find their groove each year MUCH easier than high school pitchers in spite of the fact that they probably take more time off each year (2-3 months from throwing) than the typical overused kid who plays on 17 different AAU teams.

That said, there’s a somewhat interesting exception to this rule: really untrained kids.  I’ll give you two examples from the past week alone at Cressey Performance.

We had a high school senior and a high school junior who both just started up their winter throwing programs to prepare for the season.

The first told me that he was sore in his legs after throwing for the first time in his life.  Effectively, without throwing a single pitch or really doing any lesson work (or even throwing off a mound), this kid has managed to change the neuromuscular recruitment patterns he uses to throw the baseball.  Strength, power, and mobility took care of themselves: delayed transmutation.

The second told me that his arm feels electric.  Ask any experienced pitcher, and they’ll tell you that your arm is supposed to feel like absolute crap the first 4-5 days after an extended layoff, but it always gets better.  However, when you’re a kid who has gotten more flexible and packed on a bunch of muscle mass, it’s like all of a sudden driving a Ferrari when you’re used to sharing a minivan with Mom: delayed transmutation.

Specificity is important in any sport, but a it really is just the work as far to the right as you can go on the general to specific continuum.  Elite sprinters do squats, lunges, Olympic lifts, jump squats, and body weight plyos as they work from left to right on the general-to-specific continuum to get faster.  So, why do so many pitching coaches insist that pitchers stay as far to the right as possible?    Symbolically, long toss is to pitchers what plyos are to sprinters: specific, but just general enough to make a profound difference.

In a very roundabout way, I’ve made a case for long toss as something that can be classified as beneficial in much the same way that we recognize (well, most of us, at least) that mobility drills, foam rolling, strength training, movement training, and medicine ball drills to be excellent adjuncts to bullpens. In the process of learning to throw the baseball farther, we:

1. push arm speed up

2. train in a generally-specific fashion

3. improve contribution of the lower half

4. realize another specific, quantifiable marker (distance) of progress

5. keep throwing fun

6. train the arm with just enough LESS specificity to help keep pitchers healthy, as compared with mound work

The question then becomes, “Why don’t some pitchers respond well to long toss?”  In part 2, I’ll outline the most common mistakes I’ve seen:

Related Posts

The Absolute Strength to Absolute Speed Continuum (video)
Baseball Showcases: A Great Way to Waste Money and Get Injured

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Happy Thanksgiving!

Written on November 25, 2010 at 3:54 am, by Eric Cressey

Hey Gang,

I won’t be writing much today, as I’m headed out right now for the 4th Annual Cressey Performance Thanksgiving Day Lift (video to come tomorrow).  However, I did want to take a quick second to say thank you very much for your continued support of EricCressey.com; it’s one of many things about which I can be very thankful this holiday season.

In continuing with our ‘Stache Bash 2010 week of sales, I’m putting the Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual on sale at 25% off through tomorrow (Friday) night.  Just head HERE and enter the coupon code TURKEY at checkout and the discount will be applied.

Happy Thanksgiving!

How to Get Quick…Quickly – Talking with Kelly Baggett

Written on October 7, 2010 at 11:32 am, by Eric Cressey

Today, I’m psyched to have my old friend Kelly Baggett on-board for an EricCressey.com exclusive interview.  Kelly and I go back about ten years, and to this day, he stands out in my mind as one of the brightest guys in the business of making people more athletic – and he’s also a heck of an athlete himself.

EC: Thanks for taking the time to jump in with us on this interview today.  Let’s talk first about where the “need” for this product came about; what made you and Alex decide to create it?

KB: Several years ago I had started using a particular style of movement work with my athletes designed to boost what I like to call “movement efficiency.” The premise was to rapidly and economically get people moving faster, quicker, and more efficiently on their feet without spending a lot of time doing so.  Each workout would start off with this movement work, which was a short ~10 minute section of the workout.

Alex was actually a client of mine back when he was just out of high school. He went through some these workouts and really seemed to benefit from them.   Well, a few years later he’s coaching people himself and is nearly out of college.  He had taken the workouts I’d given him several years before and continued doing parts of them and expounded upon them with an emphasis on really boosting his first step in basketball. I had always believed that quickness and explosiveness weren’t necessarily the same thing. A person can be “quick” without being explosive and vice versa.  Alex was a perfect example of that.  He has some videos somewhere out there of him with a basketball: I don’t know if he’ll ever be all that fast and explosive, but you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone quicker with the ball in his hand on the basketball court.

Several years after he was a client of mine, Alex is now a coach himself and has a pretty good training business going.  A little while back, he calls me and tells me how he’d been using these movement progressions with athletes and how well they’ve been working – and, in the process – comes up with the idea of putting the concept into a product based on “The Truth About Quickness.”

The first thing was to address some of the common myths surrounding quickness training and talk about the difference between quickness and explosiveness. The next was to introduce simple progressive quickness promoting exercises that don’t take a lot of time that can be incorporated into any existing program.  The foundation for that were the progressions I had started using several years prior.

EC: Let’s talk about your “evolution” as a coach.  What were you doing a decade ago that you thought was high performance training that you realize now just wasn’t cutting the mustard when it came to making people more athletic?

KB: When it comes to actual sprint, agility, and plyometric work, nowadays, I’m sort of known as a low volume guy. It’s all about quality over quantity.  However, believe it or not, I used to be one of those coaches who would run guys to death. I spent too much time focusing on sport-specific movements and not enough on foundational training and recovery.  I was one of those coaches who believed that if you wanted to get faster, you needed to do a ton of running.  If you wanted to be more agile, you needed to do a ton of agility and SAQ (speed-agility-quickness) work.  If you wanted to jump higher, you needed to do a lot of plyometrics.  The result was that my programming wasn’t near as efficient as it could be.

I guess sometime around the late 1990s, I started discovering by accident that most people could substantially improve sports specific movements without much focus on them.  I’d get these athletes that would come to me and say something like, “Hey I’m not going to play football or basketball anymore, but I still want to look good. I want you to train me to get me big, lean, and strong”.  So, I would.  Then, two months later, the guy goes out and hits a personal best vertical jump and 40 time.

I had experienced that myself in my own progress as an athlete but I always thought I was sort of an anomaly because I wasn’t doing what was considered “traditional” explosive power and speed training. But then I experienced it many, many times with other athletes.   From there things sort of evolved into a challenge of finding the right volumes of movement and strength work, discovering why certain approaches work for some athletes and not for others, and tailoring the approach to the athlete.

EC: It doesn’t sound altogether unfamiliar with the approach I took in The Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual, a program that a lot of people worried was too low in “SAQ” volume.  Without getting off topic too much, it’s my humble opinion that the “need” for more and more SAQ work was a provider-induced demand initiated by training facilities that realizes that they could get more young athletes through and make more money by running them ragged and messing around with agility ladders than they could with actually individually assessing kids, addressing imbalances, and getting them stronger.  They traded development for babysitting.

But anyway, along those same lines, what are you thinking is a better bet instead for nowadays?

KB: Establish proper movement patterns (which include optimizing recruitment/compensation patterns and optimizing coordination), then simply increase the horsepower behind the movement pattern.  You’re obviously one of the masters at establishing proper recruitment patterns and I have a ton of respect for your contributions to the field in those areas.  The recruitment aspects would include anything done with the focus of getting the body to operate more efficiently – stuff like corrective exercise, activation drills and stretches.

You then have to engage in enough sport-specific movement training (sprints, agility, jumps etc.) to optimize intra- and inter-muscular coordination in those tasks – and honestly, since those are gross movement patterns, it really doesn’t take a ton of volume.  Then, it’s just a matter of maintaining those things while progressively increasing the power of the relevant contributing muscles – which is easily done through strength training.  Put all that together into a plan that properly addresses recovery between all the elements and you can’t help but get better as an athlete.

EC: Just because this is fun, let’s talk about a few things you see in everyday programming from some strength and conditioning coaches that isn’t blatantly terrible (e.g., squatting on stability balls), but rather only marginally effective – and far from optimal?

KB:  I guess one of the biggest things is all the complex training I see.  Don’t get me wrong; I like complexes for some purposes (like fat burning and time-efficient training), but I don’t think they should make up the entire workout for athletes looking to build a foundation.  For example, yesterday I saw some people doing step-ups with a curl and press.  The step-up is good, the curl is good, and press is good but when you combine them altogether the effect is rather limited.  My motto is if you’re going  to load an exercise with the purpose of building strength in that exercise (and in the relevant muscles), then put your body in a mechanically advantageous position to do so.

EC: How do your recommendations change from a relatively inexperienced 15-18 year-old athlete versus an athlete who is older and has more experience?

KB: The goals don’t change but the focus on the elements does.  For the older athlete, I REALLY focus more on corrective exercise, stretches, and recovery.  Older guys tend to have so many recruitment impairments, flexibility issues, and pre-existing injuries that they can be a disaster waiting to happen unless those issues are addressed.  They not only tend to have more recruitment and compensation impairments than younger athletes, but their tissues also don’t tolerate these issues as well.  While a young athlete can often overcompensate for years and get away with it, older athletes will toast themselves the first trip around the bases at their first weekend softball game. With movement work, I work them into it gradually and also limit the effort.  A young kid can go out and run max sprints or max jumps no problem. But with older weekend warriors,  I like to work them in gradually as far as their rate of perceived exertion goes.

EC: This question is more for me than my readers, but I’ll ask it anyway.  Say you’ve got a 14-year-old kid who has never lifted a weight in his life – and he comes to you on his first day of training.  Do you do any sort of sprinting, agility/change of direction, or jump training with him?  Or do you stick purely with resistance training?

KB:  The movement work would be VERY limited and would be incorporated into part of his warm-up. It’s the basic concept behind The Truth About Quickness.  The movement part of the workout likely wouldn’t be more than 10 minutes – tops.  It’s enough to warm him up and give him a bit of movement stimulation, but not enough to fatigue him for the rest of the workout.  Short, sweet, and effective.

We’ll be back in a few days with a guest post from Kelly in conjunction with the launch of The Truth About Quickness.

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Strength and Conditioning Programs: Understanding the Absolute Strength to Absolute Speed Continuum

Written on August 25, 2010 at 3:23 am, by Eric Cressey

A few questions from one of our pro baseball guys inspired me to create this video “tutorial” on how to develop power.  It starts general, and progresses to specific.  Think about how it applies to YOUR sport and your training history.

For more detail, check out The Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual.

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Three Years of Cressey Performance: The Right Reasons and the Right Way

Written on July 14, 2010 at 7:16 am, by Eric Cressey

Though a somewhat “normal” day at the gym, yesterday marked Cressey Performance’s three-year anniversary.

While my business partner’s blog post yesterday did an excellent job of doling out “thank yous” to a lot of the important people who have been so involved in our success – from clients to parents, coaches, interns, and significant others – I wanted to add my own two cents on the matter today.  More than anything, I really wanted to highlight a sentence that illustrates what makes me the most proud about where CP has been, where it is, and where it’s going.

We’ve done this for the right reasons, and we’ve done it the right way.

I read a business development blog post by Chris McCombs the other day where he wrote something that really hit home for me.  When he was talking about how he decides to accept or reject a new project/opportunity, here is one of his guidelines:

“Only Take on Projects That Are In Line With My Current Values and Fulfill Me Beyond Just The Money – A project must fulfill me in some way BESIDE just money…too many people spend their life JUST chasing a buck; to me, that’s no way to live.  For me, the money must be there, but it should fulfill me personally, be fun, help a lot of people, and build and be in line with my current brand and brand equity.”

Back in 2007, I had a tough decision to make.  My online consulting business had really taken off, and the Maximum Strength book deal was in the works.  My other products – Magnificent Mobility, The Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual, and Building the Efficient Athlete – were selling well and getting great reviews, and I’d just had a study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.  This website was growing exponentially in popularity, and I had just wrapped up my first year on the Perform Better tour – so lots of doors were opening for me on the seminar front to present all over the world – and I could have stayed home and just written all day, every day.

I was getting really crunched for time, as I was already training clients 8-13 hours per day, seven days per week, as my in-person clientele had rapidly grown. My phone rang off the hook for about three weeks after Lincoln-Sudbury won a baseball state championship after I’d trained several of their guys, and one of my athletes was named state player of the year.  And, after being featured on the front page of the Boston Globe with a nipple so hard I could cut diamonds, I was in demand as a t-shirt model (okay, not really – but it made for an awesome blog post, The School of Hard Nipples).

I was exhausted and stressed – but absolutely, positively, “living the dream” that I’d always wanted.

To make matters a bit more interesting, I had just started dating a great girl (now my fiancee) who I really had a good feeling was “the one” after about three months.  The work days, however, were insanely long and I was worried that I’d screw up a good thing by not spending enough time with her.

Every business development coach out there would have seen a “simple” answer to all my problems: stop training people in person.  Just write, consult, make DVDs, and give seminars.  It would have cut my hours by 80% and still allowed me to earn a pretty good living – and enjoy plenty of free time.  There was a huge problem with that, though; as Chris wrote, it wouldn’t “fulfill me personally, be fun, help a lot of people, and build and be in line with my current brand and brand equity.”  I like doing evaluations, writing programs, coaching, sweating, training with my guys, cranking up the music, helping people get to where they want to be, collaborating with and learning from other professionals, and watching my athletes compete – whether it’s at some high school field or at Fenway Park.  Giving that up wasn’t an option; I guess I’d have just been a crappy business coaching client, as I would have been stubborn as an ass on giving that up.

Fortunately for me, Pete Dupuis, my roommate from my freshman year of college, had just finished his MBA and was in the midst of a job search.  And, during that MBA, he’d started to train with me and packed on a ton of strength and muscle mass – making him realize and truly appreciate the value in what I was doing (especially since he was and is a goalie in a very competitive soccer league).  Pete had also met and become friends with a ton of my clients – and taken a genuine interest in my baseball focus, as a lifelong Red Sox fan.  Almost daily, Pete would encourage me to do my own thing and let him handle all the business stuff for me.

Simultaneously, Tony Gentilcore was ready for a change of scenery on the work front.  Having been Tony’s roommate and training partner for almost two years at that point, I knew he was a genuinely great guy, that he’d read everything on my bookshelf, and that he could coach his butt off and “walk the walk.”  He, too, had met a lot of my clients – so there was continuity from the get-go.

So, on July 13, 2007, Cressey Performance was born.  Here is what we started with.

Boatloads of renovations and equipment additions later, it wound up looking like this.

Of course, we outgrew and demolished this space after about nine months and moved three miles east to a facility twice the size.  And, we’ve continued to grow right up to this day; June was our busiest month ever, and July should be busier.  We’ve got regular weekly clients who come from four states (MA, NH, CT, RI), and in the baseball off-season, I have college and pro guys who come from the likes of OH, AZ, CA, SC, NC, GA, FL, and VA.  And, we had 33 applicants for this summer’s internships.

To be very candid, though, I don’t consider myself a very good “businessman.”  No offense to Pete or Tony, either, but I don’t think they even come close to the textbook definition of the word, either.  We just try to be good dudes. “We’ve done this for the right reasons, and we’ve done it the right way.”

We don’t allocate a certain percentage of our monthly revenues to advertising.  In fact, we haven’t spent a single penny on advertising – unless you count charitable donations to causes that are of significance to us.

We don’t search high and low for new revenue streams to push on our clients.  In fact, if I get one more MonaVie sales pitch, I’m going to suplex whoever delivered it right off our loading dock.  Rather, we bust our butts to set clients up for success in any way possible – and trust that those efforts will lead to referrals and “allegiance” to Cressey Performance.  We ask what they want from us and modify our plans accordingly.  It’s what led to us bringing in manual therapy, a pitching cage, and, of course, pitching coach/court jester Matt Blake’s timeless antics.

Along those same lines, we don’t measure our success based on revenue numbers; we measure it based on client results.  In three years of seeing LOADS of baseball players non-stop, we’ve only had three arm surgeries: one shoulder and two elbow.  All three were athletes who came to us with existing injuries, and in each case, we kept them afloat as long as we could and trained them through their entire rehabilitation.  I don’t want to toot our own horn, but this is a remarkable statistic in a population where over 57% of pitchers suffer some form of shoulder injury during each competitive season – and that doesn’t even include  elbows!  And, our statistics don’t even count literally dozens of players who have come to us after a doctor has told them they needed surgery, but we’ve helped them avoid these procedures.  The college scholarships, draft picks, state titles, individual honors, and personal bests in the gym are all fantastic, but I’m most proud of saying that we’ve dedicated ourselves to keeping athletes healthy so that they can enjoy the sports they love.

The same goes for our non-competitive athlete clients.  The fat loss and strength gains they experience are awesome and quantifiable, but beyond that (and more qualitatively), I love knowing that they’re training pain-free and are going to be able to enjoy exercise and reap the benefits of training for a long time.

We don’t penny-pinch during our slowest times of the month (late March through mid-May – the high school baseball season).  We see it as an opportunity to do more staff continuing education, renovate the facilities, and get out to watch a lot of baseball and support our athletes.  And, we adjust our hours to open up on Sundays and stay later on weeknights during the baseball season to make it easier for athletes to get in-season training in whenever they can.  If a pitcher wants to come in and get his arm stretched out before or after an outing, he stops by and we do it for him – but don’t charge him a penny for it.  It’s about setting people up for success.

We don’t try to just “factory line” as many clients through our facility as possible with everyone on the same program.  You might walk into CP and see 20 different clients on 20 different programs – because a 16-year old pitcher with crazy congenital laxity is going to have a markedly different set of needs than a 16-year-old linebacker with shoulder mobility so bad that he needs help putting a jacket on.  One program on one dry erase board for hundreds of athletes isn’t training; it’s babysitting.

Taking this a step further, we don’t boot clients out after a certain amount of time.  Clients take as long as needed to complete the day’s program. And, when they’re done (or before they even begin), loads of our clients spend time hanging out in the office just shooting the breeze and enjoying the environment.  As an example, Toronto Blue Jays Organizational Pitcher of the Year Tim Collins spends a minimum of five hours a day at CP all off-season.

Tim has sold girl scout cookies for the daughter of one of our clients, and he’s been our back-up front desk guy when Pete is out of town.  Yesterday, he was back to visit on his all-star break – and he said hello to every client he saw – and remembered them by name.  If you’re a 15-year-old up-and-coming baseball pitcher, how cool is it to get that kind of greeting when you walk into the office?  Well, at CP, kids get that greeting from 10-15 pro guys all the time.  And, if they’re lucky, they might even get to throw on a bobsled helmet and join these pro guys in a rave to Miley Cyrus, apparently.

At least once a week, I get an email from an up-and-coming coach asking for advice about starting a facility.  When I get these emails, I now think about how Rachel Cosgrove recently mentioned that more than 80% of fitness coaches leave the industry within the first year. In most cases, this happens because these people never should have entered the fitness industry in the first place – because their intentions (money) were all wrong.  They usually leave under the assumption that they could never make a living training people, but in reality, these folks are going to have a hard time making a living in any occupation that requires genuinely caring about what you do and the people with whom you work, and being willing to hang your hat on the results you produce.

As such, the first advice, in a general sense, is obvious: do it for the right reasons, and do it the right way.  Sure, making a living is essential, but only open a facility because it would fulfill you “personally, be fun, help a lot of people, and build and be in line” with who you are and what your values are – which together constitute your “brand.” Making the move to start up this business was one of the most daunting decisions I have ever had to make, and all the efforts toward actually getting the business started were equally challenging.  However, in the end, it has been more rewarding both personally and professionally than I could have ever possibly imagined.

Thank you very much to all of you – clients/customers, parents, EricCressey.com readers, seminar attendees, and professional colleagues – for all your support over the past three years.  We couldn’t have done it without you – and look forward to many more years of doing things for the right reasons and in the right way.

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Spring Training Sale!

Written on February 19, 2010 at 1:35 am, by Eric Cressey

If you read this blog with any sort of regularity, it should come as no surprise to you that I’m really pumped up for the upcoming Major League Baseball season, as we saw over 30 professional baseball players from 21 different major league organizations this off-season at Cressey Performance.  My excitement hit another level earlier this week when I spent some time down in Ft. Myers, FL in the thick of things prior to pitchers and catchers officially reporting yesterday.

In honor of this big date in the baseball world, I thought it’d be as good a time as ever to announce a sale on a few of my products.  From today through midnight on Thursday, February 25, you can get 30% off on The Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual, The Truth About Unstable Surface Training, and The Art of the Deload by entering the coupon code FEB2010 at checkout from the Products Page.

This is actually the first time that The Truth About Unstable Surface Training has ever gone on sale since its release, so don’t miss out on this opportunity to pick up some first-of-its-kind research and the practical applications associated with it.

Again, just head HERE and enter the coupon code FEB2010 to get 30% off your order.

Go Red Sox!

Feedback on the Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual

Written on May 7, 2009 at 9:16 am, by Eric Cressey

I received this email earlier this week from a very satisfied customer of The Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual:

“Hi Eric,

I just thought I’d let you know of my progress after completing the first two months training from your offseason manual. At the same time I started, I also purchased Precision Nutrition and implemented a much improved eating plan to see me add strength and lose bodyfat whilst maintaining lean mass ready for the onset of the soccer pre-season at the start of July. So, after two months of Precision Nutrition eating and off-season training, in terms of measurements I have:

- lost 14lbs in weight
- lost 2 inches off my waist
- lost 3 1/4 inches off my hips
- lost 1 inch off my neck
- gained 1/2 inch on my shoulders
- maintained the same arm measurement with no direct arm training

and in the gym I have:

- added roughly 45lbs to my bench and squat
- 3RM chin of BW+45lbs
- ’straightened out’ my previous anterior pelvic tilt
- improved my hamstring and adductor flexibility

In the eight weeks this took, I have eaten seven meals a day without fail that have with no exceptions adhered to the 10 habits of PN (allowing a slice of cake for desert once a week!). I have been in the gym everyday at 6am (bar Saturdays, my off-day), with Mondays and Wednesdays being my regeneration days, which I view as just as important as my four resistance days.

I can’t wait for soccer preseason to start in July and see hopefully my hard work payoff (literally ££!!).

Thanks for providing the great resources to put me on the track to progression,

Andy Powell
United Kingdom”

Click Here to Check Out The Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual for Yourself!

EC is Getting Hitched, so You’re Getting a Discount

Written on April 20, 2009 at 7:55 pm, by Eric Cressey

It was a big weekend up in my neck of the woods.  The Red Sox swept the Orioles, and the Bruins went up 2-0 in their playoff series.  The Celtics are up tonight as they try to even their series with the Bulls at one game apiece.  CP clients Steph Holland-Brodney and Aimee McGuire both ran the Boston Marathon, as did our friend Sarah Neukom.  In the process, the three of them raised over $40,000 for charity!  Many of you helped out via the promotions we did on my site.  Great job, ladies!

On Saturday, I was the keynote speaker at the NSCA Maine Symposium up at my old stomping grounds, the University of New England.  State Chairman Heath Pierce and his staff did a fantastic job with the event.  And, as it turned out, I also got honored with the first ever Dr. Richard J. LaRue Award for achievement in Exercise Science.  Dr. LaRue was my advisor at UNE and the man responsible for really getting their Exercise and Sports Performance Department off the ground.  It is a huge honor, and that alone would have absolutely made my weekend – especially since it was near my hometown, so I got to receive it and present in front of several of my family members.

Sunday was my brother’s birthday, and snotty little brother that I am, I had to steal his thunder by capping the weekend off by proposing to my girlfriend of two years, Anna.  She’s been known as the “First Lady of Cressey Performance” for some time now, but it seemed like a good time to make it official. Feats of strength like these already guaranteed her the position, but it was nice to know that she still accepted it by saying “Yes!”

(she’s got over 250 in her, no problem)

Needless to say, I feel like the luckiest guy on the planet right now, so we might as well celebrate – and help me pay off the ring!

Mike Robertson, Bill Hartman, and I had planned on a “customer appreciation sale” this week anyway, so we decided to change the theme to one of “engagement.”  So, from now through Thursday, April 23rd at midnight, all of the following products are going to be 15% off with the coupon code “HITCHED” (no quotation marks) at checkout:

Through RobertsonTrainingSystems.com:

Building the Efficient Athlete DVD Set
Magnificent Mobility DVD
Bulletproof Knees Manual
Inside-Out DVD/Manual
Indianapolis Performance Enhancement Seminar DVD Set

Through EricCressey.com:

The Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual
The Art of the Deload
The Truth About Unstable Surface Training

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to get quality products at reduced prices. Again, that coupon code is “HITCHED.”