Adult onset is a disease we give we ourselves. Sadly, now it seems we can also give it to our children by making poor choices for them or, by allowing them to make poor choices.
Ballooning Diabetes Rates Highlight the High Cost of Cheap Food
This is a third hand link but, well worth the clicks. My friend Joe Bonyai tagged me on Facebbook. He got it from Medium.com. Either way, click and learn.
Did you know that we have over 80 free articles on StrengthCoach.com? Here’s one, called Becoming a CNP
One question that seems to come up frequently on the StrengthCoach.com forum is the “what certification do I need?” question.
I seem to answer this one over and over. People ask about NSCA, ACE, NASM, etc. as if the certification matters. I can tell you two things with relative certainty. 1- Clients only care that you are certified. They have no idea what the letters mean.
2- Potential employers only care if you are certified to protect them from liability.
To read the rest, just click here
Last week we reported that Washington DC was pushing to create licensure for personal trainers. The latest update from the Washington Post indicates that the move has failed.
DC Weakens on Nations First Registry of Personal Trainers
Is Crossfit a good sports performance training option or should we avoid Crossfit? I get asked this question all the time. I used to quickly say, “no” and suggest athletes that are participating at a competitive level should not participate in Crossfit, solely because of the number of injuries I would see from athletes that would participate in Crossfit training programs. But then, my mind was opened to the benefits of Crossfit exercise selections, and realized it wasn’t a Crossfit exercise that caused the injuries, it was the poor training techniques taught to these adolescent athletes that was causing the surplus of injuries from those high school athletes that went to Crossfit (and then came to me for their injury care).
So, here’s my new opinion about being an athlete and doing “Crossfit exercises”…. I LOVE THEM! I can’t believe I just said that, but I really have a new-found respect for the exercise selections from many Crossfit programs that I have been exposed to. I am a Certified Sports & Conditioning Specialist (CSCS) and with this certification, program design and Olympic lifting exercises is quite a bit of the focus of this certification. But, I also am a Certified Athletic Trainer (ATC) and have been working on the sports-injury side of athletics for many years. With the combination of being a CSCS and an ATC, I get exposed to many athletes that have been doing exercises wrong for a long time and result in non-contact injuries that could be prevented if their strength programs balanced out their body, rather than imbalancing their biomechnanics needed for cutting and jumping movements in sports.
Therefore, now that I have properly educated myself on what Crossfit training is really about, I have one thing to say: Yes do participate in Crossfit, but ONLY after you have the right firing pattern in your biomechanics to ensure when you do a hang clean, snatch, back squat, etc you are helping your athleticism and not setting yourself up for an injury as serious as an ACL tear or a low back injury or knee cap dislocation. And after you have this optimal firing pattern of the muscles in your body, be sure to do Crossfit programs in addition to injury prevention programs, hip mobility programs and comprehensive speed development programs all together.
If you would like to know how to make the most out of your Crossfit program and get the most optimal athletic development, as well as prevent injuries, please do not hesitate to call and schedule a consultation today! This will be the best decision you ever do. Crossfit already is designed for some pretty powerful results, but let us make sure your body has the proper foundation and muscle firing patterns first, and you will be totally amazed by your results!
One of our more recent athletes said, “Wow, I have been doing Crossfit programs for a few years, but what you just did to my body in 2 weeks is absolutely insane. I have never felt my glutes and abs work the way they do now my Crossfit program….my squat and bench just PR’d by 20 lbs in two weeks!”
….And now…..Efficient Movement Crossfit Scottsdale is coming soon! Call to learn more (602) 358-8862.
The post Crossfit or No Crossfit? appeared first on Scottsdale Sports Medicine | Efficient Movement | Sports Injuries.
Got a great question via email after our Certified Functional Strength Coach course in Germany
I’m trying to set up my own peridization model that works for my clients. The problem is that I have no clue at what intensity I should program things like SLDL or RFESS.
I have data for bench, deadlift, chin-up, Over-Head-Press, and Front-Squat. Which percentage of my bench max can I use for the incline dumbell bench press for example?
What about deadlift max to SLDL? So One-Leg to Two-Legs?
Are there any good % from the big“ lifts to use for those single leg Lifts?
First off, great questions I’ll try to answer one at a time. To better understand our periodization model, read this: Variety in Strength Training
1- Bench to dumbbell incline is the easiest. You need to remember that none of these conversions are perfect but, they work well to start. When we think bilateral to dumbbells we think 80% so for dumbbell bench press take 80 your bench rep max and divide by 2.
Example 100K x 5 in the bench press would be 40K dumbbells. ( .8×100)/2
To go from bench to incline we would again take 80% so the incline number would be 32K. Does that make sense. To make it easy you can do 64% ( 8×8) and divide by two.
2- Deadlift to SLDL and squat to RFESS won’t work as well. In a trained athlete who is experienced with the unilateral lifts there will be some relationships that work but, they will never work for beginners. Our trained athletes could split squat and front squat the same weights?
Ideally RFESS and 1 Leg SLDL will be pretty much equal but, that rarely happens. I like to start with regular split squat first using bodyweight and then progressing to the goblet position and then just use a progressive resistance approach. Think 2-4 K per week.
Hope this helps.
There is so much great content on StrengthCoach.com. The Free Articles section gives you a sample. There is a ton of great stuff there.
It’s funny but, I get lots of questions about detailed stuff and often find myself saying the same thing. KISS. Keep It Simple Stu_ _ _ .
I wrote and article last year called When In Doubt, Think Strength and Conditioning. Give it a read, I moved it to free articles.
Great article from our free articles section on Why We Still Clean.
As I’ve said over and over, I love StrengthCoach.com because it supplies me with a never-ending supply of article ideas. Recently we had a forum discussion, and then an article, on performing rack pulls versus performing hang cleans as a power development exercise. Some coaches supported the idea of using rack pulls as a substitute for hang cleans; however, at Mike Boyle Strength Conditioning, we remain “clean people”. In fact, we teach all our young athletes to Olympic lift. If you are healthy you will Olympic lift in our system.
to finish click here Why We Still Clean
Another great reminder from Dr. Mercola.
Lack of Sleep Can Quadruple Your Risk of Catching a Cold
Here are some great reminders from Dr Mercola. Yes, I know 1-2 of you will not agree with all of them but, still great reminders. I know I like a good Q-tip now and then.
10 Unhealthy Things You Think Are Good for You
My friend ( and PTA) Michael Mullin sent this to me
Personal Trainer Ruling in Washington May Disrupt Fitness Industry
Wonder who is behind this? I’ll bet the big cert companies are pushing themselves. I wonder if the NSCA has a lobbyist?
Better yet, they are going to let PT’s tell us how to be trainers?
Thoughts?
We’ve got a great thread running on our StrengthCoach.com site on Hypertrophy Training for Athletes so I thought I’d link back to the thread for site members and move an article I wrote a few years ago into our Free Articles section.
I train a lot of young athletes. These high school and college kids almost always need to gain solid weight in order to compete at a higher level. In the world of sports, hardly anyone is “big enough.” Bigger is generally better
To put it crassly, if the athletes I train don’t get bigger and stronger, I don’t make a living.
And yet, I never train athletes with the goal of producing muscle hypertrophy.
Read the rest of Hypertrophy Training for Athletes here
Although StrengthCoach.com is a membership based site we like to share some really great stuff in our Free Articles section. Here’s a really good example about working the floor in a big box gym.
I just read a thread in the Business Forum that had advice that blew me away. I’m not sure how many readers visit the Business Forum so I’d thought I summarize some of our readers’ thoughts on working the floor in a commercial gym. The value in this advice is tremendous and the reality is, this is where many of us start our careers. If I’m guessing your are getting the benefit of 70-80 years of experience here.
Dr. Mike Zourdos and colleagues just published a new paper on Daily Undulating Periodization (Zourdos MC, et al. Modified Daily Undulating Periodization Model Produces Greater Performance Than a Traditional Configuration in Powerlifters. J Strength Cond Res 2015. Published Ahead of Print). Being a fan of the Daily Undulating Periodization approach to training structure I thought I would summarize the paper and share some of my thoughts.
Subjects
Training Programs
Summary of Strength Results
The strength change results from both of the 6-week training programs are summarized as follows:
Comments & Thought
This was an interesting study and I like the approach of trying to find an optimal scheme within the training week. Perhaps someday we may find that the optimal scheme for the Daily Undulating Periodization Model (or any training model!) is one where the emphasis of training on a given day is dictated based on how the athlete reports and what they are able to tolerate? This very fluid approach to programming – where we are attempting to strike a balance between training variety, to prevent monotony, and a concentrated dose of training, to increase fitness in a certain capacity – has been suggested by John Kiely’s work on periodization. In the paper by Zourdos and colleagues, they used an autoregulation approach on the hypertrophy day to dictate the training load/intensity for that session (an approach discussed by Mel Siff in Supertraining and researched by Bryan Mann, as referenced above). Perhaps, in a practical setting, we could extend this a bit further and utilize a linear position transducer or some other form of velocity based approach (the folks at PUSH have come up with an affordable and easy to use solution) to dictate the load/intensity on the power and strength training days. If the athlete is sluggish and moving the bar slowly, then lower the load to stay within a desired range of bar velocity. Additionally, because training takes place on non-consecutive days in this type of frame work (E.g., 3 sessions over 7 days) it may be possible to utilize monitoring strategies (bar velocity, daily wellness, RPE training loads, HRV, etc) to make the suggestion that the athlete take a rest day, instead of performing the scheduled training session, and see how their body is the following day and if it is prepared to tolerate the load.
The use of effect sizes in this paper allows us to get a better understanding of whether or not the average difference between groups is of practical significance. One of the things that I find critical when looking at research on training interventions is the understanding of inter-individual differences. It is very possible that some athletes in this study responded favorably to either of the training approaches while others had no result or a poor result. The paper also look at things like changes in total volume and some hormonal measures. When it comes to understanding responders and non-responders in training, it isn’t good enough to just say, “Some people get better and others don’t”. At some point, we need to figure out who doesn’t respond and why they don’t respond. Perhaps there is something to additionally look at in this paper with the hormonal changes and the individual’s ability to increase training volume or get stagnant during certain periods of the training program.
Hopefully this group continues to do more research on the topic of Daily Undulating Periodization because I find it to be a practical method of programming training and they have done some good work thus far that they can certainly follow up on. While Mike Zourdos tends to aim his approach at Powerlifters (I believe because he is competitive lifter himself) there are concepts within this framework that can easily be extended to training team sport athletes as well as concepts that could be used for sport coaches when establishing the weekly practice structure.
Robert Dos Remedios is one of the best hands-on, real world coaches that I know.
Dos works in the trenches at College of the Canyons every day coaching real athletes on real programs. Although he is an author and an internet entrepreneur he has real credibility based on twenty solid years of coaching.
He has just released his new product called Complete Program Design, where he shows his strategies and templates for creating training programs. I don’t generally promote a lot of products ( usually 2-3 a year) but, I really like Dos’s stuff.
Go here for more information:
Complete Program Design
I get lots of questions on Facebbok and via email and to be honest, I try to answer them all. However, in the future I’m going to try to focus more on my StrengthCoach.com site.
For $14.95 a month I’ll answer your questions every day. That’s a pretty good deal? In addition, people like Alwyn Cosgrove, Charlie Weingroff and a host of others regularly chime in. Yes, $14.95 a month. I think that’s a pretty good deal. You can try it for $1 for three days but, let me warn you billing starts on day 4.
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