Another installment of Monday Morning QB. Some great articles this week so I hope you enjoy. Be sure to comment and let me know what you think or if you have any questions or want to just discuss one of these articles.
Knee Pain – The final part of a great series by Mike Robertson about knee pain and how you should perform certain exercises to help with it.
Building a Death Grip – A great article by about grip strength, how it carries over to training and daily activities, and what you can do daily to get even stronger.
New Ab and Core Exercises – A brief article by Tony Gentilcore talking about a new ab/core exercise that you should put in your training program.
Training for Coordination – Coordination training for younger (age 6-18) athletes.
Workouts for People With Limited Time – Another great Diesel Crew post about fitting in a workout even when you are pinched for time.
Squat, Deadlift, and Hip Thrust Form – Bret Contreras provides an awesome breakdown and video showing you how to squat, deadlift, and hip thrust properly.
Training Top 10 Checklist – Answer these 10 questions to see if you are really training or just working out.
How to Become a Gladiatior – 7 steps from Zach Even-Esh to make sure you don’t lose your edge training and overall
The Secrets to Usain Bolt’s Success – Usain Bolt and some of his secrets to his success.
How to Eat to Build Muscle – Chad Waterbury talks about how to eat to build muscle.
Motivational Albert Einstein Quotes – Some great Albert Einstein quotes about motivation.
Random Strength Training Tips – Some quick random strength training tips that if actually put into effect would help your gains 10x.
MMA Inside NFL Training – Famed MMA Strength Coach Martin Rooney has taken his training to the New York Jets. This video shows how he implements MMA into NFL training.
5 Pieces of Advice Football Players Should Know – The man, the myth, the legend Jim Wendler talks about 5 things he wish he knew as a football player when younger. It applies to every sport and ever athlete in the junior high, high school, and collegiate level.
Barefoot Training – Eric Cressey talks about barefoot training, why and how it should be done, and who would benefit the most from it. It basically goes along exactly with how the athletes train barefoot at the facility.
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One of the most important things in baseball is having healthy, strong, and stable shoulders. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by forcing a baseball player to move their entire body through their arms. One of the many variations that accomplish this task is the basic shoulder walk seen in the video below.
You want to keep the arms locked, reach out your hand, and pull yourself forward using your shoulders. This is not a bear crawl or other form of animal walk so your hands will not ever come up off the ground. Instead it is more of a scooting and pulling motion to move the body.
Check out the video and let me know what you think.
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With the football season finally starting back up, you want to make sure that at you at least maintain all the size, speed, strength, and power gains you worked so hard in the off-season to attain. Unfortunately for most coaches, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to be able to coach football, watch film, game plan, and spend time in the weight room making sure the football players are still working out in a way that will help them while in season.
The majority of football players from high school and up (no matter what position), lose an average of over 10 pounds of muscle as the season progresses. This not only hurts a football team and the athlete in terms of their on field ability, but also increases their risk for injury as they become weaker, slower, and smaller.
A good in-season program should consist of 1 to 2 strength training sessions a week (1 strength and power session and 1 recovery session) and needs to be constantly adjusted depending on how the athlete is feeling, performing, and any injuries they might be recovering from.
For most football players who follow a good in-season training program, they won’t just maintain everything they worked in the off-season and summer to achieve, but continue to get stronger, faster, and more powerful each week. What does this mean? Let’s say you and your competition (either an opponent, or even someone you are competiting against for that starting spot) start off the season at the same skill level. If you put in the extra work during the season and continue to get better as the season progresses and your competition is just concentrating on practice and games, by the time playoffs roll around you will be so far ahead of them that they won’t stand a chance.
By following a good individualized in-season program, you will finish the season dominating all the competition and be just as good on the field in your last game as you were that first practice.
Contact Genesis Athletic Performance today to make sure you don’t get left behind this season. Email us at Info@Genesis-AP.com, or call (832) 380-5436.
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With summer winding down, I have been spending all of my time at the facility trying to get the college athletes ready to leave and get up to school stronger, and more powerful than ever before, as well as prepare all the junior high and high school athletes for this upcoming fall. It has kept me extremely and the website articles and posts have been lacking so I apologize. Next week things won’t be so hectic and I have some great content that needs to get posted to be sure to keep checking back.
Because I don’t want to leave you with nothing, I wanted to share a link to the blog of another top notch strength coach giving you 53 tips to build muscle and get stronger. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think.
53 Ways to Build Muscle, Gain Strength, and Be Awesome (Minus the Expletives)
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As an athlete you must have superior grip strength no matter what sport or position you play. Whether you are trying to control a baseball during a pitch, hold a bat, grab an opponent to make a block or tackle, grapple with someone or anything else, you must have the grip strength in order to dominate.
This is why athletes train their grip nearly on a daily basis at Genesis. But because of the constant heavy weights, farmer walks, deadlifts, kb swings, keg cleans, etc., everyone’s hands get pretty beat up and calloused. Now callouses aren’t a bad thing and are great to toughen up the hands, but they need to be treated occasionally so you don’t end up with an inch of dead skin just waiting to be ripped off causing some down time.
Training and Playing Sports are not Fun When Your Hand Looks Like This
For 2 bucks you can have the best of both worlds. Tough strong hands, without callouses that have the chance to rip off and interfere with your workouts and training. Go to any drug store, grocery store, Target, Wal-Mart and buy a pumice stone. They are located where all the nail polish is so act manly when heading down that aisle, but it is worth the trip.
This is What Every Strong Macho Needs in His Shower...
Keep the stone in the shower and before you get out at least once a week just tear into your hands with it. Scrubbing every calloused spot making sure that you get a lot of the dead skin off. This leaves your skin tough but without the callouses so you can get back training and playing with the strongest toughest hands out there without worrying about losing chunks of skin.
Suck up your fear of heading into the woman’s sections of stores and grab a stone. Or if you really can’t man up and do it then you can buy one of those Ped Egg things but seriously… which looks better? Rubbing your hands with a raw rock or with a shiny plastic egg thingy.
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Next time you watch a professional baseball game have a look at the physiques of the players. Take special note of how muscular and strong nearly every single one of them appears. That’s because they are. Compare this to the physiques of players in high school and college. You’ll notice a similar trend: those in the greatest shape (strongest) are the ones that make All-Star games and get drafted. Being muscular and bigger makes you a better baseball player.
So if that is the case, then why are most high school baseball players 150lbs dripping wet with zero muscle? Likely somewhere in their lifetime they have been told that they don’t want to build too much muscle because it will affect their swings and/or their throwing. They’ve been taught by “traditional” coaches that baseball is a game of speed, grace, and especially hand-eye coordination, and performing only exercises training these traits should be used. It was assumed that traditional strength training would somehow interfere with those coveted traits.
Unfortunately this could not be further from the truth.
Not having any muscle at all and worrying only about “baseball skills” falls on the total opposite end of the spectrum. If baseball is all about how far you can hit a ball and how hard you can throw one, then wouldn’t power and strength be a big component to the baseball player? For the high school baseball athlete, this seems to be totally forgotten. This affects not only the player’s game, but their overall health as well. If you don’t have the muscle strength to continually throw a ball as hard as you possibly can, but still attempt to (like 99% of pitchers at the high school level) then something has to give. Unfortunately the thing that gives is often the athlete’s body. They end up with shoulder or elbow problems, tendonitis or worse – a muscle tear or other serious injury that requires surgery and down time (if they are ever able to bounce back from it anyways).
Baseball is a sport that requires the whole body to be fit and strong. Everything is used to throw, hit, and run. Some areas are especially important for success (both in the activity and in staying injury-free). Let’s take each spot on the athlete that needs to be powerful and healthy and break down the best way to achieve those results. Continue reading »
One of the greatest lessons I have ever learned as a strength coach is that it does not matter how strong, powerful, explosive, or fast you are. If you have glaring weaknesses that can be exploited they will be found and you will suffer because of it.
The majority of high school football lineman I work with can lift way more weight than what is needed to compete successfully at this level, but because they have concentrated on moving weight and not become better athletes their performance in general has suffered. They have tight (inflexible) hips, poor explosiveness, bad shoulders, and couldn’t move quick enough to punch out of a wet paper bag.
But what do the athletes and their coaches do? They stick with what they have been doing for years. They continue moving the weights and avoid the weaknesses (not intentionally) because that is how they have learned to train or have been training.
So how do you fix your weaknesses without sacrificing any of your strengths? Continue reading »
This Is Not Specific To Any Sport I Have Ever Seen
“Sport Specific Training” is the biggest buzz word in athlete performance today, but no one really knows exactly what it means. What is Sport Specific Training?
If you Google it or ask any strength coach who is trying to sell you something, they will show you a ton of whacky exercises consisting of big bouncy balls, cones, hurdles, vibrating plates (seriously?), and whatever else they just dropped thousands of dollars on. The problem though is this type of training has minimal (if any) carry over to the actual sport and actually hurts the athletes performance in the long run from over use and lack of absolute strength.
This is a business or trainer trying to sell you on something that looks difficult, not many people can do, seems cutting edge, but in reality provides no sort of performance enhancement to any athletes.
I See MLB And NFL Athletes In This Pose At Least Once A Game
To actually figure out what exactly “sport specific training” (SST from now on) should consist of, lets take a look at what actually makes someone a better athlete in general.
One of the main reasons (although there are tons) I had to open my own facility and get out of training in a globo gym, was watching other uneducated people exercise. You can YouTube all sorts of horrible exercise techniques, methods, exercises, and even people dancing while walking on the treadmill… After seeing this personally for so many years, the one thing that really stood out to me and really made me cringe was watching people warm-up. Nearly everyone who trains at these places perform warm-ups that are so pathetic I was always afraid to watch them actually lift for fear they were going to blow something out.
How many times have you seen this typical warm-up? A guy rolls into the gym, goes to the bathrooom, spends 5 minutes walking on a treadmill or elliptical, spastically swings his arms around, and then lays down on the bench and gets to work? Then he will put 45lb plates on, rep it out 8-12 times with horrible form, and then start packing on the weight… Was that really a warm-up? The only thing a “warm-up” like that demonstrates to me, is just how tolerant the human body is in taking a beating.
So how should you warm-up? There are lots of articles and videos talking about the perfect warm-up before general lifting, or certain exercises, so I’m not going to cover those, but instead approach it from a different view.
The best warm-up is one that gets the blood moving, the muscles warm and active, and starts providing warmth and fluidity to the joints. Now I know warming up like this sounds like it takes forever, is really boring compared to the actual training, and would take up a lot of room, but it is a huge key not just to staying healthy and injury free, but also to moving heavier weights.
So how can you do a warm-up like this in under 5-7 minutes with limited space? For this you have to think outside the box, or in this case the gym. Continue reading »
