Check out the video below for a great plyo exercise that not only works single leg power, but also lateral quickness, and proper landing technique.
Leave me a comment and let me know what you think.
D
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.
D
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.
D
Summer is winding down and the college athletes are heading off to school and the high school football guys are starting with their two a day practices. But that doesn’t stop them from training to become the best. Check out this video from one of Monday’s training sessions. In-Season Football Guys are knocking out a tough upper body workout, while the baseball and guys going off to college are destroying a lower body day.
Let me know what you think and be sure to comment.
D
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.
D
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)
D
The Strong Always Dominate The Weak
Far too early do athletes worry about “sport specific training”. Because of that their overall athletic development suffers. Unfortunately it’s not the parents, athletes, or coaches fault, as they just want the best for themselves and feel that these types of programs do that.
But what most athletes and parents fail to realize, is that they don’t need “sport specific training” especially at the junior high, high school, and for the most part collegiate level. They need to become better athletes. I know baseball kids who spend hours after hours working with hitting, fielding, and pitching coaches when if they added another 75lbs to their squat instead they would become a way better athlete/baseball player. You can’t perfect weakness. It is only after an athlete has a great base strength level should they worry about utilizing workouts and exercises that are geared to their sport. After all, I have yet to find a sport where being powerful, strong, explosive, and fast doesn’t automatically make you better in it. If you have please let me know.
The same goes for football athletes who only worry about their 40 times when they can barely jump off the ground or squat more than 135.
You have to be strong and learn how to use that strength in order to be a good athlete. period… There is no other way around this.
What defines strong especially at the junior high, high school, and collegiate levels? This is where it gets tricky. If you have an entire baseball team who can only squat 185lbs, then of course the athlete who can squat over 200 is going to seem strong. But are they really?
Dave Tate from EliteFTS has put together a great table showing actual numbers regarding the bench press and squat that can be used to find out where you are on an athletic scale compared to other athletes across the world.
This is the bench table that takes strength levels one step further and shows what any male athlete (no matter the sport) should be bench pressing based off their body weight and the level they want to achieve athletically.
The squat table that breaks up strength levels by skill and body weight levels.
Look over these tables and see where you fit in. Are you putting up numbers that a star would put up? Or are you failing to even hit the numbers that any varsity letter athlete should achieve.
Now that you have numbers to strive for get back in the gym and get after it or you will get dominated.
D
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.
D
Take a look at a few of the pictures below to see some of the Cy-Falls Baseball Players utilizing a slosh pipe to strengthen not just their legs but their arms, shoulders, and entire core.
A slosh pipe is basically a 9 or 10 foot PVC pipe filled 2/3 of the way with water and only weighs 30-40 lbs, but makes any exercise harder as athletes now have to stabilize their entire body to keep the pipe balanced while still performing the exercise.
Holding a slosh pipe in a Zercher postion (as seen in the picture), or an even bigger challenge overhead, turns any exercise into a full body exercise forcing the arms, shoulders, core, upper back and lower back to resist tipping while the water shifts while trying to produce power into the ground off a single leg (especially during lunges).
They can be used instead of barbells or dumbbells for nearly any exercise and by swapping them out you will achieve a different type of strength that works in any situation.
Give a slosh pipe a try if you really want to add another dimension to your sports training and let me know how it goes.
D
The number 1 question I get asked by athletes and parents who are interested in the program is “can you make the athlete faster?” This is and always will be one of the main components that determine what makes a top athlete. Unfortunately most athletes and parents do not like my answer – “Yes and No”. They get this look on their face thinking that the program is totally crap until I sit down and explain what I mean.
Speed on the playing field for the most part is totally different than being fast or having a good 40 or 60 yard time. Yet that is how we are taught to test speed. This is why athletes flood to chain sports performance places that promote “speed” instead of athleticism. However, this type of speed does not carry over well to the playing field. Unfortunately, it’s the athlete putting in all this extra effort that suffers.
Why doesn’t this type of speed training transfer well to a game situation? Ask yourself this – when was the last time any athlete has run a straight line over 20-30 yards without any contact, change of direction, or other obstacles to avoid? While this happens all the time on a track, on any other field or court it rarely occurs. Athletes rarely have the opportunity to hit maximum velocity (or even accelerate correctly) because they must change direction, go through or around other players, or only go 5-10 yards.
So, let’s revisit my answer of “Yes and No”. Continue reading »
