Tag: Kevin Neeld

NO XPLODE Exposed

Today’s Thursday Throwback takes us back to 2011 and provides an inside look at what used to be a very popular supplement. Aside from the specific supplement referenced here, there are two big takeaways from this post that you should apply to ALL supplement choices:

1) It’s important to familiarize yourself with the brand. Because the supplement is completely unregulated by the FDA, companies can put whatever they want into their bottles. Simply, there’s no guarantee that what they claim the supplement contains (e.g. creatine) actually has that ingredient in the quantities they’re advertising. Some brands have gone through the process of becoming “NSF Certified for Sport” or have been certified by “Informed Choice”, which should give you a higher level of confidence that the supplement contains what it’s supposed to. I strongly discourage our athletes from going to supplement/grocery stores to by supplements. It’s unlikely a high quality brand is even carried at the store and a lot of the sales people at the more popular stores are dangerously under-informed.

2) A lot of times less is more. There are TONS of supplements, and supplement ingredients, out there, but the overwhelming majority have no scientific support that they actually work. A lot of times popular supplements contain a few inexpensive ingredients that do work, and a ton of “extra stuff” that doesn’t, and you end up paying a premium for inflated marketing campaigns and colorful wrappers instead of a higher quality ingredient. Knowing which supplements actually work can be tough to stay on top of, which is why I frequently refer back to this: Examine.com Supplement Goals Reference Guide. It’s nice to have an unbiased, comprehensive look at every supplement so you can quickly see if there’s research supporting it’s effectiveness.

The most informative, honest, unbiased look at supplementation, ever.

NO XPLODE Exposed

A couple years ago I wrote a supplement review that we never took to print. There was a considerable conflict of interest because the nature of the article could negatively impact sales of one of the site’s top sellers. To be honest, they handled it really well, apologizing to me and noting that it wouldn’t be good for their reputation with the company. I understood and still do; relationships are everything in business. With that said, I think the wide-spread use of this supplement is ludicrous and potentially dangerous. A deeper look inside:

NO XPLODE-A Look Inside

Assuming you don’t have an NO2 label in front of you (hopefully you don’t), let’s take a look at the nutrition facts and some of the other ingredients to see if we can pick out the ingredients out that are driving their marketing claims.

Calories: 25
Fat: 0 g
Carbohydrate: 6 g
Sugar: 0 g
Protein: 0 g
Vitamin B6: 25 mg
Vitamin B9: 400 mcg
Vitamin B12: 120 mcg
Calcium: 75 mg
Phosphorous: 535 mg
Magnesium: 360 mg
Sodium: 235 mg
Potassium: 75mg

Ingredients (get ready!):

In addition to the components listed above, N.O.-XPLODE contains N.O.-Xplode™’s Proprietary Blend, which consists of: L-Arginine AKG, L-Citrulline Malate, RC-NOS™ (Rutacarpine 95%), L-Citrulline AKG, L-Histidine AKG, NAD (Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide), Gynostemma Pentaphyllum (Leaves & Stem) (Gypenosides 95%), Modified Glucose Polymers (Maltodextrin), Di-Creatine Malate, Trimethylglycine, Creatine Ethyl Ester -Beta-Alanine Dual Action Composite (CarnoSyn®), Sodium Bicarbonate, Sodium Creatine Phosphate Matrix, Creatinol-O-Phosphate-Malic Acid Interfusion, Glycocyamine, Guanidino Proplonic Acid, Cinnulin PF® (Aqueous Cinnamon Extract) (Bark), Ketoisocaproate Potassium, Creatine ABB (Creatine Alpha-Amino-N-Butyrate), L-Tyrosine, Taurine, Glucuronolactone, Methylxanthine (Caffeine), L-Tyrosine AKG, MCT’s (Medium Chain Triglycerides)[Coconut], Common Periwinkle Vinpocetine 99%, Vincamine 99%, Vinburnine 99% (Whole Plant), Di-Calcium Phosphate, Di-Potassium Phosphate, Di-Sodium Phosphate, Potassium Glycerophosphate, Magnesium Glycerophosphate, Glycerol Stearate.

Other ingredients include: Citric Acid, Natural & Artificial Flavors, Calcium Silicate, Potassium Citrate, Sucralose(Splenda®), Acesulfame-K, FD&C Red #40, And FD&C Blue #1 (These are mostly just preservatives, sweeteners, and colors).

I’ll be honest. I’m far from a nutrition and supplement scientist. There are some people that could quote strengths and weaknesses of research on most of the above ingredients-I’m not one of them. I do, however, stay current on research demonstrating consistent effectiveness of specific supplements. In that light, there are a few things that really stand out to me when looking at the excessive laundry list of ingredients in NO XPLODE.

If you scan through the ingredients you’ll see creatine, beta-alanine, and caffeine. All of these have been shown to be safe and effective compared to a placebo in eliciting greater increases in muscular size and strength (creatine), and work capacity and endurance (beta-alanine and caffeine), and there is some more recent work suggesting that caffeine taken in pretty high doses may be effective in increasing maximal strength via an increased neural drive mechanism.

The “get a big pump” claim of NO supplements insinuates greater increases in muscle mass and strength as a result of the NO2 precursor l-arginine (an amino acid), which is largely unsupported. Arginine MAY have some benefits in patients with heart problems, but only in higher doses (in the realm of 10-15 g) known to cause almost inevitable gastrointestinal distress. In short, there is no research-supported reason to think that NO2 will increase the size and strength of your muscles. Furthermore, it’d be fair to say that the overwhelming majority of the long list of ingredients in these supplements are worthless for the purposes of improving training outcomes in athletes.

Why All The Hype?

So why all the positive reports and borderline evangelical support for NO2 supplements? There are a couple reasons. For starters, this supplement has received a ton of attention from teenagers. Because it increases your heart rate as a result of the caffeine, those new to training love it. They feel more energized. They also get significantly bigger and stronger. Being logical thinkers, the conclusion is that N.O.-XPLODE gives you the energy you need to train harder to get bigger and stronger. Makes sense, but isn’t necessarily accurate. As I’ve written about before, EVERYTHING works for inexperienced lifters. In fact, I’m fully confident that front planks would increase maximum squat and bench press strength in inexperienced lifters. No matter what teenagers do, they’ll get bigger and stronger. The added rush from a supplement isn’t the cause of these improvements!

“Take NO-XPLODE! I started taking it two weeks ago when I started lifting for the first time ever and it totally worked!” – Typical Well-Intentioned, But Completely Ignorant Teenager

As I’ve mentioned in the past, my stance on supplements is simple. It needs to work (research-supported). It needs to be safe. And, ideally, it should be pretty cheap. NO2 supplements miss the mark on at least the first of my qualifiers, and probably the second. For those that swear by its effectiveness, I won’t disagree that you may get results from it, but it’s not from the nitric oxide components or precursors. Short of duct tape and a soldering iron, they’ve put just about every ingredient known to man inside N.O.-XPLODE. This includes creatine and beta-alanine, which do receive scientific support with regards to increasing muscular size and strength, especially if taken together, and caffeine, which is known to increase energy and focus. With supplements, like food, the less ingredients, the better. Stick with stuff that’s been shown to work and be safe. If there’s a long list of ingredients you don’t understand, don’t take it, regardless of what the high school kid working at GNC tells you.

I think we all need to be more cautious about what we’re allowing teenagers to put into their bodies. It seems that real food has become a minority component of today’s young athlete’s diet. Further, I think we need to take a step back and reanalyze other aspects of their lives if they can’t get a good workout in without loading up on artificial stimulants!

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
HockeyTransformation.com
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

P.S. Never waste money on ineffective supplements again >> Examine.com Supplement Goals Reference Guide

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“Kevin Neeld is one of the top 5-6 strength and conditioning coaches in the ice hockey world.”
– Mike Boyle, Head S&C Coach, US Women’s Olympic Team

“…if you want to be the best, Kevin is the one you have to train with”
– Brijesh Patel, Head S&C Coach, Quinnipiac University

Analyzing the Skating Stride

A couple weeks ago I got an email from a youth player asking me to analyze his skating stride. He felt, and I agree, that he was leaving some “free speed” on the table by now optimizing his stride pattern.

You can watch the videos of his skating below:

You can also see these here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwGmafySa8xUvxOEdhNaYKPjPy3HzDH_J

Minor Tweaks

At first glance, there are a few minor adjustments I’d recommend to him that are extremely common for young players:

1) Get a slightly deeper skating stance.
He’s not as “upright” of a skater as some players, but I think he may have another inch or so of depth left to achieve his optimal skating position. Moving into a slightly deeper skating position will increase his stride length, and therefore the amount of force he can put into the ice to propel himself forward with each stride

2) Recover the stride leg fully under the body
Again, he does a pretty good job here, but there’s a little room for improvement. Recovering the stride leg completely under the body does two things: It increases the stride length on the next stride by giving it a starting position a little closer to the body (e.g. adding stride length at the initiation of the stride, not at the end as getting a deeper stance would help achieve), and it minimize excessive friction of the skate blade on the ice of the stance leg by moving the skate off of the inside edge a bit. The more players ride their inside edges on their stance leg, the more “drag” there is on the ice, slowing the player down a little with each stride.

3) Pushing “out” instead of “up” on the starts
If you watch a lot of the starts, the player’s body pushes “up” before actually moving anywhere. If the goal is to move horizontally and not vertically (you’re not racing toward the ceiling), he should focus more on leaning in toward the direction he wants to move and pushing the ice back and away from him. In cuing similar movements off the ice, we sometimes use the phrase “low ceiling” to help players visualize that the goal is to move laterally without lifting their hips up excessively.

Making Huge Strides

These are all important things to work on, and I think with a little practice he’ll be able to make significant improvements in these areas. With that said, the two major areas I think he has the room for the most significant improvements are:

1) Adopting a more “diagonal” than “lateral” arm swing
If you look at a lot of the forward skating, the arm swing is more side to side, than front to back. I refer to this as the “Carlton Dance” (See 1:35 below)

The arm swing is meant to counterbalance the skating stride, so it should be in a direction that accommodates that. In other words, if the stride leg is pushing straight to the side, the arm shouldn’t be swinging straight to the side. The stride leg pushes back on roughly a 45-degree angle behind the body so the arm should “reach” on a similar angle toward the body’s midline.

You’ll notice that there is a lot of lateral sway in the players skating stride. There are a lot of reasons why this may be the case, but an excessively lateral arm swing will certainly carry the body’s momentum in more of a side-to-side pattern, wasting energy and slowing the player down.

2) “Pushing under” with the cross-under leg
This may be the most overlooked skating cue in “curvilinear” (e.g. not straight forward or backward) skating. If you look at the cross-over patterns, it looks like the emphasis is on stepping over with the cross-over leg. There’s A LOT of power to be gained by emphasizing the “push under” of the other leg.

In the videos, the cross-under leg doesn’t ever achieve full extension, which is a common sign that it’s not being used as a driver. In training this, sometimes it’s better to slow things down a bit and just focusing on pushing under as forcefully as possible while maintaining a good body position. Once the player has a good understanding of this motion, they can progressively pick up speed.

Wrap Up

As I mentioned, these are all pretty common adjustments that players at every level can benefit from working on. I’d consider everything above “the basics”, meaning they’re the most important things to master. Even the “elite” players can benefit from checking in periodically to make sure they’re still doing these things and haven’t progressively developed poor habits over time.

In a follow-up post, I’ll show you what I look for in my off-ice assessment and how limitations off the ice can help explain a lot of what we see as strides flaws on the ice.

In the meantime, if you’re interested in more information about optimal stride patterns and off-ice training strategies to maximize skating speed, check out Breakaway Hockey Speed.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
HockeyTransformation.com
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

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Year-round age-specific hockey training programs complete with a comprehensive instructional video database!

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“Kevin Neeld is one of the top 5-6 strength and conditioning coaches in the ice hockey world.”
– Mike Boyle, Head S&C Coach, US Women’s Olympic Team

“…if you want to be the best, Kevin is the one you have to train with”
– Brijesh Patel, Head S&C Coach, Quinnipiac University

Shoulder Pain with Pressing Exercises

Today’s Thursday Throwback is one of my most popular posts ever. This post gained traction quickly as it discusses the largest underlying factor in why so many athletes and lifters alike get shoulder pain while benching and doing other pressing exercises.

Since this post was first published over 3 years ago, I’ve continued to emphasize the importance of having some sort of screen to pre-qualify yourself (or your athletes) for specific exercises, and the necessity of having a system to make program changes if a specific exercise is not a good fit for an athlete. This is the system I use at Endeavor: Optimizing Movement

Enjoy the post and if you know anyone that has experienced shoulder pain while benching or doing push-ups, please share this with them!

Shoulder Pain with Pressing Exercises

Last week I got an email from my step sister saying that she’s been getting shoulder pain during bench pressing and dumbbell raising exercises. I had a similar conversation with a hockey parent a week before about one of his son’s teammates. In both cases, it’d be impossible for me to say with 100% confidence that I know exactly why they’re in pain and what they can do to fix it. As you know, non-traumatic pain tends to be multi-factorial and necessitates considerations to static and dynamic postures. In other words, how we hold ourselves throughout the day and how we move plays a large role in soft-tissue overload.

With that said, I’d bet my car (an estimated value of $137), that in both of these cases, the bench press is performed with a similar fault – the elbows are out too wide. Let’s walk through this:

It’s somewhat hard to tell from this picture, but my elbows are approaching 90 degrees off my side. In other words, my upper arm and the side of my rib cage form about a 90 degree angle. This puts a tremendous amount of stress on the anterior shoulder capsule at the bottom of the lift. It also increases the risk of having the glenohumeral head impinging on the structures superior to it.

Ligaments of the shoulder

The picture above illustrates the ligaments of the shoulder. As you approach the bottom of a bench press with your elbows flared out, it tends to put excessive stretch on the IGHL and MGHL ligaments displayed above and increases the chances of impinging the ligaments and tendons between the acromion and glenohumeral head (long head of biceps brachii tendon and subacromial bursa are two notables).

The same is true for push-ups, although there tend to be some other differences between bench pressing and doing push-ups. For instance, push-ups allow free movement of the scapulae, allowing the shoulder a bit more freedom than during bench pressing, which may delay the onset of pain from resulting from the elbows being out too wide. Of course, because your body isn’t supported by a bench during a push-up, it also means more freedom of movement for other joints; as a result, it’s common to see people with sagging hips, excessively arching backs and protruding chins (or what I call “bird neck syndrome” or BNS).

Brutal Push-Up…but decent display of BNS

In both exercises, the goal is to keep the elbows within 45 degrees off the side of the body and to retract the scapulae (squeeze the shoulder blades back and down) as you go down. Because the scapulae aren’t free to move during a bench press, it’s important to set up on the bench with your scapulae in the correct position, packed back and down, and to keep them there throughout the movement.

Bench Press with correct positioning

With push-ups, the shoulder blades aren’t wedged between your rib cage and the bench so they can move freely. When going down in a push-up, think of pulling your chest down to the floor and pulling your shoulder blades back and down along the way.

Push-Up with proper technique. Notice how the hands are beneath the shoulders, the elbows are within 45 degrees of the sides of the body and the chin is tucked back.

If you already have shoulder pain, it may be best to back off the pressing exercises for a week or two and focus more on rowing exercises, emphasizing pulling the shoulder blades back and down as you pull the weight toward your chest. If it’s not that bad, the floor press is a great exercise to reteach a proper pressing pattern while limiting the stress on the shoulder because of the decrease in range of motion.

Dumbbell Floor Press

With regards to push-ups, I think most of the problem comes from people assuming they can do push-ups on the ground right away. This stems back to an interesting paradox in youth training, where there is still the perception that lifting weights is dangerous but people are free to do as many push-ups as they want. In reality, I’ve come across very few athletes 14 and under that can do a single push-up the correct way on the floor. As with any exercise, it’s important to progress the loading as the individual develops the strength to perform it correctly. In this case, the overwhelming majority of people need to start performing push-ups on an inclined surface and focus on proper body positioning and proper movement (e.g. moving as a unit connected from ears to ankles, descending so that the lower chest is the first region to touch the ground or raised implement and keeping the elbows within 45 degrees of the side). As people progress in strength, you simply lower the implement closer and closer to the ground.

At Endeavor, we use the safety bars in our squat racks to accomplish this. This way it’s easy for us to objectively assess progress as each level is numbered. As the athlete gets stronger, they approach higher and higher numbers as the bar lowers closer to the ground.

Incline Push-Up

In a team off-ice training setting (especially with younger teams), this can be tough. In these situations, I’m more apt to use our jump boxes, which are set at heights of 24, 18, and 12 inches. Using these, I can start everyone at the top box and progress them lower on an individual basis as they demonstrate sufficient strength. If someone mastered the 18″ box, but isn’t quite ready for the 12″, you can just lengthen the negative or “going down” phase of every rep to make it a bit tougher.

Pressing movements are an essential part of any person’s training program. Unfortunately, they’re also one of the most common causes of upper body pain. Making the simple corrections discussed above will help make you stronger than ever, while keeping you pain free!

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com
HockeyTransformation.com

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“…one of the best DVDs I’ve ever watched”
“A must for anyone interested in coaching and performance!”

Click here for more information >> Optimizing Movement

The Myth of Core Stability

Today’s Thursday Throwback takes us back to 2010, when a controversial article questioning the benefits of “core stability” training was published. The post discusses what core stability really means, and the most effective progression we’ve found to not only minimize injury risk, but also to improve performance in athletic settings.

We still use variations of the exercises presented in the videos below. They’re incredibly challenging, which our guys really enjoy. Give them a shot the next time you’re in the gym with a partner.

Enjoy!

The Myth of Core Stability

Few people would argue that core training is an integral part of an athletic development training program. Aesthetic benefits aside, core training is widely accepted as improving:

Lumbar stability and therefore reducing risk and/or symptoms of low back pain
Force transfer between the lower and upper body, which improves power in just about every athletic movement (kicking a soccer ball, swinging a bat, lacrosse and hockey shooting, fighting off defenders in every contact sport)
Stability of the pelvis to allow for more efficient lower body movements, such as rapidly changing direction

Because of the core’s importance in both maximizing performance and minimizing injury risk, core stabilization concepts are one of the underlying foundations of all of our training programs at Endeavor. If you’ve been following my site for a while you know that I do my best to actively seek out new information to better design programs to help our athletes. Last week I came across a draft of an article from Eyal Lederman, a professor in London, titled “The Myth of Core Stability.” I’m always intrigued by articles that argue against the norm as these are usually the most eye opening.

Lederman argued that the evidence in support of core stability training to back pain is pretty limited. He notes that strength may not be the issue since some of the major core muscles are minimally active during activities of daily living. As a quick background, muscles become “active” when the body sends an electrical signal to the muscle to contract. For study purposes, the signal is often “normalized” to a maximal value for that muscle (MVC). When we talk about these “maximal” values, we need to keep in mind that maximum activation is highly dependent upon the length of the muscle and direction of the movement, but I won’t bore you with all the underlying neuroscience.

The article cites research demonstrating that walking necessitates average values of:

2% MVC from the rectus abdominis (the six pack muscle)
5% MVC from the external obliques

Further research is cited painting the picture that normal activities (even some with external loads added) require minimal trunk muscle activity (between 1-5% MVC).

The underlying tone of the article was that core stability training is foolish and scientifically unsupported. I bring up this article because many times these things work their way to your eyes and ears through the media with headlines like “Core Training Is Not Important” as some staff writer attempts to create an interesting story with out-of-context research. Within an athletic context, there are a few things worth keeping in mind:

The article cites trunk activity during walking and standing, not hockey-relevant movements like skating, changing directions, shooting, taking hits, etc.
The article is put within the frame of solving back pain, not optimizing performance
The article largely ignores evidence of active people with back pain resolving symptoms by putting a greater focus on improving their posture and core stability
Like many academics, this article systematically (although using flawed logic) dismisses many commonly held beliefs about core training, but fails to offer any alternative

At Endeavor Sports Performance, our core training system functions to integrate appropriate mobility and stability of the pelvis and spine into athletic movements. We follow a basic progression of:

Reinforce core stability in static positions (front planks, side planks, glute bridges, anti-rotation belly press isoholds, etc.)
Increase challenge to static core stability by adding a dynamic component (chop and lift variations, plank and bridge “marches”, rollouts, tight rotations, 2-Way Bunkie side planks, dynamic anti-rotation belly press’, etc.)
Maximize unexpected dynamic stiffness through perturbation training (Split stance belly press with perturbation, overhead stability ball perturbation, squat with overhead stability ball perturbation, split squat with overhead stability ball perturbation, stability ball front plank with perturbation, side plank with perturbation, etc.)

While I think most people are at least loosely familiar with the first two steps of this progression, few athletes have been exposed to perturbation training. I strongly believe this type of training will drastically increase in popularity over the next several years. Check out videos of a couple of the more advanced progressions of perturbation training below. Have you ever seen anything like this?

Split Squat IsoHold with Overhead Stability Ball Perturbation

Stability Ball Front Plank with Perturbation

Colby Cohen and Jeff Buvinow do a great demonstrating these exercises. The goal is to not move at all or, more realistically, to minimize the displacement and return to “neutral” as quickly as possible. It’s hard to tell from the video, but I’m really “cranking” on them pretty hard. We progress to more vigorous perturbations, but ultimately we want to challenge their stability in multiple directions. In the first video, I’m randomly alternating amongst pushing, pulling, and rotating the ball in a variety of directions. In the second video, I’m somewhat randomly alternating between rotating the hips, rotating the shoulder, and laterally deviating the hips and shoulders. By creating a random variety of stresses, the athlete learns to reflexively generate stiffness.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com
HockeyTransformation.com

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“…one of the best DVDs I’ve ever watched”
“A must for anyone interested in coaching and performance!”

Click here for more information >> Optimizing Movement

Is your corrective approach leading to injury

When I was growing up playing hockey, at least once every season I’d have some sort of left groin or hip flexor issue.

None were ever significant enough to keep me off the ice, but they were always enough that I was constantly “aware of it”, which is not where you want your focus going while you’re playing.

I always wondered if there was something I was doing, or not doing, that was causing these injuries.

Now that I’ve made the transition from player to S&C coach, I’m thankful for my long list of injuries as they’ve motivated me to learn more about functional anatomy, biomechanics, and a number of other injury risk factors.

Naturally, one of the major goals of every program I write is to reduce my athletes’ risk of injury. As a result, it’s important to understand what factors may predispose an athlete to injuries in the first place, and then make decisions about what I have the ability to influence.

With the increasing popularity of PRI and FMS courses over the last several years, a lot of attention is being paid to the potential for faulty movement patterns to contribute to breakdown. This is obviously an area I subscribe to, as I’ve taken FMS Level 1&2, the SFMA course, and spent over 100 hours in PRI courses, in addition to becoming PRT-credentialed a couple years ago.

With that said, purely postural/biomechanical approaches to injury risk have been appropriately questioned in the research, as these are really just one piece of the puzzle. In an effort to perfect movement, coaches may be inadvertently increasing their athletes’ risk of injury.

Identifying Injury Risk Factors

The most effective approach to injury risk reduction is to attack it from all angles. While this topic can get pretty complex, I generally think of risk factors as falling into these major buckets:

Postural/Biomechanical: Determines length/tension relationships, how mechanical stress is distributed during movement, and movement efficiency in general
Neuromuscular Abilities: Force production, rate of force development, and timing of force production
Conditioning/Fitness: The ability to repeat the sport-specific movement demands at a consistently high level and recover appropriately, both in a short-term perspective following a work bout, and at the conclusion of a training session/practice/game
Stress Tolerance: The resiliency of the body to the accumulation of stressors from within and outside the training/sports paradigm. This also determines the individual’s adaptation capacity at any given period of time
Accumulated Fatigue: Related to stress tolerance; influences all of the above factors

Each of these areas is an important contributor to injury risk and needs to be considered in a training program.

When Corrective Exercise Goes Wrong

A couple years ago, I remember hearing people talk about how some personal trainers and strength coaches were taking some of these movement-based courses and basically not letting their clients/athletes do anything except corrective work until they met some standard. At the time, as I would now, I remember thinking “people actually do that?”

As time has gone by, I realize this is more common than I would have ever thought.

If you come back to the list above, focusing on movement capacity to the exclusion of other qualities will only improve that one injury risk factor. An argument can be made (that I’d agree with) that improving movement quality can improve stress tolerance by reducing unnecessary tension/tone resulting from a compensatory attempt to produce the desired movement, but not to the same degree that also addressing fitness/conditioning and accumulated fatigue would.

Probably the biggest oversight in an overly “corrective” approach is that the athletes actually detrain. Having slow, weak, and poorly conditioned athletes that move well doesn’t only neglect many key areas of injury prevention, it makes them worse at their sport.

A Better System

Even in the presence of movement limitations, athletes need to train to improve, or at least maintain, their performance capacities. The key here is to pick exercises and methods that are best suited for the athletes based on their current movement abilities. This is one of the major topics I discussed in in my DVD Optimizing Movement, as having a system for what to do in the presence of specific movement limitations makes it easy to individualize training, even in a group or team setting.

Assessing factors that influence movement, and demonstrating how to use them to drive your training approach

It’s important to recognize that slow, weak, poorly conditioned, stressed out, and/or tired athletes are all at a greater risk for injury. With this in mind, training programs should be designed to develop physical capacities using individual-specific exercises/methods while also improving notable movement limitations, with coaches monitoring stress and accumulated fatigue to make any necessary adjustments to training loads or recovery strategies on an ongoing basis.

Wrap Up

Looking back on my own injuries, I can remember that some happened when I just didn’t feel right (possibly an alignment issue), some were the result of overuse, and others were simply because I was too weak.

As strength and conditioning coaches, our job is to deliver highly trained, injury resistant athletes to our coaches. As more emphasis is placed on assessments and corrective work, it’s important to not lose site of the importance of continuing to develop the speed, power, strength, and conditioning of our athletes, while also monitoring fatigue. Ultimately, a more comprehensive approach will not only improve their durability, but also their performance.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld
OptimizingMovement.com
UltimateHockeyTraining.com

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“…one of the best DVDs I’ve ever watched”
“A must for anyone interested in coaching and performance!”