Tag: Kevin Neeld

Training Program Design for Small Groups

Tomorrow afternoon, Emily and I will be hopping on a plane to head to San Diego for a few days of R & R. I’ve been in desperate need of a vacation since about September of last year, so this is long overdue. I’m really looking forward to getting away for a few days.

But before I go, I wanted to follow up my post from the other day on 3 Keys to Successfully Pairing Exercises with another post on program design, but this time for athletes training in small groups. In the constant search for the “perfect program” I think people lose sight of the fact that “perfect” is situation-dependent. In other words, what might be ideal for training one individual athlete may not be ideal for a group of athletes, and what may be ideal for a group in one setting may not be ideal for a group in another setting. There is a lot to consider, which is why it’s important for people to not judge the programs of other coaches until they’ve seen the setting that they work in, and the clientele they work with.

One thing we’ve done at Endeavor Sports Performance to accommodate larger groups and ensure a smooth-flowing session is move to quad-sets with two main, non-competing lifts. An example template of this looks like:

A1) Main LB Lift
A2) Non-Competing Core/Mobility
A3) Main UB Lift
A4) Non-Competing Core/Mobility

This allows us to take a group of 6-8 athletes and break them into two smaller groups. One group of 3-4 would start with A1 and cycle through; the other would start at A3 and cycle through. For Group 1, they would progress as A1-A2-A3-A4, etc. Group 2 would progress through as A3-A4-A1-A2, etc. In this way, we’re able to make better use of our equipment and keep a good training flow, but still abide but the fundamental principles we feel are important.

This isn’t a program design strategy that I would give a universal approval, but there are certain situations where it works great. The more “advanced” an athlete becomes, in terms of their training experience, the less effective this strategy is. Simply, as training experience increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to make substantial gains in size and strength and therefore every aspect of the program needs to be more meticulously designed and implemented. Naturally, this includes exercise order, intensity, and rest intervals.

In contrast, athletes new to lifting (or re-integrating back into a lifting program) and younger athletes in general progress more readily and recover quickly from any individual exercise. This means that the residual fatigue from any exercise, and therefore the deleterious effect on any subsequent exercise, will be inconsequential. I’m not suggesting it’s appropriate to just run young athletes through circuits of exercises haphazardly and without consideration to fatigue accumulation or exercise order; it’s still imperative that athletes are sufficiently recovered, mentally and physically, before starting a new exercise. But given the recovery time these athletes require, altering the starting point of an exercise circuit as described above will not impair their progress in any way.

There are a million ways to skin a cat. The key is to know your athletes, and not lose sight of fundamental training principles.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

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3 Keys to Successfully Pairing Exercises

Pairing exercises is a popular program design strategy. It builds in rest intervals between main lifts and allows athletes to make more effective use of their rest intervals (and therefore of their time in the gym). Basically, it’s a strategy to condense more effective training stimuli into the same absolute amount of time.

Conceptually, pairing exercises to get more “bang for your buck” is an inherently good practice. However, as with all things training, there are right and wrong, or should I say better and worse, ways of implementing this practice. When deciding what exercises to pair, keep these three things in mind:

1) Use Non-Competing Grips
Many primary pulling-based exercises, such as deadlift and chin-up variations and most dumbbell exercises, place a high load on the grip musculature. If the program is designed such that the athlete is pairing upper and lower body exercises, it’s important to alter the stress to the grip so that grip strength does not become the limiting factor in the exercise. As an example, a dumbbell reverse lunge and a chin-up would place a similar stress on the grip. It’s likely that the athlete’s performance in the chin-up would be compromised due to grip fatigue. In contrast, pairing a dumbbell reverse lunge with a loaded push-up or a dumbbell chest press would alter the grip stress and therefore be less likely to have grip strength be the limiting factor. In general, an easy way to avoid this problem is to pair lower body pulling exercises (deadlift variations), with upper body pressing variations, and lower body pressing exercises (squat variations) with upper body pulling variations. There are some exceptions to this, but if you stick with this template you’ll be right more often than not.

2) Emphasize different body parts
It’s important to note that “paired exercises” and “supersets” are not the same thing; at least not the way they’re typically used. Supersets usually refer to combining two or more exercises for the same muscle group (or movement pattern). Paired exercises is a more broad phrase that refers to combining two or more exercises. In this sense, there is usually a “primary” exercise that is the main focus of the pair, and a secondary exercise that is used to emphasize a different training quality or body part. Unless hypertrophy or localized work capacity is your primary training aim, it’s ideal not to combine exercises with too much overlap in emphasized musculature. For example, pairing a squat and a reverse lunge or a slideboard hamstring curl would impair the athlete’s ability to perform both exercises optimally. In full-body lifting days, you can use the template described above (LB pull with UB press, and LB press with UB pull). In lower-upper splits, you can pair the primary lift with a complimentary core exercise. For example, pairing a deadlift with a glute bridge would help ensure optimal glute activation during the deadlift, which would ultimately assist the main lift.

Glutes-Optimal activation is key

3) Don’t Pair Unilateral with Unilateral
Coming back to the idea of pairing LB exercises with UB exercises, using exercises in both categories that have a unilateral emphasis can be counterproductive (e.g. reverse lunge and 1-arm row, or back leg raised split squat and alternate db chest press). There are a number of advantages to using unilateral exercises, but the bottom line is that for most people (e.g. NOT elite level powerlifters that move truly heavy loads) they’re more physically and mentally taxing and take more time to perform. Pairing two unilateral exercises can drain the athlete and slow the overall flow of the training program. Instead, consider pairing unilateral exercises with bilateral exercises. As a full-body training example, you might pair:

A1) DB Reverse Lunge (unilateral)
A2) Loaded Push-Up (bilateral)
B1) Slideboard Hamstring Curl (bilateral)
B2) Standing 1-Arm Cable Row (unilateral)

Take Home
These are just a few important considerations when designing training programs using a paired-exercise system. Ultimately, the most important thing is that the exercises don’t compete with one another. The goal of pairing exercises is to cram more “good” into less time. Keeping these things in mind will make sure you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater (don’t lose sight of what’s important!).

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

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This Week at Hockey Strength and Conditioning

Wrapping up another busy week at Endeavor and at HockeyStrengthandConditioning.com. This week we added:

Off-Season Phase 2 from Darryl Nelson
Darryl posted a 4-day off-season training program for a relatively advanced lifter. This looks pretty similar to how I write programs for our hockey players, but it’s interesting to note a few differences in exercise selection and set/rep schemes. Darryl has been incredibly successful with the U.S. National Team Development Program so there’s a lot to be learned from reading through his programs.

Mental Toughness Training for Hockey Players from Brijesh Patel
I’ve been fortunate to learn from a lot of great people over the years, but Brijesh has been the underlying source of as many “aha” moments as anyone. Aside from being very bright, Brijesh really understands the coaching side of the equation. In other words, our jobs as Strength and Conditioning COACHES isn’t just to design quality programs; it’s to get our athletes to perform the best. A lot of the team-building side of training is lost in my facility because we work with groups of athletes from a lot of different teams, but Brijesh is a master at this. This is a quick read, but highlights an often overlooked aspect of hockey performance that players, parents, coaches, and trainers can benefit from hearing. I’m looking forward to catching up with Brijesh (and you?) at this year’s Boston Hockey Symposium.

Slideboard Hamstring Curl Variations from me
Lastly, I added two videos of variations to a slideboard hamstring curl that we’ve been using a lot at Endeavor. I really like slideboard hamstring curls for posterior chain development, but we quickly ran into a problem where our athletes were able to perform 12+ with ease. As with every exercise, progression is key. We’ve used the two variations in this video to help increase the difficulty of the exercise, but keep the same movement qualities we want.

There have been some good threads (~7 to be exact) on the forum too so sign in and check those out. Some great discussions on in-season recovery (same ideas can be applied to the off-season), good books to check out, conditioning for this time of year, supplements, and more!

That’s a wrap for today! If you aren’t a member yet, shell out the $1 to test drive Hockey Strength and Conditioning for a week. If it’s not the best buck you’ve ever spent, I’ll personally refund you!

To your continued success,

Kevin Neeld

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In-Season Training

With the off-season here, this isn’t a very timely post. Nonetheless it’s an important message that I think more parents need to hear. Last week I got an email from a parent of a high school girl we train at Endeavor asking if I thought it would benefit her daughter to continue training twice per week in-season. She was asking because her daughter is in her senior year of high school, and would soon be leaving to play division 1 lacrosse out west. That school, she pointed out, has their athletes train twice per week in-season, and she was wondering if having her daughter start that schedule now would better prepare her for college.

In-Season Training
I thought this was a great question and highlights an incredible insight that so many coaches, parents, and athletes overlook. In-season training is an absolute necessity, but is almost always completely neglected.

We even had a hockey player last year tell me that his coach told the entire team NOT to train in-season because it wasn’t good for them.

Don’t be ridiculous.

While I think this is an impressively stupid thing to say for scientific reasons, I also think it demonstrates an incredible ability to selectively neglect an obvious occurrence:

EVERY PROFESSIONAL AND DIVISION I COLLEGIATE PROGRAM FOLLOWS AN IN-SEASON TRAINING PROGRAM!

How can anyone look at the levels of every sport considered “elite”, see a commonality amongst all of them, and then say something like “in-season training isn’t good for you”?

Did you eat a lot of paint chips as a kid?

HAHAH…Why?

I think one of the reasons in-season training is so frequently neglected is because of a lack of understanding of how the volume and nature of the training program should change to accommodate the volume and nature of the stresses imposed by they sport. There are some commonalities in exercise selection, but the design of our in-season hockey training programs is DRASTICALLY different from that of our off-season programs.

Naturally, in-season training carries a number of important benefits. Unfortunately, most youth sports programs aren’t set up to accommodate in-season training. There’s an excessive focus on competition at the expense of preparation, and the “training” side of preparation is neglected altogether. Add this to the fact that most youth athletes don’t have a true off-season, and it’s easy to see why youth overuse injuries have skyrocketed over the last decade.

In the most simplistic sense, the body operates within a “use it, improve it, or lose it” framework. If athletes aren’t working to improve or maintain athletic capacities, they’re going to lose them. It’s that simple. Years ago I read about a theory stating that the fatigue associated with the end of a season isn’t just the result of of accumulated wear and tear, it was also the result of trying to maintain a given performance level while athletic capacities like strength, power, and speed were diminishing. Think of an athlete’s maximum capacity being a 10/10 and the maximum amount of this capacity needed to perform optimally at any given time being a 8/10, or 80% of their capacity. With a lack of in-season training, athletic capacity may diminish to an 8.5. Now for the athlete to perform at that same level (8 out of 8.5), they’ll be operating at ~95% of their capacity. Which do you think will be tougher to maintain through the end of the season?

With in-season training, less if more. The goal is to create the bare minimum stress to the body that results in the largest improvements in strength and power, and the restoration of structural balance across the major joints in the body. If youth organizations would sacrifice 45 minutes of practice time twice per week to get a quick lift in, they’d notice substantial performance improvements and reductions in injury rates. It’s a shame that more people aren’t doing this.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

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Pre-Puberty Hockey Training

Last week I had an opportunity to speak with the parents of two local teams with ’98 and ’97 birth-year players. After that talk, I got a great question from a well-read mom with regards to the effectiveness of training before the athlete has reached puberty. Her thought was that because the hormonal profile of the athlete isn’t conducive to adding muscle mass, it may not be worth the time.

While this is a logical thought process (and she’s correct about pre-pubescent athletes not being able to put on substantial amounts of muscle mass), it’s important to understand that the addition of muscle mass is not the only goal of training. When it comes to both performance AND injury prevention, we look at other qualities such as:

Movement pattern quality
Body awareness
Linear and transitional mechanics and acceleration
Power
Strength
Conditioning

Each of these terms is really just an umbrella-concept that encompasses many other more-specific training qualities. Importantly, none of these things manifest in isolation. A poorly conditioned athlete is more likely to default to faulty movement patterns upon the onset of fatigue. A weak athlete may not possess the strength to move with quality. Everything is inter-related.

To our hockey mom’s point, kids can condition on their own without having to spend an hour in the car getting to our facility (one of her underlying concerns in posing her question). In other words, the question comes back to, “how will training with you guys differ from training on my own?”

Benefits of Pre-Puberty Training
As the Director of Athletic Development and co-owner of Endeavor Sports Performance, it’s my responsibility to ensure that our entire staff is well-adept at spotting and correcting faulty movement patterns. This is something we take a lot of pride in and one of the things that I think the overwhelming majority of the “personal trainers” and so-called “sports trainers” (I call these guys the “guys in the field” because they tend to coach huge groups of athletes through generic “speed and agility” work in a field all at once, and are more drill sergeants than coaches) don’t know that they don’t know. A well-trained eye can go a long way in preventing unnecessary injuries.

The other important consideration is that strength is not strictly a function of muscle mass. This is a novel concept to most parents, but strength is neurally mediated. This means that, for any level of muscle mass, there is a spectrum of obtainable strength. This is why the “my legs are big enough” argument that many high school hockey players use an excuse for neglecting their lower body is stupid. Just because you’re big doesn’t mean you’re strong. Likewise, just because you’re small, or do not have a hormonal profile conducive to putting on muscle mass, does not mean you can’t get strong. Strength results from an improved neural input signal to the working muscle. In overly simplistic terms, your brain becomes better at activating your muscle’s to produce more force. This can be improved at any age.

I love this kid

Over the last several months, we’ve taken on more young athletes (middle school aged) at Endeavor. This wasn’t our original intention, but after receiving dozens of inquiries from parents of these athletes and meeting them, we decided to give it a go. These athletes tend to make extremely quick improves in motor pattern quality. Once they’re taught how they should be moving, they pick it up pretty quickly and internalize it, which provides huge performance and injury-resistance benefits. The other thing, which can’t be overlooked, is that the confidence of athletes at this age SOARS when they start training. I think this is a combination of overcoming adversity and working hard through a program AND just knowing that they’re doing things that most other athletes aren’t. Given the paramount importance of confidence in athletics, I don’t think this training benefit should be overlooked.

Take Home
The training program design and coaching style will differ for pre-puberty athletes, but the benefits of training are still substantial. Just because an athlete doesn’t have a hormonal profile conducive to adding muscle mass DOES NOT mean he can’t make considerable improvements in strength, conditioning, movement quality, and confidence. At this age, it’s extremely important that athletes train under the supervision of coaches that understand how to teach and reinforce proper movement patterns and exercise technique. It’s all about building a solid foundation for the athlete to build on in the future.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

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