Eric Cressey – Budding the Efficient Athlete

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As a continuation of this week’s series on things you didn’t learn from a textbook, today I’ll be talking about how we’ve misunderstood muscle actions. As we go through anatomy and kinesiology in the typical exercise science degree, we memorize muscle actions.

The quadriceps extend the knee. The biceps flex the elbow. The teres minor and infraspinatus externally rotate the humerus. You get the point.

The point that many folks don’t get is that this is simply a practice of memorizing concentric muscle actions, and the truth is that this is really only one-third of the picture when it comes to how we move. You see, these muscles are also acting isometrically and eccentrically; sometimes the primary goal is not to shorten, but preserve muscle length, or prevent uncontrolled lengthening. This is a crucial understanding for one to acquire, as poor isometric and eccentric control are the culprits in an overwhelming majority of non-contact athletic injuries.

Our shoulder barks at us because our scapular stabilizers and rotator cuff don’t function correctly to prevent, slow, or limit inappropriate movement. An ACL goes because glutes and hamstrings couldn’t control unrestrained knee hyperextension and hip adduction and internal rotation.

What the Strength and Conditioning Textbook Never Taught You: Synergists and Antagonists

As a follow-up to yesterday’s “series premier,” I wanted to use today’s post to discuss another topic that rarely gets sufficient attention in the typical exercise science textbook: synergists and antagonists.

The typical explanation of the relationship of the two is that they’re on opposite sides of the joint and perform opposite actions. As an example, the hamstrings flex the knee, and quadriceps extend the knee. Simple enough, right? Not so much.

Muscles can be synergists and antagonists at the same time.

Let’s just look at the hip extensors to explain this point. Your primary hip extensors are the hamstrings, gluteus maximus, and adductor magnus (there are more, but we’re keeping this discussion simple). They all work together to extend the hip each time you squat, lunge, deadlift, sprint, push the sled, or bust a move on the dance floor. That said, the hip can do a lot of things as it extends.

Black Friday/Cyber Monday Sale

I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of anything I would rather do less than get up at 4am and go stand in line at some store with thousands of other people to take advantage of some sale. And, it’s with that in mind that Mike Robertson, Bill Hartman, Mike Reinold, and I are proud to announce a sale through Monday (11/28) at midnight on the following products: Assess and Correct DVD Set Inside-Out DVD Set Magnificent Mobility DVD The Bulletproof Knees and Back Seminar DVD Set Building the Efficient DVD Set 2008 Indianapolis Performance Enhancement Seminar DVD Set The Single-leg Solution DVD Set and Manual Bulletproof Knees Manual and DVD Optimal Shoulder Performance DVD Set I’ve linked to each one of these products individually so that you can learn more about each of them, but you can purchase them individually or together easily at the Robertson Training Systems Product Page. The only exception would be Optimal Shoulder Performance, which can be purchased exclusively through www.ShoulderPerformance.com with the coupon code bfcm2011. If you’re someone who is “new” to our products, I’d encourage you to check out this video on Assess and Correct to learn a bit more about how we roll with one of these products. Assess and Correct is a great place to start, if you haven’t purchased any of our stuff yet: Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a four-part video series on how to deadlift!

7 Steps for Attacking Continuing Education in the Fitness Industry

In response to a recent blog, one reader posted a question about how I “structure” my approach to continuing education. As I thought about it, it’s actually a more organized “ritual” than I had previously thought. Here are the key components:

1. I always have two books going at a time. One involves training/nutrition/manual therapy/rehabilitation. The other involves business/personal development. Noticeably absent from this list is fiction; I really don’t have any interest in it, and couldn’t tell you the first thing about Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. I’ll usually have a book on CD in the car as well, but nowadays, my commute is non-existent (since we moved closer to the facility), so I have been doing more reading and less listening than previously.

2. Our staff in-service is every Wednesday at 10:30AM. This has turned into a great continuing education opportunity for all of us. While one person is “responsible” for presenting the topic each week, it always inevitably becomes a “think tank” among our staff and interns about how something applies to specific clients, unique issues, functional anatomy, or our programming or business model.

Want to be a Personal Trainer or Strength Coach? Start Here.

It’s an email I get at least twice a week from a random reader, and it goes something like this:

“My current job just isn’t fulfilling, but I really love fitness and want to turn it into a career. What certification do you recommend?”

I get these type of inquiries so often that I decided that this bit of writing would be my autoresponse which – as you’ll see below – has a bit of tough love that I think these folks need to hear.

A few months ago, Rachel Cosgrove said that about 80% of those who enter the fitness industry leave it within a year. I haven’t seen the statistic myself, but Rachel knows her stuff and meticulously monitors the business side of the fitness industry and I defer to her completely.

Three Years of Cressey Performance: The Right Reasons and the Right Way

Though a somewhat “normal” day at the gym, yesterday marked Cressey Performance’s three-year anniversary. While my business partner’s blog post yesterday did an excellent job of doling out “thank yous” to a lot of the important people who have been so involved in our success – from clients to parents, coaches, interns, and significant others – I wanted to add my own two cents on the matter today. More than anything, I really wanted to highlight a sentence that illustrates what makes me the most proud about where CP has been, where it is, and where it’s going.

We’ve done this for the right reasons, and we’ve done it the right way.

I read a business development blog post by Chris McCombs the other day where he wrote something that really hit home for me. When he was talking about how he decides to accept or reject a new project/opportunity, here is one of his guidelines: “Only Take on Projects That Are In Line With My Current Values and Fulfill Me Beyond Just The Money – A project must fulfill me in some way BESIDE just money…too many people spend their life JUST chasing a buck; to me, that’s no way to live. For me, the money must be there, but it should fulfill me personally, be fun, help a lot of people, and build and be in line with my current brand and brand equity.” Back in 2007, I had a tough decision to make. My online consulting business had really taken off, and the Maximum Strength book deal was in the works. My other products – Magnificent Mobility, The Ultimate Off-Season Training Manual, and Building the Efficient Athlete – were selling well and getting great reviews, and I’d just had a study published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. This website was growing exponentially in popularity, and I had just wrapped up my first year on the Perform Better tour – so lots of doors were opening for me on the seminar front to present all over the world – and I could have stayed home and just written all day, every day. I was getting really crunched for time, as I was already training clients 8-13 hours per day, seven days per week, as my in-person clientele had rapidly grown. My phone rang off the hook for about three weeks after Lincoln-Sudbury won a baseball state championship after I’d trained several of their guys, and one of my athletes was named state player of the year. And, after being featured on the front page of the Boston Globe with a nipple so hard I could cut diamonds, I was in demand as a t-shirt model (okay, not really – but it made for an awesome blog post, The School of Hard Nipples).

I was exhausted and stressed – but absolutely, positively, “living the dream” that I’d always wanted. To make matters a bit more interesting, I had just started dating a great girl (now my fiancee) who I really had a good feeling was “the one” after about three months. The work days, however, were insanely long and I was worried that I’d screw up a good thing by not spending enough time with her. Every business development coach out there would have seen a “simple” answer to all my problems: stop training people in person. Just write, consult, make DVDs, and give seminars. It would have cut my hours by 80% and still allowed me to earn a pretty good living – and enjoy plenty of free time. There was a huge problem with that, though; as Chris wrote, it wouldn’t “fulfill me personally, be fun, help a lot of people, and build and be in line with my current brand and brand equity.” I like doing evaluations, writing programs, coaching, sweating, training with my guys, cranking up the music, helping people get to where they want to be, collaborating with and learning from other professionals, and watching my athletes compete – whether it’s at some high school field or at Fenway Park. Giving that up wasn’t an option; I guess I’d have just been a crappy business coaching client, as I would have been stubborn as an ass on giving that up. Fortunately for me, Pete Dupuis, my roommate from my freshman year of college, had just finished his MBA and was in the midst of a job search. And, during that MBA, he’d started to train with me and packed on a ton of strength and muscle mass – making him realize and truly appreciate the value in what I was doing (especially since he was and is a goalie in a very competitive soccer league). Pete had also met and become friends with a ton of my clients – and taken a genuine interest in my baseball focus, as a lifelong Red Sox fan. Almost daily, Pete would encourage me to do my own thing and let him handle all the business stuff for me. Simultaneously, Tony Gentilcore was ready for a change of scenery on the work front. Having been Tony’s roommate and training partner for almost two years at that point, I knew he was a genuinely great guy, that he’d read everything on my bookshelf, and that he could coach his butt off and “walk the walk.” He, too, had met a lot of my clients – so there was continuity from the get-go. So, on July 13, 2007, Cressey Performance was born. Here is what we started with. Please enter your email below to sign up for our FREE newsletter.

Memorial Day Sale!

To celebrate Memorial Day and the long weekend that many call the “unofficial start to summer,” Mike Robertson and I decided to put two of our most popular products to-date on sale through this Monday night – and update their websites. So, from now until midnight on Monday 5/31, you can get both Building the Efficient Athlete and Magnificent Mobility for 20% off. The discount will be applied automatically at checkout; you just need to pick them up at the following websites:

www.BuildingTheEfficientAthlete.com

www.MagnificentMobility.com

If you’d like to order them along with other products, just check out the RobertsonTrainingSystems.com Products page. Don’t miss out on this great opportunity to pick up two of our “best sellers” at an excellent discount!

The Six Kinds of Seminar Attendees

On Sunday, we hosted Neil Rampe of the Arizona Diamondbacks for a Myokinematic Dysfunction seminar at Cressey Performance. It was a great experience, and Neil did a very thorough job of highlighting the different schools of thought with respect to addressing movement impairments. In particular, Neil spent a lot of time on two schools of thought: Dynamic Neuromuscular Stabilization (discussed in this post) and the Postural Restoration Institute. There was some advanced stuff being discussed, and we had a wide variety of professions and ability levels represented in the audience. There were athletic trainers, strength and conditioning coaches, personal trainers, physical therapists, and chiropractors in attendance. And, they ranged in age from 20 all the way up to 55 (or so). After the seminar, I got to talking with Neil about how it’s interesting to think what each person takes away from a seminar based on their age, occupation, and experience level. It led to me coming up with the six kinds of seminar attendees: 1. The Experienced, Open-minded Attendee – This individual may have similar experience in similar fields as the presenter. If he gets just 2-3 good tips over the course of the seminar, he’s thrilled. The more experienced you get, the more you appreciate the little things you can add (or subtract) to refine your approach. Example: Last year, I spent about 95% of Greg Rose’s presentation at Perform Better in Long Beach nodding in agreement, as he and I both deal with a ton of rotational sport athletes (him with golf, and me with baseball). He did, however, introduce one new thoracic spine mobility test that I absolutely love and use to this day. I might have only picked up one thing, but it was a hugely valuable for me. 2.The Experienced, Close-minded Attendee – This individual may be very experienced in a similar realm as the presenter, but isn’t openminded enough to realize that a professional on his level still might have things to offer to improve his approach. These are usually the people who claim to be “old school” – which essentially applies that they only have experience doing the same thing for 25 years. This is one kind of “there’s nothing new here” person. 3. The Experienced Attendee from a Different Field – This individual might be excellent at what he does in a semi-related field, but completely new to the material presented at a seminar. The challenge here is to learn what can be applied in that other realm. Think of a pitching or track coach attending a strength and conditioning seminar – or a S&C coach attending a pitching or physical therapy conference. 4. The Intimidated, Lazy Beginner Attendee – There are times when a beginner attends a seminar and has little to no clue what’s going on during the event and is completely intimidated by what he doesn’t know. And, as a result, the attendee claims that he will never need the information anyway. These folks should either change their attitudes or pick a different industry, as they are the second kind of “there’s nothing new here” person. 5. The Motivated Beginner Attendee – This attendee is identical to the intimidated beginner, but rather than getting insecure about his lack of knowledge on the subject, he uses it as motivation to study further and find a way to get to where he wants to be. This may be an understanding of how to apply bits and pieces of what the presenter taught, or a desire to become an expert in the same topic the presenter covered. You see this quite a bit in the fitness industry, as exercise enthusiasts who aren’t in the industry will actually attend seminars just to learn about better training practices – just like I might tend a talk by an economist, for instance. 6. The Middle of the Road Attendee – This individual is somewhere between a beginner and an expert in the material being covered. My experience has been that the “middle of the road” folks only attend seminars (at least the ones at which I’ve presented) if they genuinely care about getting better, not just for CEUs (the intimidated/lazy beginners do that). I find that this is probably the biggest group of the six. Groups 5 and 6 are the ones who have loved our Building the Efficient Athlete seminar the most, as it either complemented their college anatomy and kinesiology curriculum nicely, or helped to take the place of it altogether (for those who didn’t attend school). Think about this for yourself and start to consider where you fall in the context of these six categories. And, more importantly, how does your “placement” in this scheme dictate the next 2-3 seminars you’re going to attend? Do you want to completely get outside your realm of expertise and see something entirely new, or do you want to hone in on your specialty and see if you can come up with a few new tricks to take you to the next level? There isn’t a correct answer on this, other than that you need to keep getting out to see others in action to get better! On a related note, I’ve got a busy spring of seminars booked, so if you haven’t already, check out my schedule page for details.

Strength and Conditioning Programs: Efficiency May Be All Wrong…

In my strength and conditioning writing, I throw the term “efficient” around quite a bit; in fact, it’s even in the title of our Building the Efficient Athlete DVD set. I’m sure that some people have taken this to mean that we’re always looking for efficiency in our movement. And, certainly, when it comes to getting from point A to point B in the context of sporting challenges, the most efficient way is generally the best. And, just think about strength training programs where lifters simply squat, bench press, and deadlift to improve powerlifting performance. The goal is to get as efficient in those three movements as possible. And, you can look at NFL combine preparation programs as another example. Guys will spend months practicing picture-perfect technique for the 40-yard dash. They might not even get faster in the context of applicable game speed, but they get super efficient at the test.

However, the most “efficient” way is not always the right way. In everyday life, efficiency for someone with poor posture means picking up a heavy box with a rounded back, as it’s the pattern to which they’re accustomed, and therefore less “energy expensive.” This would simply prove to be an efficient way to get injured! I’d rather lift things safely and inefficiently.

And, take those who run long distances in hopes of losing fat as another example. The research has actually shown that runners burn fewer calories for the same given distance after years of running improves their efficiency. While this improvement is relatively small, it absolutely stands to reason that folks would be smart to get as inefficient as possible in their training to achieve faster fat loss. In other words, change modalities, intensities, durations, and other acute programming variables. Training exclusively for efficiency on a few lifts might make you better at those lifts, but it’s also going to markedly increase your risk of overuse injuries. I can say without wavering that we’d see a lot fewer knee and lower back injuries in powerlifters if more of them would just mix in some inefficient single-leg training into their strength training programs. And, shoulders would get a lot healthier if these specialists would include more inefficient rowing variations and rotator cuff strength exercises. In the world of training for athletic performance, it’s important to remember that many (but not all) athletes perform in unpredictable environments – so simply training them to be efficient on a few lifts fails to fully prepare them for what they’re actually face in competition. A strength and conditioning program complete with exercise variety and different ranges-of-motion, speeds of motion, and magnitudes of loading provides athletes with a richer proprioceptive environment.

In other words, inefficiency in strength and conditioning programs can actually facilitate better performance and a reduced risk of injury.

Name: Eric Cressey - Budding the Efficient Athlete
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Taken all together, it’s safe to say that we want inefficiency in our training, but efficiency in our performance – provided that this efficiency doesn’t involve potentially injurous movement patterns. Related Posts Why I Don’t Like 5×5 Strength Training Programs Weight Training Programs: The Basics, but with Variety Sign-up Today for our FREE Newsletter and receive a four-part video series on how to deadlift!