Priority #1: Breathing

If you were to say to me in 2006, Hey Sarah! Guess what?!? In 10-years you will be laying the foundation for high performance by pounding the crap out of breathing drills. I would have believed you***. It's pretty obvious, when you think about it, but the evidence for it's true importance has only been surfacing over the past couple of years. 

This is an insanely complex topic that can literally have an effect on the obvious: your ability to recover effectively between bouts of intense exercise allllll the way to the obscure and surprising: regaining normal range of motion about joints that have been previously all kinds of locked up.

So, here ya go. My long-winded explanation of why you or your child may be doing do many drills to re-pattern their breathing. The concept of training breathing patterns now forms the foundation for all SAPT athletes.

Below I've organized a loose hierarchy of what proper breathing actually accomplishes for us humans:

Life Support

Like everything else in the body we adjust to sub-optimal patterns and just assume everything is A-OK (ex: somehow staying alive when only eating frankenfoods). In this case, I'm referring to our bodies amazing ability to be totally out-of-whack and yet not collapse in on itself, biomechanically speaking.

But, as professionals in the industry of human performance, we know that those common mal-alignments in the body ultimately stem from poor pelvic balance and that is in fact causing the postural asymmetries.

What causes the problem with the pelvis in the first place? Traditionally, we’ve chalked it up to an increasingly sedentary environment - too much sitting, not enough moving. Even for children. In fact this problem first develops in children, all children.

So, let’s take it deeper. There is actually something else going on besides our chair bound, screen driven environment. It just so happens that if you look very deep, like inside your body, you will discover that the muscle responsible for respiration, the diaphragm, is actually itself asymmetrical! In fact, the thorax is packed with asymmetrical situations: the heart sets on one side, the liver on the other to adjust the diaphragm is divided into two domes (on the right and left sides) one dome is smaller and weaker than the other. This sets off a precipitation of events. All of which ultimately influence our athletic performance, efficiency, injury patterns and more.

Posture

Okay, let’s break this down. It’s important, so try to stay with me… I’m also working hard to keep up with myself. All kinds of important parts of the body attach and interact with the diaphragm. Since, by our bodies’s design, one side of the diaphragm is stronger than the other that means that certain compensatory patterns always develop. Always. If you are a human you have this pattern. 

The diaphragm is stronger on the right side, this ultimately means that we favor (and overwork) the right side of the body. While the left side becomes weakened and inefficient. 

From here we can see the commonplace asymmetries develop: one shoulder higher than the other, the rib cage set at predictable angles from right to left and front to back, the pelvis rotated predictably.

Injury Potential

Alright, we’re getting back on solid footing. The by-design asymmetry of our diaphragm causes the postural asymmetries that cause, over time, injury. 

How many times has a well meaning coach had an athlete statically stretch chronically tight hamstrings? Do they ever regain the proper ROM? Nope. But, those tight hamstrings are actually indicative of a risk for injury that points to pelvic misalignment and, you guessed it, points then towards diaphragm and thorax corrections that MUST occur before high performance can ever be achieved.

How many times has a pitching coach focused their injury prevention program to address only the throwing side? Good gracious that’s just layering on the problems.

Sub-Optimal Performance: Layers of dysfunction

Let’s continue to talk about the pitching coach who runs a one sided arm care program. Hey, it kind of makes sense. You throw with one arm, why wouldn’t focus on strengthening the musculature on just that side? 

Because you frack up the entirety of the athlete, that’s why.

Never, ever layer strength on top of dysfunction. The potential for injury skyrockets (that’s my opinion) and it becomes very difficult to make the foundational corrections (to backtrack). 

The result? The athlete has now gotten “stronger” and tighter and more imbalanced in the pursuit of performance. 

What should the approach have been? Fix the imbalances first, prioritize this as essential to performance, then and only then, begin to strengthen.

Recovery during repeated efforts

When respiration isn’t occurring efficiently, an athlete’s ability to recover between bouts of training (or plays in a game) will be suboptimal. Potentially leading to injury, compromised decision making (think ability to read a developing play), lost points, or a Loss.

Gait

We’ve established that the diaphragm will cause poor pelvic balance. But what does that mean for gait? 

“Walking and breathing are the foundations of movement and prerequisites for efficient, forceful, non-compensatory squatting, lunging, running, sprinting, leaping, hopping, or jumping ONLY WHEN three influential inputs are engaged: proprioception, referencing, and grounding.” PRI 

Pulled muscles, ligament tears, rolled ankles can all be traced back to a pelvis, and thus, breathing problem.

That tilted and rotated pelvis can be a real problem!

How many great (or on their way to great) athletic careers have been stopped in their tracks by an injury?

How to fix: Zone of Apposition

Moving forward with the understanding that breathing really is the key to life, we have to ask: how do you fix this?

There is something called the Zone of Apposition (ZOA) and this is the area where the diaphragm and ribcage over lap each other. We want to maximize this overlap through proper ribcage positioning.

Here’s the good news: train the ribcage to be in the proper position and now those imbalances start to clear up:

• Better ROM at all joints
• Better recovery for bouts of work
• Less compensatory patterns throughout the body

Now we can work on performance

How SAPT uses/integrates breathing drills to achieve performance improvements:

1. Ground based - 90/90, etc
2. Against gravity —> Static
3. Against gravity —> dynamic & sub-max
4. Against gravity —> dynamic & max

What the athlete gets in return:

• Better movement patterns (without forcing it)
• Fewer injuries
• Better recovery (between intense bouts and sessions)
• More bulletproof and awesome

With regards to training the ZOA, it's not a matter of if it needs to be trained, rather the important aspect is for the coach to assess and determine what level the athlete needs to be placed at to get started and progressed forward.

***I'm sorry, I lied - in 2006, I was 25 - knew virtually nothing - and it was hard to tell me anything unless it was about box squats, deadlifts, or the bench press. 

How to Change "Unhealthy" Habits for Healthy Ones, Part 1

I was listening to a coaching talk by Dr. Krista Scott Dixon (her site is Stumptuous.com) and how to help clients make positive lifestyle changes and keep making changes. The whole talk was about an hour long and was both informative and full of pertinent reminders for me to remember because I work with people who don't live and breathe fitness. I often forget that knowledge that I take for granted- because this is, you know, my job- isn't always ingrained as much in the general population. 

It got me thinking that around this time of year, people tend to lose the steam of the initial burst of energy to uphold New Year's Resolutions, so I figured that today would be an opportune time to sprinkle some psychologically-themed tips to help reinvigorate the resolution-keeping. I think I'd like to make this a few-post series as it's easier to write a couple short posts rather than one long one (and probably bore you enough that you decided to click somewhere else).

I chose to put "unhealthy" in quotations because not all habits are necessarily unhealthy, but perhaps they are unhealthy for your specific goal. For example, having a bowl of ice cream a few days a week isn't necessarily unhealthy (especially if you're crushing vegetables, lean meats, healthy fats etc. during the rest of the week). However, if you want to lose a few pounds of body fat then, at this point in time, that bowl of ice cream isn't healthy. Understand, then, that "unhealthy" is relative to your specific situation, not a blanket statement for everyone.

The first step to changing habits, and maintain the new habits, is setting the goal. 

You have to know where you're going before you can plan your route. 

And we're talking about S.M.A.R.T. goals (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, timely). I'm not going to belabor the point because you can easily google this for more details but for example:

"I want to lose weight." or "I want to run faster"

S.M.A.R.T.-en those up:

"I want to lose 10 pounds by my birthday in 3 months."

"I want to bring my 100m sprint down by 3 seconds by the beginning of track season [in 6 months]."

Now, find your motivation...

Ok, so you have your goal and your time frame. Now, in order for our goal to be compelling, we need find the core motivation for it. If I say I want to eat more vegetables every day, but don't really have a true reason that's important to me, ordering pizza will be much more alluring. 

Here's what I want you today. Ask yourself why you've set this particular goal and see how far down you can drill. It may be, that after digging deeply into your psyche, you find that your goal is a) not specifically what you want to do, b) not actually realistic given your time, resources, and your desire to accomplish the goal, or c) just right (high five!). 

If you find that option "a" or "b" is true of your goal, it's time to tweak it to transform it into the "c" option.

It's important to find the core motivation behind the goal because sometimes we have competing motivations, so we need to find ways to eliminate competition in order to be successful. The level motivation for our goal must exceed the level of motivation for activities/choices that will not contribute to accomplishing the goal. 

I'll give you a personal example (it's a simple, and perhaps silly one, but it popped in my brain).

I had a goal a few years ago to conquer the Iron Maiden Challenge within a year of beginning my training for it. The IMC is a pull-up, pistol squat (1-legged squat), and 1-arm overhead press with a 24K (53lb) kettlebell. It's a pretty awesome feat of strength and I really, really wanted to do it. I love to lift heavy things, I love physically challenging things, and it seemed like something I could actually accomplish with training. 

However, I didn't check my core motivations. As I said, I love to lift heavy things, I actually really, really love to deadlift and squat more so than pressing and pistol-ing. By, like, a factor of a million. 

Despite why my athletes think, I don't just goof off all day when I'm not coaching and my training time is fairly limited. Therefore, I need to be very discerning and precise as to what exercises compose my workouts; I want to maximize what time I do have to get the most bang for my buck. 

I found, after 6 weeks or so, that I didn't really have time to do what I love, mainly hoist barbells with copious (in my mind anyway) amounts of weight on them. And that didn't make me happy or motivated to train (gasp!). My desire to accomplish the IMC diminished with each day that I had to sacrifice my deadlift time for my pistol time. (I have NOTHING against pistol squatting, I just like deadlifts more). Ultimately, I realized that, yes, I can train for the IMC and get it, but I'm honestly more motivated to deadlift/squat and improve in those (for my own satisfaction, really). So, the IMC goal got shelved for now and I focused on my barbell lifts. 

As you can see, I was a *kinda* happy with it. This was ultimately more satisfying for me than, quite honestly, successfully mastering the IMC.

So, what do we need to know? 

1. Set a S.M.A.R.T. goal.

2. Ask yourself "why" (multiple times) this goal is important to you. 

3. Tweak and adjust the goal based on the answers to number 2. 

Check back next time for Part 2: How To Find The Daily Habits to Success

Athlete Sleep Survey Results

20,000 Stronger Week 2: 617,506 lbs Lifted to Date

We always strive to become more accurate with our program design by understanding our clients on the deepest level possible. This year we've implemented the Athlete Exit Survey. It's basic, it's fast. But it delivers us rich information about how we (the coaches) are doing and helps us gather useful information to better serve our clientele. 

This past week we conducted a sleep survey:

It was great to see 58% of our clientele get more than 7 hours of sleep on any given night, but there is still work to do for the other 40%. Here are a few articles on sleep and its impact on your body: When You Can't Sleep, 6 Rules to Resolve By, 4 Things Currently Improving My Sleep Life: Part 1 & Part 2.

***Heyyyy Now, that's the equivalent of The Statue of Liberty AND 3 Railroad Boxcars in 2-weeks***

Your Influential Shadow

It’s been a li’l while since I last posted, but we had a crazy December. We currently train 4 teams from a local volleyball club (BRYC if you’re interested in playing for them) and we had a high volume of young ladies that we need to evaluate, program for, and on-board to the SAPT family. It was a lot of work, but I’m through the initial tsunami!

My husband wrote a blog post awhile back on his site about a conversation we had with my dad. My dad is a rather intelligent fellow and a retired Air Force general with years of leading and commanding people. He imparted this wisdom upon us, “Be mindful if the shadow you cast.” You can read Steve’s post for the more eloquent and full musing upon the topic. This quote sums it up here best:

"Exactly," said John (Kelsey: that's my dad). "One of the distinguishing qualities of a shadow is that it stretches outward from a person, covering the ground around them. And this happens whether the person wants it to or not. It's unavoidable."

"Titles act in much the same way. They stretch out in front of you wherever you go, and will be noticed by everyone around you. They affect how everyone views you and the things you oversee. This is a burden that you must carry, and while it may be a joyful burden, it's still a burden. It's inescapable."

We all cast shadows that touch the people around us (as a coach, parent, boss, teacher, sibling, spouse, friend, etc.) and in my role of a coach, my shadow reaches a lot of pre-teens and teenagers. As this mass of teenage girls descended upon SAPT I became acutely aware of how impactful their coach, especially their female coach, is in their lives. What I say and do can affect these girls- for better or for worse- long-term.

Coincidentally, my co-worker Emily sent me a link to this article from the Washington Post about the removal of the term “bikini body” from Women’s Health magazine. I encourage you all to read it as it as I don’t plan on rehashing it here.

The combination of this article with the influx of teenager girls spawned a couple of thoughts:

1. There is an overabundance of message bombarding women and girls about what they “should” look like, and frankly, it can be damaging to our psyche. (this isn’t a new principle)
2. I struggled (and still do at times, though it’s easier to fight the lies) with body image anxiety, so much so that it drove me into an eating disorder for years. How can I wield my shadow to help prevent that from happening to young women?
3. I’m in a position to help combat those messages; while I can’t walk around and provide constant verbal counter-action, I can speak openly and positively about body image with them. I can engage them in conversation, listen to them, and encourage them to seek a healthy, well-rounded lifestyle rather than one that is focused solely on obtaining the nebulous and narrow view of a “bikini body.”
4. The shadow I cast on these girls could be part of an effort to swing them away from body image worries that plague my sex.

Great, Kelsey, good for you, but why does this even matter?

Because you cast a shadow too! Your shadow is influential, and probably in ways you don't even realize. 

How are you wielding the power of your shadow? Are you mindful of the impact you have on those around you? Do you take your burden seriously?

As a boss, how do you treat your employees? Parents- you undoubtedly have the most powerful shadow in your kids' lives. Your words and actions will affect them for the rest of their lives. Coaches and teachers also are incredible influencers, again for better or for worse.

Aside from this particular instance, I considered the my shadow in all realms of my life and it caused me to be more mindful of my interactions with others and how I present myself. I encourage you to take some time and sit down and think about where your shadow goes and who it touches. It could make a world of difference. 

We Lifted Nine Elephants

Week 1 of our 2016 initiative 20,000 Stronger is officially complete! One of the (many) ways we're having fun as we strive towards this goal is by tracking weight lifted for the Big 3 and total repetitions for push-ups and pull-ups.

Just based on our first week's totals, it's clear that after 365 days of training, we'll be posting some insanely large numbers. In deadlift alone, we've already lifted the approximate weight of nine elephants! But, what I'm MOST proud of is the quality of these repetitions. 

At SAPT, we practice excellent repetitions. So, while you look at these huge numbers grow over the coming months, remember we hold ourselves, as coaches, and SAPT trainees to the very high standard of excellence in movement execution. 

What does that matter? It makes all the difference in the world. Perfect repetitions ensure that all SAPT atheltes remain safe and are only using loads their bodies can handle with perfect form. This builds an incredible foundation from which we build superior athletic performance.

If you are unfamiliar with our practices, here are some videos showing examples and some of the variations that will compose the growing total of pounds lifted and repetitions completed. 

Squat: 

Bench Press:

Pushup: 

Deadlift:

Deadlift:

20,000 Stronger

My pledge for the New Year.

I've set a really big goal for 2016. It's bigger than anything SAPT has achieved to date. It requires the full support of pretty much anyone I have ever come in contact with and many more I don't yet know!

For every training session we deliver in 2016, I will set aside $1 to donate to each client's choice of three charities (Alzheimer's Association, Side-Out Foundation, or Special Olympics). My goal is to make a minimum of a $20,000 total donation at the end of the year in the name of all our clients and supporters.

I am committing fully to this goal by announcing it today and humbly asking for your support throughout the year to help us achieve it. We will not get there without the fanatic support of our friends, family, clients, and followers. 

What can you do to help? 
Training with us is the most direct way, of course, but even if you are unable to train with us in-person, there are many ways to help us get 20,000 Stronger:

• Get the word out by sharing our content 
• Refer SAPT to your friends and colleagues 
• Follow us and engage on social media
• Introduce us to media outlets that need a great provider of weight-loss, health, fitness, sports performance, injury prevention, and post-rehab content or expertise
• Connect us with corporations that are looking for help making their wellness programs more impactful (our services are completely scalable)
• Distance coaching! Don't let geography be a barrier. Distance coaching will count towards our goal, too!

I'm pumped for this year and I sincerely hope you are just as excited for your own goals. Please reach out to us (via the "get started" link on our home page), or in the comments section, if you have any questions or great ideas on how we can achieve 20,000 Stronger. 

Wishing you the best,

Sarah Walls, Founder & President, Strength & Performance Training, Inc.

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P.S. - We delivered about 10,000 sessions last year, so when I say we need your support... I really mean it!