Thanks To All Our Athletes
The best part of being a strength coach is watching our young athletes come in and train hard. It takes little to no motivating from us coaches to get them to come in and smash weight; they have an awesome desire to get better. It’s the best part of our day to see them come train and grow. With that said I wanted to do something cool for the athletes so I decided to put together a video. However, I lack the software and technological talent to do such things so I enlisted the help of my friend Binh. He did an awesome job and captured exactly what I was looking for, so thanks man I appreciate the help. And to the athletes I hope you guys like the video. Thanks for coming in and TRAINING HARD!
A "New" Way of Assisting Pullups
The other day, one of our interns, Tadashi, was messing around with the bands and came up with quite a useful way to assist chinups. As soon as I saw it, I had one of those Why didn't I think of that?! moments.
Wrap the band just around your thumbs as shown in the video below and perform as follows (you can use it for any grip choice...pronated, supinated, or neutral):
Why I like this variation:
1. Simply put, it provides a bit less assistance than traditional *BA variations, but it still provides just enough help for those that aren't quite comfortable with chins/pullups yet. It's essentially one more step on the learning curve ladder toward performing a full-range, bodyweight chinup.
2. It completely unloads at the top of the movement, which is perfect for performing isometric holds at the top - for those who are a bit stronger and even closer to getting over that "one-rep hump."
3. With traditional BA chinups, it's fairly difficult to prevent oneself from "swaying" back and forth due to the pull of the band. I find that this variation keeps it much easier to maintain a rigid body alignment.
See the video below for how we have done BA chinups in the past (3 different progressions):
All of those are still awesome, and should be used for those in the beginning phases of conquering the bodyweight chinup. This is simply another tool in the toolbox, if you will.
Reducing Dietary Salt
I've never been one to worry much about my salt intake, but for this pregnancy I made the decision to really crack down on the added sodium in my diet.
Why? Well, two reasons:
1. When pregnant with my daughter, I found that often my blood pressure was very low (this is usual for me). But, about 35% of the time it would inexplicably sky-rocket to a borderline high area. I don't know whether it was stress, anxiety, diet, or weight gain that caused this problem.
2. I also had a tough time with swollen feet/ankles by the last trimester of pregnancy 1, so I'll pretty much do anything to avoid that again.
Something to check out and consider: This morning Fooducate posted a blog called 9 Ways to Reduce Your Salt Intake.
I'm only just now reaching my third trimester of this pregnancy, so I don't know if my approach will be effective for the swelling. But, I do know that my blood pressure readings have been quite a bit more consistent and reasonable up to this point.
Coaching Nutrition and Exercise For the Win: Keep it Simple, Stupid
Last weekend, my wife and I were able to take advantage of a great opportunity. In short, some good friends of mine recently had their "Harajuku Moment" (or personal tipping point) with regards to personal health. They requested that Kelsey and I provide them with some nutrition lessons and give their current dietary regimen a "makeover," if you will. Given that they have a beautiful lakehouse - and offered to lodge us there for the weekend on top of providing all the food - we replied, "When do we start?!"
Needless to say, the experience was very rewarding. Throughout the weekend, we prepped+cooked meals with them, along with putting together a “mini packet” comprised of easy recipes, quick & dirty checklists to run through every time they prepare a meal, a sample grocery list, and a brief chart of healthy fats, proteins, carbs, and supplements. We were also able to answer some questions and debunk some myths for them:
Should I avoid eating close to bedtime? What should I eat before/after a workout? How much red meat should I consume/avoid consuming? Should I avoid egg yolks like the bubonic plague?
Kelsey and I were able to provide this family with some very practical strategies they could begin applying to their lives immediately. Strategies that would allow them to experience greater mental clarity and energy levels, lower blood sugar, reduce the risk of heart disease, and all-in-all fix a lot of “stuff” going on in their bodies. And these strategies were all very uncomplicated.
We didn’t tell them to count calories. We didn’t tell them to weigh their food. We didn’t tell them they had to buy everything “organic” (whatever that means anymore). We didn't them them if they failed to eat Paleo then their world would be over immediately.
This entire process got me thinking….many of us – whether we are the teacher or the student - tend to overcomplicate topics in the exercise and nutrition realm. Given that I’m a strength & conditioning coach, I often fall on the teaching side of things, so I’ll briefly touch on this subject from that perspective.
When I first started in this industry as a personal trainer, I made things way, way, WAY too complicated. Whether it was coaching someone through a squat or something as simple as a X-Band Walk, I practically gave the poor client a short essay on how to perform the exercise.
The same thing with regards to nutrition advice. I gave them wayyy too much information. All this ended up doing was overloading the person and didn’t actually help them get on their feet toward reaching their goals.
My heart was in the right place, but my head was not.
For those of you reading who teach exercise (be it in a professional setting or simply to a friend or family member), please learn from my mistakes. Don’t overwhelm the person who is listening to you. Give them one cue and explain why they should care.
When you teach someone a squat for the first time, they don’t care if you know that the rectus femoris is the only quadricep that crosses both the hip and knee joints, or that you understand the biceps femoris is the only hamstring that externally rotates the femur along with extending the hip.
Please.....let's get over ourselves.
Practical Application
Let’s put this into a practical scenario, shall we? Pretend that your teaching someone to squat for the first time. I’ll provide the “fail” version, along with a strategy you could take that will lesson the odds of your student completely hating you and being overwhelmed.
Female Volleyball Player. First Session.
Fail: "Okay, next, we’re going to squat. First, we’re going to hold the weight at our chest, or “goblet position” because if you don’t, your body will likely shut down and move like a pregnant seal, creating aberrant movement as a result of a perceived threat due to lack of stability…although you might still suck due to poor ankle dorsiflexion, inhibited glutes via reciprocal inhibition of the hip flexors, and/or tight lats. You’re then going to turn your feet out, point the big toe up, but keep your weight distributed evenly on your feet, then sit BACK, don’t fall forward!, keep those shoulder blades down and back into your back pockets, pull yourself down via your hip flexors, CHEST TALL! don’t slouch now, act like your sitting on an egg so you don’t slam into the box, then EXPLODE up so you can access your fast twitch motor units and improve your rate of force development."
Win: "Okay, first, we’re going to squat. This is going to help improve your vertical jump and allow you to move faster on the court. Watch how I do it, and then do your best to replicate it." *Coach then demonstrates a few reps of the goblet squat to box*
See the difference?
In the second scenario, we gave the athlete a reason to care, and then coached them by showing them. Ninety nine times out of a hundred, the athlete/client will perform the movement better in the second scenario rather than the first.
Is it still going to be perfect? No. But you can tweak and help them throughout the subsequent sets, adding just one or two coaching cues and keeping it there for that day. Throughout the following weeks, you help them with one small improvement at a time. Rome wasn't built in a day, ya know?
Now, I realize there are exceptions. Some people are more “audible learners” as opposed to visual learners, and others actually do want a lot of detail (usually those are people who already have some lifting experience and are involved in the field in some form or another). But I hope you get the point.
The same thing can apply to fat loss clients, someone dealing with knee pain, or those seeking some extra help in the kitchen.
Keep it simple FTW.
Metamucil + Locked Out of Your Apartment = Not Good
Note from Stevo: I must preface this story by warning you that this has nothing to do with training. I apologize for all of you who dialed in to SAPTstrength today to learn more about all things looking, moving, and feeling better, but honestly I was running low on the list of ideas for training-related content and figured you all could use a laugh at my expense today.
This past Wednesday was looking to be a particularly delightful morning for me. I was ahead of schedule with my SAPT-related tasks (something that occurs once in a blue moon), and, also, Wednesday holds my shortest workout of my weekly training schedule. As such, I had a bit of extra time at my disposal.
Given this, I thought it'd be a great opportunity to get a full night's rest, do the laundry (something really vexes me about having to do it during the weekend), write a few programs for the SAPT athletes, answer some emails, then top it off by heading to the local coffee shop to satisfy my palate with a delicious brew while writing my next article for an online publication. I'd then have plenty of time to get in my training session before the athletes showed up to SAPT for the afternoon appointments.
Sweet. It was going to be a solid morning.
I sleep in until 7:30am, and eventually head into the living room at 7:45, laundry basket in hand. However, upon entering the room, I immediately notice three things:
1) Sheik, our (indoor) cat, is nowhere to be seen. 2) The door to our apartment is ajar. 3) There's a faint meowing sound in the distance.
My wife left at 7:30 to handle the morning appointments at SAPT, so it was pretty clear what happened: The door didn't shut all the way, and Sheik, being a cat, wanted to see what lay out in the mysterious void beyond the apartment walls. She clearly became lost, and was now fearful and meowing like crazy.
My superhero instincts kick in.
Without thinking about anything else, I commando roll out of the apartment and dart down the stairwell to find poor Sheik huddled in a ball in the middle of the concrete floor looking around like a....well, like a frightened animal. I pick her up, comfort her and tell her that everything will be O.K., and head back up the stairs, thinking about how much I can't wait to tell my wife of how I saved the day by rescuing our precious little kitty.
That is, until I climb back up to the third story to find that our apartment door is locked.
Now, if the story stopped here, I wouldn't be wasting valuable cyberspace bandwidth to tell this story on the interwebz. After all, practically everyone has locked themselves out of their home at one point or another.
Not THAT big a deal, right?
Well, there are six additional details that make this situation particularly frustrating for me:
1. Remember how I told you that, "without thinking about anything else," I rolled out of our apartment to rescue our cat? Yeah, well, the clothes on my back was one of those things I forgot to consider. Or rather, the LACK of clothing on my back. Yes, I am locked outside my apartment in my little boy shorts that I slept in. 2. It's wintertime. So not only am I nearly naked in a public space, but it is 35degrees outside. 3. Kelsey is gone. So there's no one inside to let me in. 4. My cell phone is inside the apartment. So calling for aid quickly gets crossed off the #1 spot on my list of options for survival. 5. I have an indoor cat stuck with me, outside. 'Nuff said there. 6. My bowels are screaming LIKE CRAZY to use a bathroom. Remember how I mentioned last week that my life has been radically altered for the better because of my recent supplementation with Metamucil? Yeah, well, one of the things about Metamucil is that it works. VERY WELL. Once that puppy kicks in your system, you better hope you have a bathroom nearby.I do not. The nearest restroom is at least a quarter mile away, in the middle of a shopping center.
Best. Morning. Ever.
Next I run through some other possible solutions. One of my neighbors can help me, right? Yes, sure they can. I tell Sheik to stay put by our door, and I begin to knock on neighboring doors to see if someone may have a phone - along with the number for maintenance - to help me out. Yes, I realize it's 7:45 in the morning, so I knock softly. Don't really want to piss anyone off, especially considering that if and when they open their door early in the morning, the first thing they'll find is a nearly naked man on their doorstop.
No one answers, which I'm not particular angry about (after all, how I am I supposed to explain things to them???). No luck there.
The leasing office of my apartment complex doesn't open until 9am, so it looks like I'm going to have to wait it out until I can go get a spare key. I slide down the brick wall, take a seat on the cold tile, and try to get into the most comfortable position one can only do when it's cold out and they don't have any clothes. As Sheik climbs into my lap, I tell her, "Okay, Sheik, here we are." Just seventy minutes to sit here and wait. And hope I don't explode."
Throughout the next seventy minutes I do two things:
1) I try to think of how, once 9:00am arrives, I can walk the quarter mile - shoeless and nearly clothless - over to the leasing office and explain the situation to them, hoping they'll grant me amnesty before a police officer tackles me and drags me off to prison for indecent exposure.
2) I do that weird and awkward wiggle-and-waddle-hunched-over walk people do when they're about to destroy the back of their pants. I wonder how long it's going to take before I run outside and experience, first hand, what the old adage "desperate times call for desperate measures" really means.
Another problem is, I have no watch on me. So I have to guess when it's 8:50am to begin my journey over to the office. I don't want to be out in the open any longer than I have to be.
So I continue to alternate between sitting and standing, replaying the Sliding Filament Theory in my head, doing my best to remember the reaction sequence of Glycolysis, and trying to recite Prilepin's Chart by memory. Or, maybe, I just sit there, attempting to warm the tile beneath me, counting the number of bricks on the walls. I can't remember which.
And don't worry, I'll spare you the details of that whole "Metamucil thing" I alluded to earlier. All I'll say is that it was not pleasant.
Here's where things get even more interesting.
At what I can only guess has been the 1-hour mark, I hear a chain jingle behind the door across from me. I immediately perk up, simultaneously filled with both excitement and anxiety as I don't know who's going to walk out from behind the door.
The door swings open, and out walks a professional-looking woman who must be in her low thirties. Innocently on her way to work of course. Upon seeing me, she quickly gasps, widens here eyes, freezes still, and nearly drops her bags at the site of a strange, practically-naked man sitting in the cold abyss in front of her. Here's how the conversation goes down:
Me: (trying to explain as quickly as possible that I'm not some sort of Dionysian rapist) Hiii, umm, I know this looks really weird, but I locked myself out of my apartment over an hour ago trying to rescue my cat. *fervently pointing to cat*
Lady: ......
Me: I'm sorry, I know this looks really sketchy, and I hate to bug you as you leave for work, but is there ANY way I might be able to borrow a phone? *tries to hide under desk, but there's no desk to hide under*
Lady: Oh, sure....sorry, you startled me, that's all. Yeah, here you go. *sets bags down and stands as far from me as possible as she hands me her phone*
Me: Thank you SO much, I really do appreciate it. You don't happen to have the number for maintenance, do you?
Lady: Yeah, I do actually. They don't open until 9:00 though (it's 8:45 at this point), but you can leave them a message.
Me: *begins dialing*
Lady: Hey, uh, I need to get to work, but can I get you a blanket or anything?
Me: Oh, wow, thanks so much, but I'll be okay I think. I don't really want to bother you any more than I already have.
Lady: No really, it's not a problem, it's pretty cold outside, after all. *Begins rummaging through her purse to get her keys*
Lady:.........
............................
Lady: OMG. My......my keys.......what the.....my keys. *hands move faster and she begins to breathe rapidly*
My keys aren't here. I locked them INSIDE MY APARTMENT!!!!
Yep....talk about the odds.
So now we have a business woman, a man in his boy shorts sitting on the tile against a brick wall, and a cat. All locked outside their apartments during a winter morning.
I wish someone had been there to take a photo.
Anyway, I'll wrap all this up. After a while (and some awkward conversation) she eventually wandered off to the maintenance office alone (I didn't have to convince her that I shouldn't go with her) and we made it back inside our respective homes. The bright side of all this is when I eventually made it to the coffee shop, the barista offered to give me a drink on the house after inquiring as to why I was going outside my usual order and requesting the "black eye."
If you somehow made it this far, I give you an internet high five. Nice job! Be back on Monday with the usual content.
Complete and Utter Randomness
Just a few random thoughts that have been running around my mind and some training videos for everyone out there. Random Thoughts:
- I’ve been struggling as of late when it comes to high school weight training either as a class or after school for sports. It seems to be very few and far between that you have sport coaches/weight training teachers who know what they’re doing in the weight room (I’m not saying all of them). Just talking to athletes about what they do in there blows my mind such as maxing every three weeks with terrible form, crumpling under the barbell during a squat or rounding their back and hitching a deadlift just to get the weight up. Most of these kids can’t do a bodyweight squat correctly, why are they maxing with a barbell on their back? I’m not trying to make people angry but it just seems ignorant when there is so much good/free information everywhere that would help these coaches and their athletes immensely. I attribute this to one of two things, they are to prideful to admit they don’t know what they are doing or they just don’t care to find out that what they are doing is wrong and harmful. Either way it’s unacceptable.
- The previous thought kind of led into the idea of being average. I’ve heard people for as long as I can remember talk about how they are better than “average” or that they don’t want to be just “average”. I always thought that thinking like that was arrogant, or that they felt they were superior. I used to be of the mindset that in order to be above average you had to be something like an astronaut, sports superstar, movie star, bill gates, you know things along those lines. I’m assuming I thought that way because from the time I was in elementary school to the end of high school that’s what I felt I was, just average. Why? Because I was led to believe that’s what I was by OTHER people. It wasn’t until college when I started taking my physical education and exercise science classes that I started to realize that I wasn’t “average” and that I never want to be “average”. I started becoming more confident in my intelligence and through weight training I became more physically confident, and most importantly I stopped listening to negative people. This all lead to me understanding that it’s OK to NOT want to be average. Nobody should want that. Whatever it is that you are currently doing you shouldn’t be satisfied with being average at it. Whether you are a student, strength coach, teacher, sport coach, attorney, grounds keeper, etc. you should STRIVE to be better so you can look back when it’s all said and done and be able to say you left your mark. Anyways the reason why this all got sparked was because I’ve been hoping this is the message that I am instilling in the athletes I work with. There is enough negativity in the world and I REFUSE to be a negative influence when it comes to working with these kids.
- My last thought as of late is that I want to buy a truck. Really not for any other reason than to buy a Prowler to leave in the bed of the truck just so I can always have it on hand in case the mood strikes to push it. Weird right?
Videos:
And without further delay, here are some videos to take your mind off the incoherent rant you just read….
Here are two of our female high school volleyball athletes. I think they are just realizing that they are really strong. SAPT is really proud of all their progress…
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The next video is of one of my training partners and GMU’s S&C graduate assistant John Delgado. He’s currently doing Jim Wendler’s 5/3/1 and he decided to get real squirrely with this 315 deadlift for what I believe is 13 reps…
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The last video is of me getting in some work for my upcoming powerlifting competition. My training is going really well and my squats and pulls feel really fast and smooth (bench is still feeling a bit weird and wild). I’m about 7 weeks out from the Richmond Open and I am getting all sorts of jacked up about it.
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