Athletic Performance Toolbox

Recovery Drills

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This article was provided by Training and Conditioning

By Cass Barrett
Cass Barrett, BA, CFSC, CPT, FMS, FRCmS, began his coaching journey teaching body position and breathing as a U.S. Marine Corps Primary Marksmanship Instructor (P.M.I.), and for the last 17 years has coached everyone from the weekend warrior to professional & international level competitors. Most recently, Cass was a corrective exercise technician in a physical therapy clinic, and the assistant strength and conditioning coach for the 2016 PRO-Rugby North America Champion Denver Stampede. He now owns and operates his own private training studio.
As strength and conditioning coaches and performance enhancement specialists, we have cornered the market on high threshold programming. We know full well how to rev our athletes up. But amidst all the 1RM testing, vertical jumps, 40-yard sprints, and other tests of intensity, have we forgotten a variable?

That variable can be loosely referred to as “recovery,” and is perhaps more appropriately called “resilience or rejuvenation training.” Without it, there is no fitness, no performance, and ultimately, no reason to train.

The goal of dedicated resilience training is to merge activities that promote down-throttling of the central nervous system (CNS) and facilitate long-term habit development. This means using modalities that are not too complicated and that don’t invoke a negative emotional response.

A good example of this type of practice is approximately two to three minutes of foam rolling before (or after) lifting. Although it is often times a point of conjecture, the value of checking the body for inordinately sore or tight muscles is hard to argue against. And while we understand that the effect on physical structure of the tissue is minimal, the other valuable aspects of foam rolling, such as dampening neural tone and aiding the flow of blood into the tissue, create reason enough to devote a few minutes to this practice.

Breathing drills offer another low level, high impact ritual for resilience and rejuvenation. Breath training is becoming a much more mainstream practice in elite level strength and conditioning as more and more coaches are educated on its impact on performance. Take legendary NFL strength coach Joe Kenn, for instance. One of the first activities on his Block Zero programming itinerary is breathing drills.

The relevance of this practice is easy to recognize once we start to consider the impact of a more efficient oxygen exchange in the lungs. An easy way to move forward with breath training is to have your athletes begin with simple nasal inhalation and emphasize the inflation of the stomach. Of course, the air isn’t actually filling the stomach, but the lower portion of the lungs, and this is where the alveolar concentration is located.

Additionally, breath work is another route to down-throttle the CNS in order that stiff muscles might be more compliant, presenting a window of opportunity for mobility and dynamic warm-up exercises to have the greatest impact. Finally, breathing drills allow for a moment to declutter the brain before undertaking a very challenging order of work, and it’s fair to assume that all coaches would like just a little more focus in training.

Quite often, timing is everything when it comes to performance based outcomes, and in an ideal world, we would be able to schedule separate sessions dedicated to resilience training. Olympic track coach Charlie Francis always reserved training days specifically for resilience and recovery. However, in the real world, this might be a challenge, depending upon timing of classes or sessions, the mix of athletes, and their competitive schedules. Instead, it might be more effective to integrate this practice directly into the daily routine.

Intuitively, many would schedule this for the end of the workout, but that is also the easiest place for it to fall off the schedule. Therefore, I prefer using many of these methods specifically during the warm-up. Then, if time allows, I return to them to close the workout. I simply start with a two- or three-minute window of exploratory foam rolling followed by another two minutes of “crocodile breathing” (flat on stomach with forehead resting on forearms) where deep nasal breaths are the focus.

With everything a strength and conditioning coach needs to focus on, devoting time to resilience and recovery can be a challenge. But this component can be the key to the success of all of the other hard work you and your athletes do.

Motivation for Offseason Workouts

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This article was provided by Coaches Network

It can be challenging to keep football players motivated during offseason workouts. To help his athletes get through the dog days of summer, Evan Simon, MS, CSCS, SCCC, Head Strength and Conditioning Coach for Oregon State University, turned the team’s strength and conditioning work into a mock season and awarded “wins” or “losses” based on performance.

Simon first utilized this tactic in when he was with Utah State University’s program. “The team had gone 4-8 each of the previous two seasons, and the goal for the upcoming year was to qualify for a bowl game,” he says. “To help players meet those new expectations, I wanted to shake up the offseason. I noticed that we could break up the summer workout schedule to reflect our 12 regular season contests and a bowl game. The players and coaches loved the idea.”

The Aggies finished the 2011 mock summer season 13-0, which Simon believes was a catalyst for a 7-5 regular season capped by the team’s first bowl appearance in 14 years. Although Simon didn’t bring the tradition with him when he and Head Coach Gary Andersen moved on to the University of Wisconsin, he saw an opportunity to reintroduce it after the duo’s first year with the Beavers.

“We knew we were going to need players to step up after a disappointing previous season, and I knew the competition would be a big motivator,” Simon says. “So I talked to Coach Andersen, and we agreed to bring it back.”

In the system, every two-and-a-half days of summer work is equal to one “game.” Based on players’ showings during conditioning drills and lifting, Simon awards touchdowns or field goals to either the Beavers or their opponents. At the end of the game, the score is tallied up to see which side wins.

To make the mock season more realistic, Simon ties his teaching cues to the teams the Beavers will face. “I don’t tailor the work specifically to an opponent,” Simon says. “But I’ll tell the players, ‘The fatigue you’re feeling on this sprint is what you’re going to be feeling in the third quarter at Stanford University in week nine. Get through it here, and you can get through it there.’”

Another key to making the mock season successful is focusing on intangibles rather than hitting specific weights and times. “I don’t want the players to think, ‘If I hit a certain time on a run, it’s worth a touchdown,’” Simon says. “I’m looking at other things: Are they giving maximum effort, using proper technique, and responding to our coaching cues?

“For example, if a player runs through the finish line in a drill and has good body language afterward, that’s going to result in points for the team,” he continues. “But if the player slows up at the end of a sprint or doesn’t listen to our instructions, the opponent will get points, even if the player finishes with a great time.”

The mock season also encourages teammates to support each other. “Let’s say an athlete walks back to the weightroom from the drinking fountain. I’m going to call him out and say, ‘You have to pick it up. We always jog back from getting water,’” Simon says. “By bringing attention to it, all the players know that someone made a mistake and that the other team has scored.

“If they ignore it and go back to doing their own thing, it’s going to be a touchdown for the opponent,” he continues. “Yet if they reinforce what I’m saying and tell their teammate, ‘We know you’re tired. We all are. We can get through this together,’ it’s only going to be a field goal. That reinforces the importance of always having each other’s backs, even during training.”

This past mock season was a success for the Beavers, who went 9-4, including wins over rival University of Oregon and in a bowl game. “I probably could have scored those four losses as wins,” Simon admits. “However, when the result can go either way, and I notice areas for improvement, the players benefit more from a loss. It allows me to emphasize how they can get better, and it fires the guys up to work even harder the next game to earn a win.”

ACL Injury Reduction Exercises

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ACL injury prevention and rehabilitation is an essential practice every coach should use to keep their team at full strength and free from injuries. This practice includes prevention, but also what to look for if the injury happens and how to get your athlete back to competition quickly and safely.

In the two video clips below Jake Moore; DPT; APTA Credentialed Clinical Instructor; Collegiate Strength & Conditioning Coach Certified, Physical Therapist/Strength and Conditioning Coach, Gilbert (IA) High School; USA Weightlifting Club Coach,  discusses body positions that tend to produce ACL injuries and in the second video he offers two exercises to help reduce and recondition ACL injuries.

The following is a brief explanation of body positions that tend to produce ACL Injuries:

  1. Abducted hip with externally rotated foot
  2. Knees tend to be bent less that 30-degrees (important to teach athletes to bend knees more when cutting)
  3. Trunk tilted or rotated towards the plant leg
  4. Posterior ground reaction force
  5. Internally rotated knee

In the second video Coach Moore demonstrates and explains the two exercises that improve the posterior chain strength of athletes, the Double Leg Romanian Dead Lift (RDL) and the Single Leg RDL.

Key coaching points for the Double Leg RDL:

  1. Feet should be shoulder width apart
  2. Slight knee bend
  3. Push hips back
  4. Squeeze shoulder blades
  5. Toes straight ahead
  6. Slide dumbbells down the leg and come back up
  7. All of the weight should be on the heels
  8. Flat though the back
  9. Shin angle should be nearly vertical
  10. All of the movement should be through the hip joint

Key coaching points of the Single Leg RDL:

  1. Stand on one leg with slight knee bend
  2. Bend at the hip
  3. Swing leg back behind as you bend at the hip
  4. Work to keep the knee in line with the toes on the leg that is staitionary
  5. Hips should stay level as you swing leg back
  6. Try not to let the swing leg touch the ground when you come back up

For more information about the DVD that these two clips were taken from, click the link ACL Risk Reduction & Reconditioning

The YouTube videos below have sound. Make sure that your sound is turned on and that you have access to the site. Please note that some schools block access to YouTube.

 

Don’t Snooze You Lose

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This article was provided by Training and Conditioning

As more and more research is done on sleep and athletes, we achieve a broader understanding for all the areas it impacts. Three recent studies open our eyes even further, showing how a lack of sleep can affect reaction time, performance, and substance use.

According to an article in Science Daily, fastballs in Major League Baseball take about 400 milliseconds to travel from the mound to the plate. Getting enough sleep can help players react to different pitches faster, says a new study. It found that by increasing their amount of sleep by one hour for five days straight, MLB players could improve their cognitive processing speed by reacting 122 milliseconds faster. They were also able to react 66 milliseconds faster on a selective attention task.

“Our research indicates that short-term sleep extension of one additional hour for five days demonstrated benefits on athletes’ visual search ability to quickly respond when faced with distractors,” Cheri Mah, MS, a Clinical and Translational Research Fellow at the University of California San Francisco Human Performance Center and the study’s lead author, told ScienceDaily.

Performance gains from sleep aren’t limited to the baseball diamond, according to another recent study. Researchers at Stony Brook University analyzed more than 30,000 late-night tweets from 112 professional basketball players along with their stats from home games spanning 2009 to 2016. The results showed players who tweeted between 11:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. saw an average of two minutes less on the court, along with fewer shots, rebounds, steals, and blocks.

“Using late-night tweeting activity as a proxy for being up late, we interpret these data to show that basketball skills are impaired after getting less sleep,” Jason Jones, PhD, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook, said in a statement that was covered by SportTechie.

Sleep disturbances are also related to an increased likelihood of substance abuse among college student-athletes, says researchers from the University of Arizona. They examined data from the National College Health Assessment, focusing on the survey responses of 8,683 student-athletes that were collected from 2011 to 2014. The survey was conducted by the American College Health Association and asked students about sleep problems that had been difficult to handle in the past 12 months. The survey respondents were also asked about specific substances they had used in the past 30 days.

In an article from ScienceDaily, the study’s findings showed that student-athletes who reported sleep difficulties were 151 percent more likely to use cigarettes, 66 percent more likely to smoke marijuana, and 36 percent more likely to drink alcohol than those without sleep difficulties. On top of that, the student-athletes who reported sleep difficulties were 349 percent more likely to use cocaine, 317 percent more likely to use methamphetamines, and 175 percent more likely to use steroids.

“Knowing this association between sleeping difficulty and substance abuse could be beneficial for coaches, physical therapists, and physicians,” Michael Grander, PhD, Director of the Sleep and Health Research Program at Arizona, told ScienceDaily. “These findings could provide important insight when treating sleep disturbances or attempting to improve athletic performance.”

Methods to Improve Explosiveness

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This article was provided by Coaches Network

By Matt Grimm

Explosiveness is the key to athletic development. The ability to start and stop at high speeds is what makes an athlete “explosive.” How can coaches make their athletes explosive? Below are three methods.

Plyometrics: to improve neural capacity and the stretch reflex

Plyometrics are anything that requires jumping and change of direction. In reality, this happens constantly during a game. Therefore, we must train our athletes’ bodies and nervous system to maximize the plyometric qualities and produce the most force development possible.

Plyometric exercises include box jumps, broad jumps, lateral jumping, multi-jumps, and other similar exercises. The key to training plyometrics is to keep the volume of the jumps low, yet the intensity incredibly high. In a single workout our athletes will never go over 32 jumps. So our sets will be 4 sets of 4 each side if we’re doing single leg jumping. This puts the total volume at 32. If we are doing box jumps, we would do 5 sets of 4 making the total volume 20 reps.

There are many ways to integrate plyometrics into your workouts. One idea I use a lot is to pair med ball throws with jumps to save time.

Power & Strength Training:  to build horsepower and make the body stronger

Strength is the base for every athlete and will dictate the ceiling for power development. Strength and power are directly correlated to each other. When evaluating strength training, we are looking at weight room strength. Total body strength is the most valuable, which can be quantified with squatting, deadlifting, pull-ups, bench press, and rows.

To develop power, use explosive lifts. The most valuable and safest are auxiliary Olympic lifts such as the hang clean, single arm dumbbell snatch, or a dumbbell push-press. Training the total body three days a week during the off-season will provide the best results for your athletes.

Mobility: to increase range of motion

Mobility is by far the most disregarded part of training by coaches worldwide. It is vital to having full range of motion through movement. If an athlete doesn’t have mobility they will not be able to develop strength or power to the highest degree. If our athletes have mobility issues and we train them through their issue, it typically will cause injury.

Strategies for increasing range of motion are done before workouts and practice: foam rolling or any soft tissue work, such as massage and mobility drills. Getting some kind of mobility and foam rolling completed before activity will make your athletes less injury prone.

 

Matt Grimm is Head Strength and Conditioning coach at Trevecca Nazarene University and owner of Matt Grimm Performance, LLC, in Nashville, Tenn., where he trains athletes of all ages. He can be reached through his website: MattGrimmPerformance.com.