Month: August 2017

“What kind of diet do you follow

…pretty clean, right?”

“Nothing, really. By typical American standards, clean. By fitness culture, athletic and other standards, I eat like a garbage disposal.”

I’m (semi) often asked about diet for fitness and sports performance. I don’t claim to be an expert here. But I’ve had some official coursework, have worked with and heard the stories of hundreds of patients and athletes, and have been interested in this, simply paying attention to nutrition concepts for over twenty years. But I want to be careful here. People seem to be really attached to their way of eating ; ). 

It was well over a decade ago that I decided to intentionally avoid any nutrition movement. The organic variations. The low carb. The Zone/Paleo/Atkins. The raw food. The blood type. The vegan. On and on they roll in and out of style. Next week the trend will be to eat something that was forbidden 6 years ago, and avoid something else.

The idea of running fast requires some context. Are we talking about moving 5-yards as typically demanded of an offensive (football) linemen? Are we referring to covering 26.2 miles in less than X hours:minutes? Does the activity also require rapid and frequent changes of direction?

The stage is set: early pre-season among some of the regions best of the best 16-year olds at the Baltimore Armour of the US Soccer Development Academy. [The point is to understand the kind of athletes that Loc is running up against here].

How did Loc get those kind of wheels? Well, from a few YEARS of consistent hard work.

I remember Loc bouncing around the BLC (gym) as a very average 12-year old, mostly shirking my gentle invitation to learn some light movement patterns. With some encouragement, he began hitting the weights while his brother and sister were here. Later he added  some mobility and speed and agility work, and”Plyo Friday” almost every week. And, he physically grew over a time of attending (probably) hundreds of soccer practices and games. And there you have it. Well,…someone has to come in first ; )

Do you know what does NOT provide that kind of sprinting ability?

1. Long distance running. There is a time for it. But it’s often over-done, and of little benefit for making an athletes sprint and accelerate well.
2. Agility Ladder. There is a time for it…little time. It has some rehab (physical therapy) application. But in my opinion, doing the agility ladder will eventually make you a pro at…doing the agility ladder.
3. Skills/ball control circuits. These are  worthwhile, and can certainly provide a high degree of conditioning. But they’re far less than optimal for actually increasing lower body power, range of motion, and functional core stability (factors involved with peak speed).
4. Insanity/P90X style circuit training. Again, these will provide some degree of conditioning, getting “in shape.” But unless the athlete is very out of shape to begin with, they will benefit running speed very little.
5. Trendy stuff like running in sand pits, “jump shoes” with no heels, squats on unstable surfaces, and other gimmicky ideas that have limited application. These often fail to acknowledge that speed is about generating 1) ground reaction forces 2) quickly over a 3) broad range of motion!

Okay then, wise guy, what should we be doing to get faster? 

1. A tune-up. Find and fix any specific muscle imbalances and mobility restrictions due to joint stiffness or faulty movement patterns. These vary widely among athletes, and require just a little time and attention to address.
2. “The Weights.” Some athletes need an emphasis on muscle gain while others just need to control their body more efficiently. Do the corrective work (see #1 above) and progressions/regressions to dial in perfect form on the big movements like squat, dead lift, lunge, loaded carries, and other leg/core exercise variations.  ** Attention to detail is required, because even with the big and best exercises, athletes will often try to move around their weak areas. “Finish the lift with hip extension and not lower back extension.” “Keep the torso upright and do not twist when you press.”  These are the type of cues that initially cause us to cut back on the amount of resistance that can be handled. But they make the exercise far safer and more effective for improving function outside of the gym.

   

3. Sprints of various distance and intensity. Be smart about gradual increases. There is no substitute for a video to provide immediate feedback and attention to running mechanics.
4. Plyometrics – are not just for basketballers and high jumpers.  All athletes can benefit from getting the most out of gravity. They provide a challenging stimulus for athletes to use the entire body to generate and control ground reaction forces. While plyometrics done well are certainly somewhat fatiguing, do not use them to achieve a conditioning effect. There are safer and better ways to build work capacity.
5. “Conditioning”  This is also sport- and athlete specific. I readily admit that some lower intensity running to achieve a base level of running economy and fitness does indeed help when it comes time to really fire up the engine in sprinting.

I absolutely concede that speed is at least partially genetically determined. But everyone can improve, and with the right training, to a great extent. Think about what may be holding you (or your athlete) back from being the fastest, most resilient version of themselves, and specifically address those issues.

 

 

 

 

…a small tip for getting back to running.

If patients in my office are a somewhat representative sample of the entire population of people with orthopedic issues, there are many people in the “I’d like to get back to running” boat. They want to run for weight management, fitness, or because they enjoy it. But they can’t because they’re coming off an injury. Others simply feel “out of shape”, coming off a long period of sedentary living. They assume that walking is good (it is), but they want to increase the intensity and benefit of their time in exercise.

Conventional wisdom says to progress jogging with a gradual increase in time duration , walking the hills until you get in shape. But I say to attack the hills for a relatively short duration of whatever effort that you can safely muster. Walk (or stand and rest) for however long you need until attacking the next hill. It is difficult to suffer injury while running up hill*, especially if you’re conscientious of proper warm up and mobility of the hips and ankles.

With the standard advice of a steady build up in jogging time or mileage, many folks usually start to hit a wall around the thirty minute mark, and they’re back to square one.

At this point it’s necessary to recall that impact is usually the primary bad guy when it comes to running injuries. So…manage impact! Monitor and modify how much of a beating the knees, hips and lower back will need to tolerate in your fitness endeavors. Running hills demands that you pour on the effort, but the strides and flight time are relatively short, with impact greatly reduced. That’s why hills are one of the best ways to “get in shape” relatively quickly while sparing the joints yet toughening the muscles and tendons for the strain of long duration jogging.

If you’re new to exercise, don’t imagine that you MUST jog to get in shape. If you enjoy jogging, get in shape to jog, and try not get hung up on traditional long distance, low- or moderate intensity standard. Hit the weights and use some imagination.

So find a grassy hill or a small, private drive. You will be surprised at how quickly your appearance and fitness level improve.

Just one problem…

While hill sprints do not cost much in terms of money or even time, the hill will ALWAYS kick your butt. Hill sprints (or even walks) are difficult, and I do not anticipate the masses who want to lose weigh and get fit crowding up the local hills. Or, as the great Ronnie Coleman would probably put it:

“Errbody want to be healthy and look good…

     But ‘aint nobody want to run them steep-ass hills.”

 

*Select orthopedic issues such as Achilles tendinopathy and some types of lower back pain MAY be irritated with hill sprints, although I have yet to hear a person actually complain of this.

“We see you make all the dead lift comments and entries into the Dead Lift Photo Gallery…So what’s the big deal about dead lifts?”

Why are dead lifts useful and awesome? Oh, here are a few of the reasons.

-Because dead lifts are a part of everyday life, unless you’re going to “seated shoulder abduction” a ladder over to the clogged gutters or leg press a suitcase up the airport stairwell. So we may as well train the brain and body to “pick things up and put them down” well. Dead lifts demand ground reaction forces and core stability, naturally teaching us how to maintain a rigid neutral spine and efficiently push with the legs, benefiting us well after the training ends.

-Because you feel like (and eventually ARE) a beast when you can easily move a boat load of weight. Dead lifts provide a fairly straightforward route to seeing and feeling fairly drastic improvements. For example, exercises like bench press and bicep curls recruit a relatively small amount of the body’s muscle mass, and adding 10 pounds to these movements is unreasonable. But a ten pound increase in the dead lift is no big thing because the work is distributed across a broad area of the body.

-Because dead lifts are one way to truly learn what we are capable of. Very few people, athletic or non-, understand how to coordinate multiple body segments, bracing some joints like a stone while others push and pull with intensity. BUT…once you learn how to be a rock in some areas and a piston in others, you find that moving your body weight off the ground is easy. And you’re are a legitimate game-changer, dishing it out rather than being trucked on the athletic field.

-Because most people, athletic and non-, make poor use of their gluteal and hamstring muscles. The “posterior chain” includes the largest muscles in the body, yet most people move with knee-dominant patterns that emphasize quadriceps activity, which eventually leads to knee and lower back problems. Dead lifts are a direct route to train up stronger hips and a faster, quicker athlete.

-Because when you think of training the core for peak performance, you need to think less 7-minute abs and more dead lift, split stance squats, and single arm overhead presses. This is a matter for another essay, but there is no other endeavor that will provide more core strength than learning how to easily move one- to two times your body weight. Not a single crunch, leg raise, TRX or physio ball rehab movement, Pilates, Yoga, home DVD fitness plan, or machine-based exercise will cause the core muscles to work more than handling a relatively heavy load of free weights. Not everyone can jump into heavy dead lifts without some preparatory work. But as far as core strength for sports performance, dead lifts are king.

-Because dead lifts are a not too technical total body exercise. There is definitely an art to learning how to dead lift well, knowing how and when to implement progressions and regressions, and safely building up the resistance on the barbell. But they are somewhat safer and much easier to learn than the Olympic lifts that require the use of heavy resistance with momentum and fast bar speed.

-Along those lines, dead lift are relatively safe when programmed well. By this I mean using appropriate form (or progressions/regressions to achieve good form) as well as reasonable increases in resistance, recovery, and a sound over-all training plan. I recently looked at a collegiate off-season weight training packet that had athletes deadlifting the day after heavy squats and power cleans. This is terrible programming.

It is important to note here that all things can be taken beyond what is beneficial, to unhealthy extremes. Easily dead lifting twice your body weight is a reasonable and exceedingly beneficial long-term goal that pays great dividends in performance and body appearance. But dead lifting triple body weight, or dobule body weight for 20 continuous reps, or body weight for 120 reps, are all fairly berserk endeavors and probably not exactly healthy. And I do not wonder why my hip hurts : /

 

Let the Dead Lift Gallery Roll On!

The Doughty brothers had some recent dead lift PRs! Jackson 300 lbs and Spencer 315. Ridiculous strength given their age, size and less than one year training duration.

Watch out for them this fall!!