June 2015 – Performance Edge

Repost: Triple Extension Is Important for All Athletes

By MIKE ROJAS, Aug 24, 2010

Nowadays, speed training is all the rage in almost every sport. You can find “coaches” marketing weekend camps or group training at schools and parks everywhere. Because it’s so heavily marketed to teams and groups, you feel like you’ll be left in the dust if you don’t do it.

I think we can all agree that teaching the mechanics of running is essential for beginners because technique and form are necessary for achieving maximal speed. But with so much emphasis placed on getting faster, what is a parent or athlete to do?

In my opinion, “speed training” is the latest fad to squeeze money out of misinformed coaches, parents, and athletes. Some parents are usually torn between choosing to pay for speed training or strength training. Well, I’m pretty sure you can guess my answer to this dilemma! The biggest bang for your buck is achieved through strength training. The stronger you are, the more force you’ll be able to apply to the ground, which will make you faster.

To get faster, strength training is paramount because:

1. Force = mass x acceleration
2. Power = force x velocity

You’ll also get better triple extension (locking of the ankle, knee, and hip). We all want to develop more force and power, but what does triple extension have to do with all this? Without locking at the hip, knee, and ankle, maximal jumping and sprinting can’t be accomplished. Triple extension is the key to a faster athlete.

Let’s take a look at the NFL combine. The combine is made up of a series of tests—the 40-yard dash, vertical jump, broad jump, bench press, three-cone drill, and shuttle run. Five out of these six events are lower body dominant, and they test the athlete’s ability to explode from a static position to an all out sprint, jump, or lateral shuffle. Guys running a 40-yard dash under 4.25 seconds are very hard to come by. If you can achieve this type of speed at a combine, you can pretty much assure yourself a very lucrative contract. Tenths of a second can mean the difference between thousands or millions of dollars for certain athletes.

Each position player is looked at as a whole, but the hips and legs are highly scrutinized so separating yourself from the pack is very important. With that being said, quickness is brought about by explosive movements such as cleans, snatches, squats, deadlifts, tire flips, and other movements. I’m willing to bet that the guys who stand out on these tests put in a lot of time performing these types of lifts!

Take a look at a basketball player going up for a blocked shot or a slam dunk. He explodes off the ground by applying as much pressure as possible in order to get as high as possible. Triple extension is very important for all jumping movements. With a proper weight training program, athletes can increase their vertical jump and speed and decrease their chances of injury.

Most people wouldn’t think that swimmers need to lift weights let alone incorporate triple extension exercises. But they have to start somewhere and usually it’s on land. If they’re competing in the backstroke, they push away from the wall with an explosive jump. The weights don’t have to be heavy in order to increase the power derived from triple extension. Jumping or deadlifting with light weight can make a big difference in a swimmer’s starting strength.

Wrestlers definitely need to utilize strength training because they are constantly battling an opponent’s weight and strength. However, do they need to encompass triple extension exercises? Of course. They’re creating tremendous power and force with every throwing movement. For this, we use different types of cleans with dumbbells, kettlebells, and sandbags in order to strengthen their hips. The tremendous grip work involved is an added bonus of performing cleans.

Being a coach, my ultimate goal is to get my clients stronger and faster than their opponents. I teach them technique first, and as they improve, I increase the resistance and workload specific to the demands of their sport. Running around cones and ladders won’t increase their speed nearly as well as a quality strength training program. Time invested in a weight room will yield better results than running with a parachute strapped to your back. It doesn’t matter what surface they compete on—by achieving powerful triple extension through the ankle, knee, and hip, we can create explosive and powerful athletes!

Repost: The Female Guide to Getting Lean

A note from Dave:

All too often at Performance Edge my staff and I hear many if not most of my prospective or new female clients share their concerns with regard to bulking up by lifting weights. As a professional strength coach that has had the privilege of coaching professionally, collegiately and working with aspiring young men and women the past eighteen to twenty years, I can say that this is entirely not true. Many of the beliefs women have with regard to keeping healthy, getting or staying lean are not based on quantifiable research or facts. If you are at all interested in learning the truth and become stronger and healthier then please read the informative article below by Tami Bellon. Knowledge is Power!

The Female guide to Getting Lean

Calorie Intake

If you weigh 200lbs and are only eating 1,200 calories, you are not eating enough. That doesn’t mean break out the donuts, that means increase your protein consumption – to start. A general guide for calorie intake is your bodyweight times ten to twelve. Example: 200lbs x 10 = 2000 cal.

You may be thinking this is a lot of food, but it is not. Women have been taught that starving themselves will make them lose weight. In reality, we don’t just want to be smaller do we? Don’t we want to be leaner, too? I’m not saying bodybuilding lean, but enough to see a little definition in your arms and/or abs. Most women would answer me with a very loud, “Yes!”

Calorie intake is just one component of many that go into this machine we call our body. The body is much smarter than the average person. You may trick it once or twice, but it will learn how to overcome what you are trying to do to it. The body will combat under eating by hording everything you feed it. Then you jump on a piece of cardio equipment and pedal your little heart out for extensive amounts of time, and still – nothing. Why is that? Keep reading!

Drop the Carbs Down

You don’t have to completely eliminate them; doing so would only set you up for failure. Do you know what foods are considered high in carbohydrates?

The foods to reduce in this category would be sugar, which includes candy, cakes, pies, etc. But it also includes fruit. I hear so many people say how healthy they eat and then proceed to tell me they load up on fruit. Fruit is mostly sugar. Natural sugar is still sugar, and it still makes you fat if you eat too much of it. Okay, so we have sugar clarified. More foods that are sugary: pasta, potatoes, some other veggies – research those. Don’t forget rice and bread are sugary, too.

Another misconception is that brown rice and pasta and whole grain breads don’t do the same thing as their regular white counterparts. Truth is – they do. They just have a little more fiber and digest more slowly, so you don’t get quite the same insulin spike, but they are still a carbohydrate and they can still cause fat gain if you overeat them.

So what we have learned is to drop carbs down. In general, I start people out at 25-30% carbohydrates in their diet and assess from there. How are you going to do that if you don’t know how many sugars and carbohydrates are in what you’re eating? Think about it. Take responsibility for what goes in your mouth.

Increase Your Protein and Don’t Fear Fat

Beef, chicken, turkey, fish, etc. There are studies out now that are proving our governments “lean meat only” consumption isn’t necessary.

For example:

CLA is a substance that accumulates in the fat of grass-fed ruminant animals-fats like butter and tallow-that has anti-cancer effects.
Industry apologists have now done an about-face and are campaigning against the trans in favor of the liquid oils – while using this opportunity of heightened public interest to continue demonizing the fats we should all be using, the natural saturated animal fats in animal foods and tropical oils.

Increased protein helps maintain the lean mass (muscle) you already have. You want to keep this, as it increases your metabolism. Adding a little more lean mass is usually a good thing. As a general starting point, I think 40% of daily food intake should be protein. I have seen great results with this.

Resistance Training

Ladies, listen very closely: you will not bulk up from resistance training. If you start getting bigger, it is most likely because you are also eating more. You may put on a little lean mass, but it should not cause you to outgrow your pants. In fact, if you clearly know what foods are acceptable, watching your nutrition, and doing resistance training, you should be getting smaller and leaner.

Just because you work out doesn’t mean it’s time to go get a pizza because you “just worked off the calories.” It’s simple, if you have a high body fat percentage; you are eating too much, unless there are medical reasons surrounding your weight in which case you should be even more attentive to your food intake.

Resistance training has some proven benefits:
Improved muscle strength
Weight management
Prevention and control of health conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and arthritis
Pain management
Improved mobility and balance
Improved posture
Decreased risk of injury
Increased bone density and strength
Reduced body fat
Boosted metabolism
Improved sleep patterns
Increased self-esteem
Enhanced performance of everyday tasks

A Little Cardio Goes a Long Way

Women today go way overboard with cardio. I have a simple explanation for what this does to your body. It is well known to those of us in the industry that excessive cardio (meaning more than 45 minutes steady state or 30 minutes of high intensity interval training) is too much for the average person.

After this amount of time, your body will start to become catabolic, which means it starts to eat muscle for fuel instead of food recently eaten and fat stores. All those ladies you see on the cardio equipment day after day, who always look the same, are actually eating up their muscle.

Do you realize what this means? They are lowering their metabolism because now they have less lean mass. Basically, if you would give them a body composition test, they would be fatter.

Becoming catabolic also happens when we don’t eat enough. Starving yourself will only make you carry more fat. When you can’t stand starving yourself anymore and go back to “normal” eating, don’t expect a positive result. All the scam diets that tell you to drink nothing but shakes or eat only five hundred calories a day, they make you catabolic and set you up for failure. Don’t be lazy. Take control of your body.

All of it comes back to being balanced and approaching your health and fitness from a variety of angles. While these guidelines are general, they work and they are a great place to start whether your goals are athletic or aesthetic. Cardio, strength, and nutrition are all important and all build upon each other. Focusing too much on any one aspect while leaving others at the wayside won’t have you be the best athlete you can be.

Repost: Two Sides of the Coin- Mobility and Stability

A note from Dave:

As the owner and CEO of Performance Edge I constantly strive to educate my athletes, clientele and those in my community about the necessity and importance of a well-rounded training and/or exercise program. The following article provides some insight as to what the staff and I at Performance Edge work to provide daily…Balance!

Two Sides of the Coin- Mobility and Stability

To start, let’s first give mobility credit where credit is due. Mobility is (almost) everything. If you lack range of motion, no amount of muscle strength will power you through that restricted movement, at least not without serious repercussions – for example, pain. Restricted movements will force the body to compensate, creating further dysfunction. Additionally, if a muscle cannot achieve its optimal length, it cannot generate sufficient force.

In short, good mobility is a basic requirement of quality, safe, and efficient human performance. I am a fan. I’m psyched that the masses are aware that restricted mobility causes trouble and they are ready to take charge and do something about it.

As amazing (and necessary) as mobility is, if it’s “almost” everything, then the other side of the coin is – you guessed it – stability. Stability can exist without mobility, but you wouldn’t get too far. If everything locked down to stabilize, you would have a lot in common with a tree stump. On the other hand, if you had amazing mobility without stability, movement would be next to impossible and sloppy at best.

Thankfully, most of us fall somewhere just off to one side of the correct proportions of each. In other words, we are likely either walking around with a bit too much mobility without sufficient stability, or a bit too much stability without enough mobility.

The Problem of Excess Stability

The first scenario – excessive mobility while lacking stability – is an easy fix. Strength training. Stability work. Get control of all that movement. It would make sense then that in the case of the latter – mobility deficits with excessive stability – the same approach would help. Increase mobility. Stretch, roll, and release. Achieve unrestricted range of motion.

This approach focuses on deficits and increasing what is missing. For my gangly, mobile, Bambi-on-ice patients I want to focus on increasing stability. However, by only trying to increase what is missing, we fail to look at the whole picture. While my goal is not typically to decrease available movement, sometimes, somewhere along the process of increasing stability we might get a reduction in (hyper)mobility. Not necessarily a bad thing.

On the flipside, those with insufficient mobility need to consider the role stability plays in their dysfunction. It is quite easy to come to the conclusion that you have a limited range of motion, but how in the world would you assess that you have an excess of stability? Simple. They are one and the same. Yep, Finkle is Einhorn.

That tight muscle you assault on a regular basis is likely an overworked scapegoat, providing stability to keep you going. In the presence of instability, muscles and joints lock up to hold you together. You’ve always known you’ve had tight hamstrings, but you blame it on not stretching enough, too many posterior chain workouts, or perhaps genetics is your excuse. Haven’t you ever wondered the real reason your muscles were tight?

Did you ever consider that maybe those muscles can’t let go because they are holding on for a reason? When muscles start doing more work than they were designed to do, we have a problem. Tendinitis, muscle strains, decreased mobility. If you can teach a muscle to relax, not by pounding it into submission, but rather by turning on the correct muscles to create stability, the tight, limiting offender might just be able to let go.

The Best Application for Mobility Work

So here we are, in the middle of this mobility craze, borderline epidemic. As I approach the end of my first decade working as a physical therapist, I can say with absolute certainty that the number of people suffering from self-proclaimed mobility problems is an all-time high. Just a few years ago, I’m pretty sure I never heard the word mobility used by anyone outside of the health and fitness fields. At this point, it’s a tossup between selfie and mobility for most overused words.

Worse yet, mobility is not just an overused part of our lexicon but it is now becoming the sole approach to address movement dysfunction. Over-prescribing mobility drills for poor movement patterns is not all that different than a physician doling out antibiotics for every ailment. Just like medication, when the right drills are applied for the right condition, mobility work will be successful.

“Normal” mobility, without question, is a requirement to perform safe, efficient, and quality movement. Mobility drills such as stretching, foam rolling, and the like are all good ways to increase soft tissue pliability and increase range of motion. But for those of you consistently chipping away at these drills without yielding the desired change, perhaps it is time to step back and see what else may be going on. It’s time to ask where immobility stems from. If mobility work hasn’t helped yet, I’m not
sure more suffering will get you the results you are looking for.

So, is mobility just a fad? No. It’s a real thing. But it’s not the only thing.

Lauren Beasley, MS, PT, OCS, NKT – Total Physical Therapy