Striking a Balance in The Unstable Surface Controversy: How and Why You Should Use UST
Introduction The topic of unstable surface training has been one of great controversy within the strength and conditioning community for over a decade, and most people either find themselves on one side of the debate or the other. Either people love it and use it for everything, or they hate it and avoid using it for anything. That being said, I feel that we should all be somewhere in the middle on this issue. Go search the internet for unstable surface training and you will find notable names in the strength
Strength Training Isn’t Just for Physical Prowess
As many of our summer athletes head back to school, whether that be middle/high school, prep school, college, etc, it's good for us to take a step back and review our own performances as strength coaches. Did our athletes' testing numbers get better? Was our programming adequate? Was it appropriate? What could we have done better? It gives us an idea of what areas we as coaches need to improve upon, because there are always improvements to be made, and it also gives us something physical to hand our
Battling the Early Deterioration of The Single Sport Athlete
In my last blog post I got into the topic of early sport specialization and the detrimental effect that it has on the development of young athletes. As the post made it's way around the internet people either agreed with the idea or thought that it was a ludicrous concept and that kids needed to spend as much time as possible practicing their respective sport. The latter, oddly enough, generally seemed to be people who stood to make a profit off of training the kids for a specific sport. Shortly after
Training On The Go
In this day and age of instant gratification -- fast food, fast cars, getting pissed at the internet taking more than 5 seconds to load Facebook -- we tend to be impatient with our goals and not realize how far we've progressed on our journeys, whatever they may be. In the fitness industry, I see a ton of clients who work their butts off for 75% of the year, but come the Summer, vacation awaits! I'm going to tell you how to keep up with your workouts, even when you
One Sport May Be Too Much
Also Read: Battling the Early Deterioration of the Single Sport Athlete Playing one sport year round won't get your kid to the pros. In fact if anything it may hurt his or her chances. In today's world we've all become obsessed with the idea of instant gratification and when we want something we want it as fast as possible. So then more practice at one specific skill or more time spent on one thing must make you better at it right? Not necessarily. One area where we see a lot of this
Optimizing Movement and FAI
Often times strength coaches, personal trainers, and the like fall into the habit of thinking every client should be able to perform the perfect squat, the perfect deadlift, the perfect overhead press, etc. The issue with this is that not everyone's structural anatomy is created equal. It's our job as Strength & Conditioning professionals to determine whether poor quality of movement in a client is a structural issue, which we then have to work around, or if it is a functional issue, which we can use all of our tools
What really works when it comes to achieving your fitness goals?
Train for performance, and the aesthetics will come. When I was still green in the strength and conditioning world, one of my co-workers said something to a client who was concerned with the way that they looked and wanted to improve their overall physique. He said to them "train for performance and the aesthetics will come". Train for performance… at the time, to me that meant train for sports performance because I had my blinders on and there was only one way to train. If you think about it that made