Month: August 2011

Fitness Business Blueprint

About a week ago, my friend Eric Cressey let me know about a new resource he was releasing with Pat Rigsby and Mike Robertson called the Fitness Business Blueprint.

Being a co-owner at Endeavor Sports Performance has forced me to take a more proactive role on the business side of things, which wasn’t really my strong point. Training and coaching comes pretty naturally, but understanding how to optimize the business mechanics…not so much.

Over the last few years I’ve been fortunate to receive guidance in this area from guys like Eric and Pat Rigsby, who have been influential in some of the changes we’ve made to our business in the past and plan to make in the near future. The thing that appeals to me about their “business advice” is that it’s always centered around delivering the most beneficial service possible. Pat says that his job is to help make coaches/business “the best coach/business they can be.” That’s a noble undertaking and certainly flies in contrast to the greedy business ventures who seek only to run a maximum number of kids through a glorified gym class without any semblance of a plan, but then market it as revolutionary athletic development.

I realize not everyone reading this runs their own business, but I thought I’d bring this to your attention anyway. Fitness Business Blueprint doesn’t just cover sales and marketing, it also covers what most business products seem to overlook completely, like:

Staff Training
Assessments
Program Design
Personal Development

There’s more to it than that, but those are some of the big topics that you can’t find information on from a business standpoint anywhere. For those that pick up a copy today, Pat is giving away a Private Workshop (Normally $1197) as a bonus.

You can check out all the details here:

Click here >> Fitness Business Blueprint

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

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3 Things Hockey Parents Should Know

At Endeavor Sports Performance, we see hockey players from a wide range of age and ability. We have players as young as 11 competing in Tier II youth programs up through the NHL. We’re very fortunate to have such a diverse population because it allows us to pick up on trends in movement patterns and structural asymmetries that develop over the player’s career. Being able to “look into the future” has really helped us develop better long-term player development training and programs and recommendations for players, parents, and coaches.

On that topic, I asked David Lasnier, who has been my right hand man for the last year and a half, to put together an article on a few things that all hockey parents should know in order to maximize their kids’ development. Check out his response below!

1. First, and most importantly in my opinion, your kid should have fun playing hockey!! I can give all the tips in the world about training, nutrition and injury prevention, but the most important thing parents need to know (and trust me there are wayyy too many that either don’t know it or just don’t care) is the first reason your kids play sports is to have fun. When you start to send them to every hockey clinic, every development camp and every showcase and you do that year-round when your kid is 10-years old, it’s not about fun anymore. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about developing skills and taking the necessary steps to get better at one sport, but there is such a thing as overloading your kids too young. This is the first step toward them dropping out of hockey at a young age because they’re burnt out. Kids are kids; they’re not adults. There is no reason we should ask of them to get too serious too young; it’s true with sports and it’s true with everything else in life.

Another thing that leads me to believe that parents might not prioritize their kids having fun and enjoying the game is the way some of them behave in the stands. I’ve seen it happen too many times; parents yelling at their kids, at the referees or at the other players on the ice. I’m not talking about encouragement, but some parents flip out in the stands and get aggressive to a point it gets completely absurd! I’ve seen this happen in amateur hockey at pretty much every level, including Mites! What kind of message do you think it sends to your kid? There is no way when seeing that that the kid is going to think it’s all fun and he should enjoy himself on the ice. He’s going to get very competitive and play to win, and nothing else will matter. Parents need to understand that hockey, like every other sport, is a game. The first goal at the youth level is to have fun. There is a time to start to get competitive and to specialize in one sport, but anything under 13-years old is way too young.

Sit down.

2. This second point is very closely related to what I mentioned above. Don’t push your kid into specializing too early in one sport. For one, it might contribute to taking the fun out of the practice of their sport. But it also can lead to a lot of issues. Skating on the ice, much like other movement patterns from other sports, causes a certain stress to your body and your joints. It is important at a young age when the body is still in development that we don’t force kids into playing one sport year-round. This can lead to overuse conditions very young (Check out these studies: Sports-Related Injuries in Youth Athletes: Is Overscheduling a Risk Factor? and Early sport specialization: roots, effectiveness, risks.). It’s no coincidence that there are so many sports hernias, groin pulls and hip surgeries nowadays. Early specialization in sport is more common practice than it has ever been before. You impose a lot of stress on your joints from a very young age, you keep the stress accumulating by playing hockey year-round and never give them rest or use any injury prevention modalities to avoid reaching the injury threshold. Again, let kids have fun, play multiple sports in different seasons and don’t make or LET them specialize in one sport before they reach at least 15-years old.

3. The last thing is nutritional habits! We know that nutrition and sports performance are closely related. Whether most parents know that or not, I’m not sure, but I can tell you one thing: I don’t know many kids we train at Endeavor that actually have good nutritional habits. Most of them skip breakfast (and if they don’t they eat pop-tarts), they snack on candy all the time, and they show up to work out without having eaten anything in the previous 5 hours before their session! It’s part of our job as strength and conditioning coaches to educate kids on how to eat well and fuel their body to perform optimally. But in the end, if the parents are not educated themselves, or if they just don’t apply these good habits, we’re fighting a losing battle. We can tell the kids to eat more protein and more vegetables, but if the parents don’t encourage that, it’s just not going to happen. I don’t know of many kids who go food shopping by themselves (or simply have the power to decide what their parents are actually buying at the grocery store). That’s why it’s so important for the parents to be educated on that subject and make sure they give their kids good eating habits like eating a good breakfast every morning, prepare food for the day, have a pre- and a post workout meal/shake, etc.

Precision Nutrition: The best sports nutrition resource available (your kids will love these smoothie recipes)

David continues to be an outstanding resource for me. I appreciate that he and I can work in the same environment, but have different interpretations of what we see. Because he’s from Quebec, he has a slightly different vantage point on the state of youth hockey development and athletic development in general. If you haven’t yet, head over to his site and sign up for his newsletter. It’s free and he puts up some great content every week.

Click here >> David Lasnier Sports Training

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

Please enter your first name and email below to sign up for my FREE Athletic Development and Hockey Training Newsletter!

This Week in Hockey Strength and Conditioning

This week I posted two new articles related to understanding, assessing for, and training around hip injuries or structural abnormalities that a significant proportion of the hockey population suffers from. My friend Dr. Jeff Cubos wrote a follow-up to Monday’s article for his site. All three have received a ton of great feedback so if you haven’t had a chance to read through them, check them out at the links below:

1) Training Around Femoroacetabular Impingement

2) Hockey Hip Assessment Questions

3) So Your Athlete Has FAI, Now What?

Jeff also added an awesome video series to Hockey Strength and Conditioning. His videos detail a progression to help reinforce single-leg stability and really ingrain requisite dynamic internal rotation control. As I recently mentioned, players that have poor single-leg stability tend to ride their inside edge during the gliding phase of skating. Even if they don’t exhibit this fault, they surely waste power and suffer from a compromised ability to give and withstand contact. This exercise would fit into a program as part of a dynamic warm-up, extra hip mobility/stability work, and/or core training. Check it out at the link below:

Click here to watch >> The Hip Airplane from Dr. Jeff Cubos

Sean Skahan also added a couple videos of sled/sprint contrast work he uses for a phase of the off-season program. Theoretically, contrast work should help maximize recruitment of movement-specific motor units and therefore provide a bigger engine for the secondary exercise that follows the “primer”. Sean’s videos demonstrate one way to apply this concept in a linear movement and lateral movement format, but he alludes to a couple other ways that he uses these during this phase of his program.

Click here to watch >> Sled and Sprint Contrast from Sean Skahan

If you have any questions about these articles or the videos, hop on the Hockey Strength and Conditioning forum and ask. That’s the quickest way to reach me and I know Sean, Darryl, Mike, Jeff Cubos and a couple other really bright guys are pretty active on them as well.

As always, if you aren’t a member yet, I encourage you to try out Hockey Strength and Conditioning for a week. It’ll only cost $1, and if it’s not the best buck you’ve ever spent, I’ll personally refund you!

To your continued success,

Kevin Neeld

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Hockey Hip Assessment Questions

Following Monday’s post on Training Around Femoroacetabular Impingement, I got this email from a fellow coach:

Dear Kevin,

I really enjoyed your webinar about assessment and totally agree with most of it. Congrats on your great work.

I have few questions:

1) When you mentioned the Tyler et al study you talked about that maybe skating could change the length-tension curve to the right and said that could be good to work the adductors in shorter length. Can you explain better this concept please?

2) If I understand this well, if an athlete has excessive anterversion or retroversion, it is not good to work end range right?

3) I am excited to know how you program a prevention plan for adductor strains as I read that you reduced these injuries in your athletes over the last couple of years: probably a multifactorial approach right?

Thanks!

First off, I appreciate the kind words and the inquiry for more information. Q&A’s make for great articles because usually a lot of readers/listeners will have the same questions and explanations can help clear things up for everyone. With regards to these questions specifically:

1) As a muscle’s length changes, so does its ability to produce force. Every muscle, and every joint due to the collective influence of all the muscles that cross it will have a point in the ROM where it can produce a peak force.

Length-Tension Curve

As the figure illustrates, during active tension (neurally-driven muscular contraction) the force producing ability of the structure will change in a U-shaped fashion, so that there is an optimal length for maximal force production and a decreased ability to produce force at shorter and longer lengths. This force producing ability coincides with the quantity of overlapping sarcomeres. While this figure, and most of its kind, represent the behavior of an isolated muscle fiber, when tension is represented relative to joint angle, a similar curve presents.

Muscles will adapt to the demands placed on them. Simply, this means that muscles trained in shorter lengths will shift their peak tension toward shorter lengths (to the left on the figure above), whereas muscles trained in longer lengths will shift their peak tension toward longer lengths (to the right). Because the adductors are under maximal tension toward the end of forward skating stride, where they are required to decelerate a high velocity hip extension, abduction, and external rotation at near maximal lengths, I’m suggesting that the high volumes of skating characteristic of most hockey players causes the strength of the adductors to shift to the right, toward longer lengths. As a result, these muscles will test weak if tested in a shortened position.

A great demonstration of a typical forward skating stride position

In the Tyler et al study (The association of hip strength and flexibility with the incidence of adductor muscle strains in professional ice hockey players), they assessed adductor strength in a sidelying position with the hip adducted so that the foot was ~12 inches off the table. They assessed abductor strength with the leg positioned slightly above horizontal. In my opinion, this biases the adductors significantly further to the left on their length-tension curve. This certainly isn’t to discount the results of their study, but I believe their results are more indicative of identifying players who have experienced the shift in peak tension more so than a true strength imbalance. In either case, the training initiative is to restore adductor strength in shortened lengths, a strategy that the same research group demonstrated efficacy with in a follow-up study.

2) Forcefully driving through end range is never good, but that’s not the whole story. When a player hits end range and still needs additional range of motion to complete the movement, they’re going to continue their momentum at another joint, usually an adjacent one. This isn’t a “compensation” per se, it’s just what the body needs to do to achieve the end goal. Knowing whether the athlete has excessive ante- or retroversion will be helpful in ensuring that we avoid forceful end range, but it also gives us a better understanding of what foot positions correspond with a neutral hip position. Typically a slight toe-out position puts the hips in a neutral alignment. If an athlete has severely anteverted hips, a slight toe out could be near end-range hip external rotation for them, which will effect their movement quality, especially in rotation-based movements.

Just as importantly, understanding version angles will provide insight into probable pathological compensations. Continuing with the example of an athlete with severely anteverted hips, pushing backward with their foot at a ~45° angle to skate forward requires a great deal of external rotation of the stride leg, which this athlete will not have. Because external rotation is linked with a tendency for the femoral head to translate anteriorly, it’s reasonable to be suspicious of athletes with excessive anteversion also presenting with anterior hip capsule laxity and/or hip flexor pain/weakness. To use the Postural Restoration Institute’s parlance, we can build in exercises meant to improve the function of “ligamentous muscle”, which simply means using muscles to help reinforce ligamentous integrity/function.

3) The prevention of all injuries requires a multi-factorial approach. Everything we do is leading us closer to or further away from optimal. This is one of the reasons why Charlie Weingroff’s DVD set Training = Rehab, Rehab = Training resonated so much with me. It’s all the same. We’re seeking to improve quality, and then gain capacity by systematically adding quantity. Breakdowns occur with excessive quantity and/or poor quality.

One of the best resources for performance training and rehabilitation professionals ever created

In more specific regards to adductor injuries, we have made a few simple program adaptations for high-risk athletes that has had a profound difference on the incidence and recurrence of these injuries. I don’t think these changes, in isolation, are the solution, but I think they fit into our overall system well to create the response we we’re after. I wrote an article detailing this approach about a year ago for Hockey Strength and Conditioning that you can find here: A New Approach to Handling “Groin” Strains

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

P.S. If you missed the webinar that these questions are in reference to, you can check it out at either (or both) of two of my favorite sites: Strength and Conditioning Webinars, Sports Rehab Expert

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Training Around Femoroacetabular Impingement

As I mentioned on Friday, I gave a webinar last week called “Hockey Hip Assessments: An in-depth look at structural abnormalities and common hip injuries.” Over the last couple years, I’ve become known as a “hip guy”. In reality, I’m not sure how I could train high level hockey players without being a hip guy. Almost half of our players this off-season presented with a hip structure considered “abnormal”, and I think it’s fair to say that every single one of them is flirting with the overuse/under-recovery threshold of their adductor and hip flexor musculature. And these are all “healthy” players. Knowing how to spot individual structure differences and program/coach accordingly is of paramount importance in my setting.

One structural abnormality that is gaining momentum with regards to research attention is femoroacetabular impingement or FAI. I’ve trained several players that have FAI, a couple of which were unaware of their affliction. A 2007 study by Philippon et al. demonstrated that 100% of the 45 professional athletes (24 hockey players) that came to their office with FAI had labral tears. Unfortunately, there is a strong association between labral damage and subsequent osteoarthritis. Recognizing FAI early can help minimize labral damage and the rapidity of osteoarthritis onset, which has the potential to facilitate both short- and long-term performance improvements for the player.

FAI Basics
FAI results in a limitation of hip flexion to around 90 degrees and presents in one of three ways:

CAM impingement: A decrease in the offset between the femoral head and the femoral neck. Hip flexion is limited by the bony overgrowth butting up against the top of the acetabulum.
Pincer impingement: An overextension or growth of the acetabular hood. The femoral neck contacts the overgrowth at a lower degree of hip flexion.
Mixed impingement: A combination of the CAM and pincer structural deviations.

FAI Assessment
Because the common denominator in all forms of FAI is a limitation in hip flexion ROM, you can use a basic quadruped rock to get an idea of whether the athlete has a limitation or not.

Quadruped Rock

Just have the athlete set-up on all fours with their knees under their hips, hands under their shoulders, and spine in a neutral position. Have them push their hips toward their heels while attempting to maintain a neutral spine and note the position of hip flexion that causes a “tucking” of the hips and rounding of the lumbar spine. Ask the athlete where they feel the restriction. If they feel it more in the front/middle part of their hip (“groin” area), it’s more likely a bony limitation than a soft-tissue one. Athletes with FAI will tap out around 90 degrees of hip flexion and feel it primarily in the anteromedial border of their hip.

You can follow up this test by having the athlete lie on their back and take the “suspicious hip” into flexion, adduction, and internal rotation. A significant limitation and/or pain with this movement supports the thought that the athlete has some sort of FAI.

Training Approach
If I suspect an athlete has FAI, we’ll make some very basic adaptations to their training program. Underlying everything we do with these athletes is Mike Boyle’s profoundly simple idea of “if it hurts, don’t do it.” In these cases, I think the athlete’s success has as much to do with what they don’t do, as it does with what they do.

Teach the athlete to perform EVERY movement without flexing the hip past 90 degrees
This is by far the greatest service we can offer these athletes. Every time a player jams through their end range, they put excessive stress on their labrum, and likely cause compensatory problems at neighboring joints. Coaching hockey players with this problem to skate lower or squat deeper will invariably worsen their symptoms and expedite the degeneration process. Range of motion is very individual specific, and these athletes need to be taught how to move within their own structural limitations. This can lead us to making some simple exercise modifications like having the athlete performing 1/2 kneeling exercises with their back knee on a 12″ box to minimize hip flexion of the front leg, and program modifications such as not allowing the athlete to do any lifts off the floor (e.g. deadlifts, trap bar deadlifts, Olympic lifts, etc.).

Favor Single-Leg Exercises
This isn’t a huge change for us because we already place a premium on single-leg training, but it offers the additional advantage for players with FAI of providing more degrees of freedom should the athlete “accidentally” approach hip flexion end range. With bilateral exercises, end range hip flexion is coupled with lumbar flexion, which is an undesirable position for a heavily loaded exercise. In contrast, unilateral exercises allow the hip to tilt in the frontal plane AND usually necessitate lighter external loads, sparing the spine from unnecessary additional stresses associated with compensatory movement.

Augmented Emphasis on Medial Soft-Tissue Work, and Lateral Hip and Posterior Chain Strength/Control Work
Players with FAI tend to have very dense and stiff adductors. Paying extra attention to soft-tissue work to the high adductors, especially where the posterior adductor magnus merges with the medial hamstrings, can help bring some relief to the constant tension these players feel. In theory, the adductors may become overly dense because they adopt a role of tonic stabilizers, functioning to compress the hip joint in an effort to gain stability. Lateral hip work in the form of miniband walks and single-leg exercises can help improve the strength and function of the smaller, dynamic stabilizers of the hip and remove some of this burden from the adductors. Lastly, these players tend to present with an anterior pelvic tilt and poor posterior chain strength. Shifting a greater proportion of their lower body training toward a poster chain emphasis can help restore balance in passive and active strength across the hips.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to assessing for and training around common hip structural abnormalities. I went into a lot more detail into our assessment and training system in my presentation, which is now available at two of the best strength and conditioning and injury prevention sites out there. If you’re not already a member, I highly recommend you check out Strength and Conditioning Webinars and Sports Rehab Expert.

To your success,

Kevin Neeld

P.S. Both of these sites offer trials for $1. If you’re on the fence, shell out the two bucks and test drive them both to see which may be more appropriate for your needs! Strength and Conditioning Webinars, Sports Rehab Expert

References:

Philippon, M., et al. (2007). Femoroacetabular impingement in 45 professional athletes: associated pathologies and return to sport following arthroscopic decompression. Knee Surg Sports Traumatol Arthrosc. 1597, 908-914.

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