Month: February 2009

Functional Hockey Isometric Training

Isometrics (producing muscular force without a change in total muscle length…think of pushing against a wall) are probably one of the most effective, and under-utilized forms of training. Other than wall sits (which is a stupid exercise in my opinion), many hockey players never use isometric training at all.

I love isometrics.

I think they’re great for:

Building sport-specific work capacity.
Building strength in a specific range of motion (isometric strength transfers about +/- 10-15 degrees from the joint angle that the exercise is performed. For example, holding a squat position with a 90 degree bend at the knee and hip would produce increases in muscular strength for knee and hip angles from about 75-105 degrees.)
Building MENTAL strength and toughness, as nothing slaps you in the face like pushing/pulling as hard as you can against something that won’t move.
Altering the stimulus to your body during a periods of high frequency training or during a deload period. Fatigue is contraction-type specific, meaning the mechanism of decreases in force production differs depending on whether the contraction is dynamic (concentric and eccentric), or static (isometric). Because all these contractions are used in ice hockey (and in life for that matter), I think it’s important to improve the body’s capacity to handle these loads.

Last night I came across a great exercise from Cal Dietz, the University of Minnesota Hockey Strength Coach. While, semantically, I may disagree with calling this a deadlift (which I think requires a greater loading of the posterior chain-e.g. glutes and hamstrings), I still think it’s a phenomenal exercise that all players would benefit from. You could also perform several variations of this exercise, such as having the bar across the athletes shoulders (set between two sets of pins so that they can get under the bar, resting on the first set of pins, and push up against the second set of pins set a few inches higher).

Another variation would be to perform a an overhead pressing movement against pins from the same position. The great thing about this variation is that it’ll necessitate full body force transfer. If you push harder with your upper body than your lower body, you’ll just sink. Having said that, there’s no excuse (other than poor core stability and strength) for not being able to match overhead pressing force with leg drive force, even from this position.

Enjoy the video…

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The Secret to Rapid Fat Loss

Despite my background and involvement in ice hockey, I get more questions on a daily basis about fat loss than any other topic.

Should I lift weights?

How much cardio should I do?

What supplements do you recommend?

How do you find time to prepare healthy meals all the time?

To which I respond: Yes. 3-4 high intensity interval training sessions per week. Hard work and dedication. Make time.

Usually not satisfied by this response, I usually get a continued stare.

“Cmon. What should I REALLY do?”

So here it is, my ultimate secret revealed!

The truth is, I’ve been training like a dedicated athlete for years, and was never able to manipulate my body fat like I am now. So what was it? A change in my training? A change in my diet? A change in supplementation?

The answer: All of the above, under the guidance of Dr. John Berardi. No, I don’t work with him personally. That’s not necessary. He did such a good job with putting together the Precision Nutrition program that I’ve never had to. I read through it once, and instantly understood why I hadn’t been able to drop body fat in the past and what I needed to do to lose body fat in the future.

He also includes Gourmet Nutrition, a cook book with recipes of all kinds (appetizers, entrees, desserts, smoothies, etc.) with recommendations on when to consume each (anytime vs. post-workout). As if that wasn’t enough, the program also comes with access to an online community, with a wealth of articles, answers to any question you could think up, recipes, and forums use as a support network. I was baffled that so much came in one package, and frustrated I hadn’t come across it earlier. I actually used a modified version of the “Get Shredded Diet” he provides at the Precision Nutrition website in my recent 6-week fat loss experiment.

I’ll admit, the preparation that goes into making sure you have a healthy option for every meal of the day can seem like a daunting task. Dr. Berardi provides some helpful hints into how to save time though. Just this week I noticed that I pulled into the Stop n Shop parking lot at 7:10pm. By 9:00pm, I had completed preparing meals for the week (or at least the first half of the week. We’ll have to see how hungry I get), as well as having cooked and eaten dinner (a 3-egg pepper, onion, and cheddar omelette), as well as cleaned all the dishes. And because I had so much spare time on my hands, and because my digital camera doesn’t get a lot of use, a picture of my food preparation efforts stacked for your viewing convenience is shown below.

Figure 1. Displayed food involves chopped onions and green peppers for easy omelette making, 4 heads of chopped broccoli, 3 sliced green peppers, 3 tubs of “Reese’s Cottage Cheese”, 6 pork chops (chopped into bite size pieces), 10 oz steamed spinach, 1 lb of cooked ground turkey, and conveniently bagged baby carrots.

As an aside, the cottage cheese containers are filled with what I call “Reese’s Cottage Cheese”, a trick I learned from Berardi on how to make foods I don’t like (Cottage Cheese) taste like foods I do like (Reese’s Cups).

The secret to having healthy choices for every meal? Plan ahead, cook all at once, and store everything in tupperware. With this set-up, I can heat up and eat a meal in less than 10 minutes. I can eat the Reese’s Cottage Cheese with ZERO prep time. And cooking all at once saves countless hours throughout the week.

Keep working hard…but plan smart too.

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Improving Hip Range of Motion in Hockey Players

Back to cleaning up groin pain issues in your hockey players…

After improving soft-tissue quality through foam rolling, “lacrosse balling”, and manual therapy, the next step is to stretched the newly “released” muscles. It’s particularly important to focus on the muscles surrounding the hip.

As a reminder, the side-to-side discrepancies in range of motion or strength are the greatest risk factors for injury. In general, when your athletes have a side-to-side discrepancy, you’ll want to stretch the tight side and strengthen the “looser” side, but use your judgement here based on what you found from your previous analysis.

I’ve posted a few of these videos before, but it never hurts to see them again. These are all mobilization videos, but almost all of these positions can be held as stretches. Make sure you’re moving/stretching in all three planes (frontal, sagittal, and transverse), so you aren’t lengthening the same parts of the muscles every time you perform a stretch or mobilization. This tri-planar movement idea was popularized by Gary Gray years ago during the Functional Training Frenzy, but has since been reinforced by Mike Boyle and Brijesh Patel. They make a good point-if athletic movements involve movement in all three planes, so should your training.

On to the videos:

Lying Knee-to-Knee Mobilization (If athlete lacks internal rotation ROM)

[quicktime]http://www.kevinneeld.com/videos/Lying%20Hip%20Internal%20Rotation%20Mobilization.mov[/quicktime]

Rectus Femoris Mobilization This is a good one if your athlete has tight hip flexors (All athletes have tight hip flexors)
You should also perform this without grabbing your back foot and with varying levels of internal and external rotation of the back leg. In all cases, you’ll want to maintain some tension on your butt of the side of the back leg. This will help keep your pelvis stable and core tight so you’re mobilizing your hip flexors instead of your low back.

[quicktime]http://www.kevinneeld.com/videos/Rectus%20Femoris%20Mobilization.mov[/quicktime]

Adductor Mobilization with External Rotation
Like hip flexor restrictions, almost all hockey players have very strong and tight adductors. This is a great one to loosen up the adductors of the stretched leg, including the gracilis (which doesn’t get lengthened in stretches where the knee is bent) and the medial hamstrings. It’s somewhat hard to see in the video, but basically all I’m doing is shifting my hips straight back, not allowing ANY movement of the lower back (neutral lumbar spine). Stop when you feel your lower back rounding or when you reach the end of your range.

[quicktime]http://www.kevinneeld.com/videos/Adductor%20Mobilization-Ext%20Rotation.mov[/quicktime]

Wide Standing Hip Mobilization
It’s important to include standing mobilizations as well since the role of the nervous system changes when you move between lying, seated, kneeling, and standing positions. Because most sports are played from an upright position, this is the most relevant environment for the nervous system to be trained in. In a nutshell, it’s not enough to improve mobility in lying, kneeling, or seated positions. This improves hip rotation ROM.

[quicktime]http://www.kevinneeld.com/videos/Wide%20Standing%20Hip%20Mobility.mov[/quicktime]

Diagonal Standing Hip Mobilization
Similar to the above mobilization in concept, this exercise adds a more hockey-specific hip position. When you rotate away from your back leg, do so my contracting your glutes hard on the back leg. Remember, everything should be actively pulling your body into these positions. Nothing is passive or momentum-based at all.

[quicktime]http://www.kevinneeld.com/videos/Diagonal%20Standing%20Hip%20Mobility.mov[/quicktime]

In-Line Split Squat
This improves hip mobility in the frontal plane by taking both hips into relative adduction. Line up both feet and drop your back knee straight down so that it falls in the same line as your feet. Keep your hips and shoulders level and square to straight ahead as much as possible. You can make this more challenging by adding a rotation over your front leg or a side bend to the side of your front leg in the bottom position.

[quicktime]http://www.kevinneeld.com/videos/In-Line%20Split%20Squat.mov[/quicktime]

Reverse Crossover Lunge
This is a great exercise I borrowed from Brijesh Patel. This brings everything together, improving hip range of motion under the control of musculature that’s functional to athletic movement. You can add a side bend or rotation to this as well, but most people find it difficult enough as is, at least in the beginning.

[quicktime]http://www.kevinneeld.com/videos/Reverse%20Crossover%20Lunge.mov[/quicktime]

Try performing these exercises for 8 repetitions on each side in a circuit. If you feel extra locked up or restricted during any exercise, or on one side of an exercise, repeat it for that side in that exercise only. I’m guessing your hips will feel “freer” than you’re used to after you go through these.

Keep working hard.

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Top 5 Reasons to Quit a Low-Calorie Diet

That’s it. I quit! After 6 weeks of low calorie eating, I’ve had enough. A lot of people asked why I was on a low calorie diet to begin with. I think it’s important to cycle calories, as well as macronutrient (carb, protein, fat) sources periodically. In other words, if you usually eat a low calorie diet, cycle in periods of higher caloric intake. If you usually eat a high calorie diet (me), cycle in periods of low caloric intake. There are also additional health benefits to dropping body fat, notably that toxins are stored in fat tissue, so shedding some fat periodically will help release some of these toxins and clear them from your body.

Those are the reasons I usually gave people, but to be honest, that had nothing to do with why I went on a the diet. The real reason: It sucked. It was hard. With my hockey career officially over, opportunities to really challenge myself physically and mentally are somewhat limited. Going on a very strict, severely limiting diet was one way to see if I still had it, to test my mettle. Overall, I’m happy with how I was able to stick through it.

Before (180.5 lbs) After (166.0 lbs)

So why give up after 6 weeks? My original thought was to try this out for 6-10 weeks, so I’m not really bailing out early. Having said that, I have 5 great reasons to start eating a more “normal” diet (more calories and slightly more carbs):

5) No matter how lean I get, my skin will still be impressively pale, verging on translucent, and dangerous for other people to look at.

4) I miss smoothies and ketchup. I put ketchup on everything. So should you. But when you’re only afforded 50 g of carbs per day, you can’t use them haphazardly. No ketchup for the last 6 weeks. It’s been rough. On the same note, I usually throw back two smoothies a day. I showed my friend Mike how I make them. After his mockery (apparently smoothies aren’t a manly meal choice), he agreed they were delicious and began making his own…with a modified recipe. The “recipe” looks something like:

16 oz 1% Milk
6 Tablespoons Teddy’s All Natural Peanut Butter
2 Bananas
2 Cups Frozen Mixed Berries
3 Scoops Chocolate Muscle Milk
10 g SAN BCAAs
5 g SAN Creatine
A rack of lamb

What does this have to do with my diet? Mike managed to take my entire day’s worth of calories, and blend them into one delicious smoothie. Diet out. Smoothies in.

3) I’m too performance-oriented to several restrict my calories. Despite an intelligent supplement menu throughout my low calorie eating, my training has still taken a pretty big hit. I haven’t lost too much strength, considering the amount of weight I lost, but I haven’t gained any either. A little more carbohydrates (more than the 50g/day I’ve been eating) and a few hundred more calories/day will go a long way in helping me get back on track in improving my strength and speed, while maintaing my body weight. I also want to add more conditioning into my training. More conditioning equates to more fat burning and more calorie burning. In a nutshell, I can eat a lot more calories and not gain any fat if I offset it when an intelligent conditioning program. My new motto: Smaller, stronger, faster.

2) Undersupplying your mind and body with energy isn’t really conducive to training hard, running a business, coaching a hockey team, training clients, reading and analyzing research, writing articles, taking graduate classes, and teaching undergraduate classes.

And finally….

1) My lovely girlfriend saw me at 166 lbs and told me I look like a “scrawny little bitch”. Ha! I have to admit, as much as I don’t typically care about what other people think about how I look (I’d be more offended if someone called me weak than if someone called me fat), I found it hilariously ironic that I lost body fat and she, of all people, made fun of me. For some reason I thought leaner was better in the female eye. 6 weeks of low calorie dieting taught me two important lessons: (1) I love food too much to do something like this consistently (although I did gain a whole new respect for bodybuilders that do this sort of thing on a fairly regular basis to prepare for competitions); and (2) I still know nothing about women.

Back to hockey content tomorrow…

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Fat Loss Training…The End!

This was the last week of my 6-week fat loss experiment. My training won’t significantly change, but my diet will. More on this in the days to come. Training results for the last week are posted below.

Valentine’s Day Words of Wisdom

George Costanza once said, “If you can’t say anything bad about a relationship, you shouldn’t say anything at all.”

Happy Valentine’s Day to all of you in relationships.

For the rest of you, nothing says “People in happy relationships make me sick” like heavy deadlifting.

Feb 8, 2009: Weigh-In 168.5 (Water Loading Begins!)
A1) Back Squat: 135 x 5; 225 x 3; 315 x 4; 335 x 2 sets of 4; 335 x 3; 315 x 4
A2) Bird Dog Hold: 3 x 15s each
B1) Stiff-Legged Deadlift: 225 x 4; 295 x 4 sets of 6
B2) Front Plank March: 4 x 20s
C1) 1-Leg Squat:3s Negative: 3 x 6 each
C2) Glute Ham Raise: 3 x 12
CON) Overhead Side-Side MB Floor Slams 10lb Ball, 8 x 6 slams each side (12 total per set); 30s rest between each set

Feb 10, 2009: Weigh-In: 167
A1) Standing Shoulder Press: 95 x 4; 135 x 6 sets of 3
A2) Scap Wall Slides (Back to Wall): 4 x 8
B1) Weighted Chin-Up: BW x 5; BW+45 x 3; BW+55 x 3; BW+65 x 3 BW+55 x 2 sets of 3
B2) DB Triceps Extension Ecc-to-Close Grip Con: 2 x 45DB x 5 sets of 6
C1) 1/2 Kneeling Chop: To Right Only; 50 lbs x 3 x 8
C2) Face Pull w/ External Rotation: 110 x 3 x 12

Feb 12, 2009
A1) Front Squat: 135 x 5; 225 x 3; 185 x 3 sets of 8
A2) Side Plank w/ Abduction Hold: 3 x 15s each
B1) DB Back Leg Raised Split Squat: 2 x 70DB; 4 x 4
B2) 1-Arm DB 1-Leg SLDL: 1 x 40 DB; 4 x 6 each
B3) Bar Rollout: 4 x 10
B4) Stability Ball Hamstring Curl: 4 x 12

Feb 13, 2009: 7am Lift!
A1) Bench Press: 135 x 6; 225 x 2 sets of 6; 225 x 5; 205 x 6
A2) I, Y, T Holds: 1 x 30s each
B1) 1-Arm DB Row: 85 DB; 3 x 8 each
B2) Standing Cable Chop: To Right Only; 50 lbs x 3 x 10
B3) 1-Arm DB Push Press: 50 DB; 3 x 8 each
B4) DB Hang Clean-to-Curl Eccentric: 2 x 45DB; 3 x 6
B5) Bird Dog: 3 x 10 each
CON) 10 x 10 Medicine Ball Overhead Floor Slams; 8lb Med Ball; 30s rest between sets

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