On Monday I got a nice present in the mail.

My mentor, colleague, and friend Chris Boyko (Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach at UMass Amherst) mailed me back my Building the Efficient Athlete DVD set by Eric Cressey and Mike Robertson.

It was like Christmas morning when I opened that. It’s still by far my favorite training resource ever.

Every time I recommend that someone get it, I get the same response: “I’d really like to get it; it’s just so expensive!”.

I’ll save you the mystery; it’s a $200 investment.

It’s certainly not cheap…but it shouldn’t be.

My college tuition and associated expenses were over $150,000 in my combined 6 years of collegiate studies (4 years as an undergraduate at University of Delaware and 2 in grad school at UMass Amherst).

$150,000!!!!

And both of those schools have relatively reasonable tuitions (not $50,000+ a year like some).

Having invested $150,000 and thousands of hours in my education, I can’t help but laugh when people say $200 is a lot.

I learned more practical, instantly usable information in Eric and Mike’s 8-DVD set (that I watched in one day) than I did in all my years at college.

I wouldn’t recommend dropping out of school (at least not yet-I’ll spare my “college education is the biggest rip-off out there” rant for another day), but you’d have to be foolish not to invest in Building the Efficient Athlete.

-Kevin Neeld

After spending last week showing examples of rotational core exercises and how to fit them into part of a progression, I thought it would be a logical time to mention a big change that should occur in-season for hockey players, baseball players, and golfers.

Remember that in all three of these sports, athletes are taking a lot of reps in a rotational pattern in ONE direction.  Assuming the athlete in all three sports is right handed, they’re likely to get a ton of repetitions in a rotational pattern to the left, just from their sport.

From a training standpoint, this is when it’s important to have an unbalanced training program to help maintain structural balance within the body.

It’s really not complicated. In any rotational core exercises, just do one set in the direction you shoot, and 3-4 sets in the opposite direction.

-Kevin Neeld