Yesterday I sat in the office of Philadelphia Flyer’s strength and conditioning coach for over two hours and talked about their program.  Talk about an eye opening experience.

I know many strength coaches and personal trainers that will swear on their lives that squats should ALWAYS be performed to a full depth (below parallel).

Do they know that patellofemoral (think knee cap on knee joint) joint reaction forces exceed 7x the person’s body weight when you pass a 90° knee angle?

Maybe that’s not something you want to do with someone that’s experiencing or predisposed to knee injuries.

The Flyer’s won’t run or squat their guys that have a femoral neck angle of inclination over 145° because it increases the compressive forces on the anterosuperior hip joint/labrum.

I realize that it’s not always practical to make these types of decisions.  I don’t know anyone outside of the professional strength and conditioning realm that will be able to monitor their athletes femoral neck angle of inclination.  The thing that is most important to remember is that no form of training is ideal for everyone.  Some people aren’t built to squat.  Some people that are okay to squat, might not be okay to squat because of a current injury.  It’s frustrating to see strength coaches and trainers make sweeping umbrella statements about certain exercises or ways to train athletes.  It’s even more frustrating when these people judge other coach’s programs without talking to the coach about them directly.

One of the things I thought was most interesting was the weight room they worked out of.  It was filled with machines.  Anyone walking in would be lead to the conclusion that most of their training is machine based.  There were no Olympic lifting platforms.  No Olympic lifting?  Not really.  In fact, the Flyer’s use almost all the Olympic lifts and their dumbbell and barbell variations.  They RARELY use the machines at all, except for rehabilitation purposes.

The take home: More than likely you don’t know as much as you think you do.  Continue to educate yourself.  Speak with other strength coaches about what they do and WHY they do it.  The best strength coaches I’ve been fortunate to meet are always looking for better ways to train their athletes and are learning constantly.  These aren’t 25 year old newbies.  Jim McCrossin has been in professional hockey for over 20 years.  Mike Boyle has been in the industry for 25 years.  Jeff Oliver and Brijesh Patel at Holy Cross and Chris Boyko at UMass have all been doing this for 10+ years, yet they all continue to seek out more knowledge and better ways to train.

It’s likely that whatever training program you’ve followed to get yourself or your athletes to here, won’t get them anywhere else.  Quite simply, if you do what you always did, you’ll get where you always got.

Continue to be a student of the industry.  Continue to get great results.

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Recently I’ve read a few articles and forum discussions that have left me with that “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed” feeling.  Despite writing about this a few times already, it seems that people still do not understand the difference between muscle recruitment and muscle activation.

Recruitment refers to the beginning of force production from additional motor units.  A motor unit is a motor neuron and all the muscle fibers it innervates.  For the sake of simplicity, just think of motor units as muscle fibers and recruitment as more muscle fibers producing force.  In most cases, in small muscles, recruitment is MAXIMAL by 65%; in large muscles, recruitment is MAXIMAL by 80%.  This means that you DO NOT recruit additional motor units (or muscle fibers) above these percentages.  If you read somewhere that doing this or that will improve motor unit recruitment or the recruitment of fast twitch fibers, they are probably lying to you.  The exception, of course, is that below these percentages a rapid concentric contraction can lower the recruitment threshold of these motor units, meaning they are recruited below 80% (in big muscles, for example).

When most people refer to recruitment, they actually mean activation.  Activation is an all-encompassing term that includes both motor unit recruitment AND rate coding.  Rate coding simply refers to the firing rate of a motor unit.  For any given motor unit, a faster firing rate results in higher levels of force production.  Therefore, despite maximal motor unit recruitment at 80% in large muscles, maximal force production can increase due to changes in firing rate.  The total change in motor unit recruitment AND in firing rate properties is referred to as activation.  Increases in activation occur as a result of strength training.  Increases in recruitment do not.  There is essentially no evidence that untrained people cannot recruit all their motor units.  There is ample evidence that they cannot fully activate their motor units.  It’s not just semantics; it’s actually important.  Next time someone tells you to perform some form of exercise because it will increase your recruitment, ask them for a reference!

Power, defined as force production over time, is arguably the most important variable of training for athletics.  I never used to think there was such a thing as too much power.  Today I changed my mind.  Today I was doing a series of medicine ball throws against a brick wall as part of a conditioning workout (Side Note: I hate traditional conditioning.  All my conditioning sessions involve slideboards, medicine ball throws, barbell complexes, farmers walks, and sled pulls).  Today it looked like:

3 Times Through:

A) 1 x 10 Overhand MB Floor Throws

B) 1 x 30s Heavy DB Holds w/ Added Perturbation

C) 1 x 10 (Each Side) Side-Standing MB Wall Shot-Puts

D) 1 x 10 Underhand MB Wall Toss

On my first rep of the underhand MB wall toss, I threw my hips back, and rapidly thrust them forward as I threw the ball against…well, over the brick wall, into the ceiling pipeline, and straight down into a water pump.  The take home: Maybe too much power CAN be a bad thing.  Either that or I should stick to hockey and leave ball-throwing for someone with better aim.

Last week I had another article published on T-nation.  If you haven’t already, check it out here: Fight the Injury Blues: Keep Lifting.  Remember, if you’ve suffered an injury or are dealing with nagging pain (and the article doesn’t clear things up for you), feel free to email me and I’ll get a response back to you ASAP.  No one on my newsletter list stays hurt!

I leave for Denver tomorrow evening to relax for a few days in the mountains.  It’ll be nice to take a break from everything.  I hope you all get to relax a bit this weekend as well.  Enjoy the holiday.

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I hope you all had a great 4th of July.  I had a lot of fun out in Denver, but am glad to be back on the east coast.

One of the primary issues I get questioned about is supplement use.

Should I take supplements?

What supplement should I take: protein, creatine, etc?

What brand should I take?

When should I take them?

My position on supplements is pretty straight forward.  I think everyone should have a protein supplement, creatine supplement, and some sort of multi-vitamin or greens supplement.  As for brands, all the products from Biotest (https://www.t-nation.com/onlineStore.jsp) are of the highest quality.  I’ve tried some others, but always come back to Biotest, with the following exceptions: the green supplement Greens+ (Get the berry flavor; the regular tastes like dog food…no, not the stuff that tastes like chicken or beef); Carlson Lab’s fish oil.

There is a large crowd that largely discounts the need for supplements, claiming that people can gain all the macro- and micro-nutrients they need from food alone.  In general, I agree with them.  However, there is research coming out now stating that even people that eat a wide variety of foods in adequate amounts still have some form of nutrient deficiency.  The quality of food simply isn’t as it used to be.

Probably more importantly, I think I can count the number of people I know that eat a balanced, versatile diet on two hands.  Regardless of whether people can get adequate nutrients from a proper diet, they aren’t.  Supplements can fill a void in the diets of both athletes and non-athletes alike.

However, over the years I’ve noticed an interesting trend amongst people trying to put on weight.  The primary problem in most of these individuals is that they simply don’t consume enough food, let alone the right types of foods.  After listening to what they eat on a daily basis, and reminding them that they need to eat much, much more, I invariably hear “I know. I know.”  But they never do it.  For whatever reason, eating isn’t a desirable behavior for this strange population, but taking a supplement is always seen as the solution.

Is a supplement the only solution?  Absolutely not.

In fact, research has shown that consuming chocolate milk after training brings about the same desired results as a protein shake, probably because milk has a whey/casein mix (just like a good protein supplement) and the chocolate usually means the drink will have simple sugars in it (just like a good post-training shake).

But people don’t want to drink chocolate milk either.  Supplements just flat out work for these people, not because it’s the only solution, but because it’s a solution they’re willing to work with and that THEY think will work.

The addition of a protein supplement during/after training will increase the total amount of protein and the total number of calories that the individual consumes.  Also, I’ve read that the placebo effect can account for up to 40% of realized results (in general, not specific to protein supplements).  This is huge!  If one person takes one supplement that they don’t think will work and one that they do think will work, they are likely to have better results with the one they do think will work.

Science has invariably supported the benefits of consuming a protein supplement during and after training.  If you aren’t taking one yourself, and/or aren’t recommending that your clients take one, ask yourself “why?”.  Whether people “need” it or not is irrelevant if it is an effective solution to their “weight gain problem.”  More times than not, people simply will not eat more food, but they will take a supplement.  If you have some moral dilemma with supplement use, I’ll caution that your illogic is fighting an uphill battle against years of research and in-the trenches efficacy.

Keep training hard.  Starting drinking your protein shake during and after your training.  Start achieving your goals.

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Recently there’s been a debate among fitness professionals about whether or not back squatting is necessary.  The “functional” people may have you believe only single leg work is necessary.  The “old school” people or those with backgrounds in powerlifting and olympic lifting won’t listen to a word about cutting squats out of a program.  Depending on the population, training goal, and health status of the individual, I’ve agreed with both populations.

Why the debate?

Orthopedically, there is sufficient research to suggest that heavy squatting over the LONG-TERM may lead to degeneration of the spine.  Functionally, most sports and lifestyle activities aren’t performed on two legs.  These are the two basic arguments thrown around for NOT squatting.

Naturally, there is an opposing side to these arguments.  The main attraction to squats is that they can be loaded heavily.  If performed correctly, they are a safe way to build a significant amount of muscle and strength in the hips and legs.  The benefit to this should be obvious.  Bill Hartman, a physical therapist and fitness professional working in the Indianapolis area, noted that the joint reaction forces are more similar to many athletic movements in squatting than single-leg movements.  In other words, for some aspects of the body, squatting may be MORE functional than single-leg exercises.  I have some questions about this concept.  Bill is sometimes referred to as the smartest man in fitness and is highly respected around the country, so there’s probably something to what he’s saying.  Having said that, I can’t help but wonder: if these high joint reaction forces are prevalent in athletic movements, wouldn’t they also be prevalent in jumping/sprinting?  Would it still be necessary to squat someone to prepare them for these high forces if they’re experiencing them through other training modalities?  Also, are these high forces something that we want to mimic through training?  In football and hockey, it’s likely at some point that the athlete will get so hard that it feels like they hit a brick wall.  Of course, we don’t prepare our athletes for these contacts by having them run into a brick wall.  Yes, that’s a stupid analogy, but I think you get the concept.  Just because athletes encounter something through competition doesn’t necessarily mean it should be mimicked through training.  Again, this isn’t a knock on Bill; I’m just raising some issues to think about.

Yesterday I listened to an interview with Jeff Oliver, the head strength coach at Holy Cross.  Jeff is both highly experienced and very intelligent.  In the interview he mentioned that when an athletes hips tuck under at the bottom of a squat, it may not be due to tight hamstrings or a lack of hip mobility as commonly argued.  Instead, he said it might be due to an anatomical limitation.  In other words, you can’t improve it.  Forcing athletes to squat through this range may lead to femoroacetabular impingement, which is linked with several other hip pathologies (hip labral tear, sports hernia, groin pain, etc.).  The prevention of these injuries is of paramount importance, both in terms of optimal performance, and long-term health (FAI and hip labral tears are related to future osteoarthritis).  He mentioned that he has stopped squatting individuals that he suspects have this anatomical structure and that these athletes report both feeling and performing better.  When I spoke with Flyers Strength and Conditioning Coach Jim McCrossin, he mentioned that he doesn’t squat athletes he suspects of having similar injuries to parallel.  This certainly contradicts the “squat to full depth no matter what” crowd.

As always, there are a few take home points from all of this:

1) Analyze the goals of the athlete/client to determine whether squatting is even necessary Athletes and general population clients will probably benefit from a greater proportion of single-leg work.

Athletes competing in powerlifting and Olympic lifting events will need to include the back squat in their programs. That’s a no brainer.

2) Analyze the performance of the athlete during the exercise

If athletes can squat to parallel (or below) with their feet flat on the ground and without their hips tucking or lower back rounding, squat them to parallel (or below).

If form starts to break down higher up, try spreading their feet slightly wider.  If form still breaks down, don’t squat them to parallel.

3) Analyze how your athletes feel. This ties into the first point.  If the goal is improved athletic performance, weight

training is a means to an end.  If the exercise isn’t improving performance and your athletes feel like hell doing it, it might be time to try something new!

The most important point: Always learn from other professionals, but never be blinded by their words.  Just because something works for them does not mean it will work for you.  Be objective in the assessment of your own programs.  Just because you think it will work doesn’t mean it will.

The best professionals in any field are those that are results-driven.

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