Functional Path Training

NY Times Injuries in Baseball Article

Yesterday NY Times had the following article on the front page tiltled “Increasing Pace of Injuries”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/sports/baseball/07injuries.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

I am formulating a detailed reply with specific ideas, recommendations and further questions for consideration. I will state though that this problem is bigger than  baseball. The injury rate in most major professional sports needs to be addressed; it is more than a baseball problem.

Tim Nokes Quote

"50% of what we know is wrong; the problem is that we do not know which 50% it is". Tim Nokes, South African sport scientist who has challenged many of the sacred cows of exercises physiology including Max VO₂.

The Paterno Rule

Dr Dave Joyner MD one of our GAIN Faculty members shared with us the Paterno Rule during his presentation. Dave was an All –American lineman who played for Paterno. The Paterno rule is simple – You remember the last thing you do, a very simple statement with complex implications for both cognitive and motor learning. My good friend and colleague, Gary Winkler one shared with me a similar concept. His idea was that the last thing  you do in a training session will be how you will begin the next training session. The implication being that if you want them to start the next session hammered and beat up then end the current session hammered and beat up. I always try to end a training session with something light quick and explosive.

2009 GAIN Apprentorship – A wrap-up

It has been a week and half since we ended the Apprentorship. I have been going through withdrawal ever since. What a great experience. I think Joe P. http://joestrainingroom.blogspot.com/2009/06/great-experience.html and Tracy http://ironmaven.blogspot.com/2009/06/my-09-gain-experience.html nailed it on their respective blogs. It is hard for me to find words for how well it went. Someone asked me if it  met my expectations’, it exceeded my expectations and I always set my expectations sky high. Now we have set a standard for each succeeded year. I am starting work on that now. We had a great faculty that hope to make even better. For those of you considering att ending next year be sure to get your applications in early, space will become more limited each year. I feel confident that last year we got a good start out of blocks to the beginning of the Athletic Development revolution this year we accelerated rapidly to take a giant step forward. We had a good mix of didactic sessions, practical sessions and discussion groups in interest groups. The days were long and productive, culminating in the lobby bar with discussions sometime too long into the night. Just like in college where everyone sat around in their rooms and  talked  this is where many ideas came together and future alliances were formed. Once again thanks to everyone who helped to make it  special, my wife, Kelvin Giles who came a couple of days early to help me get my act together, the faculty, especially Jim Radcliffe who flew all night from Oregon, presented for six hours and flew home. The staff at the hotel and KICS International were very helpful and the food was very good (Always a plus). Our sponsors Perform Better, Finis, Lifeline, TrainTrak, Lane Gainer, Performance Dynamics and Vasa. Can’t wait until next year!

Happy Fourth of July

I am ashamed to say the answer to quiz – What country is this? is the United States. On the day we celebrate our independence I think it is a good time to take a few minutes to reflect on our freedoms we have and wonder why such alarming things could be happening in our society, especially to our children. The human resource is our most precious resource; within that resource children represent our future. We should do everything we can to insure that their future will be for a better life than we have now. Not in terms of material things but in terms of health and education. The tools they we will need to continue to make this country what it is. Al Qaeda or terrorists will not bring us down, we will do it to ourselves. We cannot continue the self indulgent waste of precious human and natural resources. It starts with each of you individually, what each of you are doing to make you home, your family, your community a better place to live. We can all play a part in making the world a better place by making each of our individual worlds a better place. If need inspiration and ideas on how to do this read Blessed Unrest – How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the World by Paul Hawken.  Decide what you can do and take action, don’t wait. Increase your awareness of how YOU can make a difference.

On a lighter note today I am going to spent my Fourth of July finishing the biography of Winston Churchill I am reading while listening to Flaco Jimenez on my I Phone. This evening I am going to watch the 40th anniversary DVD of Woodstock with additional footage never before seen footage. Started out with a nice hour and twenty minuute bike ride. If that does not represent the self indulgent American what does?

Mindless

Two days this week I watched a football team finish their weight workout with 15 to 20 minute of “Abs” all on the ground, just counting out reps, no coaching, no concentration, no intensity! Mindless work is not training. To quote a grizzled old football coach “when I see players lying around on the ground or sitting they are not training for the game.” Last time I checked the game is played on your feet, if you are on the ground you are beat! Last week at the GAIN Apprentorship Jim Radcliffe presented on the Oregon Football training program from A to Z. It was awesome, systematic sequential and progressive. The only drills done on the ground were drills to teach you to get up quickly. The proof is in the pudding. Train with a purpose, make it game like with intensity, concentration and effort.

Quiz - What Country is this?

It is number one in prison population (726 prison inmates per 100,000 people); first in teen pregnancies, drug use, child hunger, poverty, illiteracy, obesity, diabetes, use of antidepressants, income disparity, violence, firearms death, military spending, hazardous waste production, recorded rapes, and the poor quality of its schools. Only one of two countries where the schools need metal detectors - what is the other country?

SAID Principle

Tim Sullivan wrote the following in response to my Rules for Robots post from yesterday:

    My understanding is if you keep bending it like a credit card or hotel     card eventually it will break or law of repetitive motion... to this rule     only applies to a small amount of the training program, when heavy     superficial external loads are place on the body... to this is another     way of saying isolate them out.

Of late I keep hearing this law of repetitive motion quoted. Who wrote this law? Sounds like another guru platitude. The body is not rigid piece of plastic, nor is it a machine. These kind of inane comparisons and analogies do not do justice to the body. The body is designed to solve moment problems, sure it adapts to certain patterns if repeated whether they are loaded or unloaded. Think of a stoop worker in the fields? The body is highly adaptive. In sport situations and in fact life and work situations that are highly repetitive that is why we find appropriate means to strengthen and lengthen. Sure there are time when it beaks, that’s life. A good training program that is mutli-joint, multi plane, proprioceptively demanding and mindful will address this.  I believe Logan and McKinney addressed this on page 149 of their book Kinesiology. “The mature athlete tends to have a posture which is related to his particular sport if he has trained for years to become expert at his specific position or event. The reason for this phenomenon is the fact that the body tends to adjust or adapt to the various stresses or demands imposed upon as a result of prolonged muscular activity. Wallis and Logan have called this the SAID Principle: SAID is an acronym for Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands.” In my book nothing more needs to said (If in doubt go to Logan & McKinney, they have stood the test of time.

PS Tm, I wish GAIN was sponsored by Honda.

Rules for Robots

No overhead lifting – Dangerous for the shoulder

No squatting or lunging with the knee past the toe – Dangerous for the knee

Keep your spine neutral – Dangerous for the spine

Draw in to activate TA – Protect the spine

And on and on ad nauseum. These are rules that made to be broken. When you follow rules like this the assumption is that the body lives, works and plays in a phone booth. These rules are artificial rules that don’t work. We live, work and play in a proprioceptively demanding environment that is ever changing. We are not robots; we are human problem solving and self organizing beings with amazing ability to adapt. We must give the body credit for the wisdom it possesses. Think connect and link to improve the quality of movement. Movement is rhythmic and dance like, not segmented and robotic. The rule I live by is to harmonize not roboticize.

Pitching Biomechanics - A Perspective

The following piece from yesterdays NY Times sports page made me decide to write this. Someone needs to set the record straight. The former Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson, who for 20 years has pioneered biomechanic analysis of pitching motions, said that he shielded athletes from the physics behind what they do.“You can’t build a car and drive one at the same time,” Peterson said. “When you talk about how the brain affects athletic performance, that’s mostly right-brain activity. The physics is left-brain. If you get too analytical, you’re going to interfere with that process. I show my guys the film, but not the measurements.” I have no tolerance for gurus and shameless self promoters. This guy is both. I had to work this guy, both with the White Sox and the Mets. He is not what he claims to be. He is such a pioneer that twenty years ago with the White Sox he stated to me, my boss and the other pitching coaches that he did not believe in biomechanical analysis. He refused to take his pitchers to the ASMI lab when he was our AA pitching coach in Birmingham.

We had started a comprehensive project of biomechanical analysis in 1989 with Dr. Chuck Dillman director of the ASMI lab and a real pioneer in the biomechanics field. We had the support of out General Manger Larry Himes and our Farm and Scouting Director Al Goldis. All our monor league pitching coaches were fully on board except for Rick Peterson. Dewey Robinson, out pitching coordinator at the time and now major league pitching coach for the Houston Astros worked hard to facilitate the project. Since our AA team was in Birmingham and ASMI was located there it was a natural to get this done. We realized that one off filming and analysis was not as productive as continual ongoing analysis, so we tried to get our prospects filmed early and them we filmed them as often as possible after that. Since AA is the point of make or break it a players career we would arrange to have the pitchers analyzed during the season by throwing their bullpen day in the lab. From all of these we were able to refine our conditioning and clarify the key point s in a pitchers mechanics that the coaches could focus on. It was a guide, not an absolute process. We were not trying to develop a model as Tom House had done several years before with his biomechanical analysis with the Texas Rangers. The project was fully funded by ASMI because they needed high level subjects for their projects to understand the causes of elbow and shoulder injury.  We continued with this analysis throughout the remainder of my tenure with the White Sox.

When I went to work for the Mets Peterson had promoted himself into the job as major league pitching coach after his success as pitching coach with the Oakland A’s using biomechanical analysis. I found this very ironic. Now everything was based on biomechanics. In addition he was focused on certain measures completely out of context. His big emphasis was hip rotational velocity, one of the many measures in the pitchers analysis. I kept telling him you can’t shot a cannon from a canoe, there are several very large body segments before the hips are involved that contribute to hip rotational velocity. This fell on deaf ears. I made him very uncomfortable because I knew he was misrepresenting what he had done with the White Sox. I was a living skeleton in his closet. Well now he is the biomechanics guru. All of you pitching coaching out there take what he says with a huge block of salt.

There is a large body of data of good data on pitching biomechanics going back to Dr. Betty Attwaters (University of Arizona) work in the late seventies. Her article in Exercise and Sport Reviews in 1979 -Biomechanics of overarm throwing movements and of throwing injuries,is a classic. Once again I implore all of you to seek knowledge not information. I also want to emphasize that our work with Dr Dillman and later Dr. Fleisig was invaluable. We did mini studies on throwing over and underweight balls and throwing a football that were very helpful. Lastly I think it is important that biomechanical analysis is one tool in a large toolbox the coach has available.