Don’t skimp out on a warm-up to only tweak your back squatting 135. I know from experience.
Why is another article in the realm of injury prevention and performance improvement while aging relevant? For two reasons: the audience is growing, and every author has a different writing style. If you remember at least one of my points, remember, “Get the drugs!”
Nearly a decade of training combined, and what have Jim Wendler, Matt Rhodes, and Vincent Dizenzo learned about the perfect warm-up?
We value warming up before lifting or any exercise, but we don’t really think much about how to structure a warm-up. This article will help solve just that with a comprehensive review of the literature on approaches to warming up.
The cue “push into your belt” has lifters focusing on the front of their bodies. But this operates under the assumption that the torso will expand in 360 degrees, not just out toward the front. In order to have the best brace, we need to rework our understanding of doing so in the first place.
Still want to play softball, play basketball, practice martial arts, hike, bike, and swim? Although these things are extremely fun and I highly recommend them for mostly everyone, they can certainly take their toll on your body, especially when combined with hard training.
Resistance is resistance, no matter from which source it comes. When you do a push-up, your body doesn’t just go, “What, he’s doing a push-up? Nah, I ain’t growing.”
From the bar to 95 pounds, 135, and so on, you should get under the bar and treat it like it’s 400 pounds. How will you unrack that weight? How will you set it up? How will you pull air? How will you sit down?
I’m going to share four key components to packing on more muscle and getting stronger by actually backing off the weight.
I’ve heard more times than I can count that agility ladders are not all they are cracked up to be, that they don’t fit into an elite athlete’s program, that they don’t develop speed, and that they don’t develop change of direction skills.
Layering thousands of coaching hours on the floor with successes and failures, I think I know what works and what doesn’t work.
It is almost as if lifters don’t think training starts until the weight gets heavy. I’ve got news for these kinds of lifters: a training session starts right after the last one is finished.
This article is for the grizzled veterans who are now getting up in years. If you’ve fallen off the exercise wagon here are seven easy tips to get your training back on course.
Having a good meet means accounting for every aspect of your performance. Mismanage one aspect and you’re not going to have a great day.
Over the last five semesters, we’ve made a lot of adjustments to how we warm-up our athletes. Here are the most important changes.
If you have the slightest inkling that this article may offend you, proceed to mistake number 5. You’re probably that guy.
These four things can make or break your program. Do you know of them?
How you choose to prime your body for a training session is up to you, but not all warm up and recovery methods are equal.
What is the best way to prepare for your training session? Do you need a foam roller? Muscle activation techniques? A reverse hyper?
At times, training around an injury may be your only option in this sport. There is no easy fix, but these small adjustments can combine to keep you moving forward.
This efficient and all-inclusive pre-training routine will physically and mentally prepare you for the rigors of a serious session in the gym.
Let’s climb in the driver seat of that car with a performance-tuned suspension and a set of tires that will connect that power to the ground and put the pedal to the floor!
With a program known for strength increases, with a minimal injury rate, this guy knows a thing or two about a proper warm up.
Borrowing ideas from Olympic lifting to make pre-workout interesting and effective.
Not any old training system will give you an 860 raw squat at 220.
Are you falling victim to one of these three common lifting mistakes?
All you need is five minutes to foam roll, five minutes to do the breathing and bracing, and five minutes to do the dynamic warm up and you’re all set!
Strength training is a simple process that has become an over complicated “wishing well” for athletic success.
No matter what sport you compete in, you’ll probably agree that conditioning plays a huge factor in how an athlete performs. If athletes aren’t conditioned properly, they’ll never achieve peak performance in their sport.
I’ve read mixed reviews from many different coaches and trainers on how to assess your clients.
This article is about a lifter who I have talked with over the internet a few times. I won’t mention any names or places, but he knows who I’m talking about. I watched a disaster happen at his first meet. There are a number of things that he and his group could have done differently to help him through his first meet. So, let me introduce you to lifter X. This is his story.
We would like to know your thoughts on warming-up and recovery.
You have to figure out a way to manage all of them in a way so that they will get the most out of the training session.
Injuries such as groin strains and athletic pubalgia (sports hernia) are just two of the common causes of lost time due to injury in ice hockey.
The most important and overlooked part of your training session is the first 5–15 minutes, also known as the warm up.
Whether you’re pressed for time or want to get straight to the weight, the thought of skipping over those warm-up exercises and routines seems to always cross our mind.
I’m not writing this article to stir up the dynamic versus static warm-up debate but to suggest different variations and progressions for a dynamic warm up.
Exercise should be done by grabbing a db and resting it on the quad as far away from the hip joint as possible.
You didn’t get injured today, but you exponentially increased your potential for injury because your next workout and warm up will be pretty much the same.
Your warm-up should prepare your for the workout without hindering your ability to perform optimally.
The cookie cutter approach to exercise doesn’t make sense to me, especially when people are stuck behind desks (sustained lumbar flexion, shortened hip flexors) all day or opt to train with movement impairments. Corrective strategies are necessary, and everyone needs to have a static and dynamic evaluation. It’s common to confuse being strong with being healthy.
As your old high school gym teacher might have led you to believe, stretching before weight training isn’t the best way to warm up. Recent reports show that static stretching before exercise can reduce muscle strength. Stretching relaxes your muscles, so why would you want to relax your muscles when you need to lift explosively during weight training?
For years, coaches have been failing to attain maximum results when putting their hockey players on an off-ice conditioning program. Much of this comes from misunderstandings. Typically, an unknowing coach will put far too much emphasis on aerobic training despite its near uselessness in hockey specific conditioning. For example, timed miles, which I have performed as a player and have seen many head coaches require that their players perform, have very little transition to a hockey player’s game related physical preparation. There is a better way—high intensity interval training.
What’s keeping you from setting a personal record (PR) in your lifts? Why isn’t your “top end” going up?
I’ve been working with athletes for quite some time. Even though I haven’t overhauled the way I do things, I definitely make changes on a continual basis. One thing that has seen many changes is the way I warm up athletes. I’ve always used some type of movement-based stretching, and I’ve tried to stay away from any pre-workout static stretching. My belief has always been in the actual workout, not so much in what we did before the workout. I’ve always believed in getting a sweat going before moving on to the actual workout.
I guess I can begin by saying how wrong I was and how I took our Q&A staff for granted. I know EliteFTS has the best training team on the planet. Yes, this is a very cocky statement, but do me one favor here.
I have been going to Force Training Seminars, either to help Dave or to do them on my own, for almost 3 years and one of the hardest things to do is get someone to squat correctly.
Recently I have been flooded with e-mails and questions on the EFS Q/A, and rather than answering them one by one, I decided to put them into an article form so that everyone has access to them. There is a lot of great information in these answers.
It is often said by futurists that there is an over-reaction to most new concepts in the short term, yet an under-reaction in the long term. We can all come up with countless examples of it – the high carb trend of a few years ago – which has become the zero carb trend recently.
If you’ve been training long enough, chances are that just about everything you do is routine. Possibly the worst part of having a routine is monotony and boredom, especially when it comes to warming-up; you know it’s important, but damn if it isn’t downright boring!
The time has finally arrived for me to summarize how I train high school athletes in my quaint, but aesthetically unappealing subterranean gym.
