Tis the season to get e-mails with gift ideas (like UPA’s most recent eNews) and see blog posts with shopping guides a plenty, such as this one from Squat Rx. Here are a few holiday gift ideas for the Ultimate trainee in your life =)
1) the Valslide!
Invented by trainer Valerie Waters, these neat little sliders (gear review here) can “effectively double your lower-body repertoire”, as Alwyn Cosgrove puts it.
A portable version of the slideboard, valslides let you ease-in and ease-out of compass lunges in any direction–reverse, lateral, anterior 45, with minimal jarring stress on your joints. Sure, single leg squats (whether RFESS or Russian Pistol-style) will make you strong, but it’s more likely that the Ultimate trainees in your life want to develop some strength-endurance in their legs, grease the lunging groove, and get a little cardio and anterior core training in on the side.
Holiday priced at 27.95 USD at PerformBetter.com. So go and “work your tush” =)
Next up…
2) the TP (TriggerPoint Performance) Quadballer
Sure, you can always start doing anterior core progressions on furniture sliders and soft tissue “therapy” on a PVC pipe, but if you’ve already worn out your gym’s foam roller and carry around a TigerTail with you at all times, you might want to check out this little device from tptherapy.com. Designed to feel more like the hand of a human masseur/masseuse, the Quadballer is an easy-to-carry way of releasing those tricky lil trigger point buggers.
I’ve been testing out the Quadballer for some weeks now, as passive soft tissue therapy before I do active joint mobility work, and it’s particularly nice to release tension in the soleus (which people tend to forget, focusing instead on the larger gastroc above it). tptherapy.com also carries a massage ball which is harder than a tennis ball but harder than a lacrosse ball, for piriformis / upper-body work.
You can get this through store.tptherapy.com or at a specialty running store dealer near you.
Finally, we have…
3) S-Phase, The Complete Athlete from Z-Health Performance Systems
I’ve talked about some S-phase concepts before (bone rhythm) and you may have seen mc’s review of this 2-DVD set, but I’ll mention it more explicitly right now. The S-phase DVD covers basic athletic transitional movements as a skill, from linear acceleration to hip turns, from rotational steps to the so-called plyo step.
In theory you should work with a Z-certified trainer in your area who has taken the 4-day S-phase course as well as the 6+4 day R- and I- course prerequisites, and/or have a solid mobility grounding first in both R-Phase and I-Phase, but in practice it’s hard to see why it’s worth investing in ankle and t-spine mobility when all you do is want to hit the ground running. In cleats.
That said, while I applaud the rise of Ultimate sports coaches, most of us have never been taught to accelerate, sprint, stop, or turn “properly” with good biomechanics, nor do we practice these movements in a way that honors them and yet unpacks them joint-by-joint for maximal efficiency and minimal strain. Z-Health is a performance system that begins with joint mobility and ends with optimal athletic performance, and S-phase at least gives you a peek of that.
You can pick up S-phase from the Z-health web store.
- Ultimate Fitness, the DVD and/or a UPA membership
- Convict Conditioning (actually haven’t read this yet but will borrow a friend’s copy
- subscription to PrecisionNutrition.com or a copy of Ori’s Warrior Diet (just make sure you eat a bit more during tourney days
- a Russian Kettlebell or the TRX Suspension Training system
- Want to avoid gift-waste? Try a gift card for PerformBetter.com
Cheers!
On the way to the Stanford med school library to do some research for this post, I biked past two high school teams prepping to scrimmage and later a hundred some peeps playing in a high-level club tournament at another field on campus. Adjacent to them was an IM game of Ultimate, and what all these games shared was a love of the sport and a diversity of ages, from high school students to college players, graduate students and working professionals in their twenties, thirties, and beyond.
As we get older, common wisdom holds that the body breaks down, that we are fundamentally unable to play or run as we age. What if, at least to some meaningful degree, this perspective just was not correct? The Rarámuri (Tarahumara) runners described in Born To Run play and “compete” in ultramarathons through their sixties, and Dara Torres won her latest Olympic medals at the age of 41.
Of course, it’s worth noting that the Rarámuri have been running close-to-barefoot for their entire lives, and we may not be able to afford the coaching and recovery staff of an Olympian such as Dara, but I think there’s at least some occasion for hope =)
"Muscle Man versus the Chameleons" by Lee Nachtigal
Mark Verstegen of Athletes’ Performance has the following saying, “Work + Rest = Success”, but we can we do beyond passive rest before & after we play, practice, and train?
Before we play? We can (1) warmup (see the last blog post on Ultimate Fitness, the DVD), (2) address soft tissue dysfunction, and (3) do active/dynamic joint self-mobilization.
And after? Well there’s always contrast therapy, addressing HRV (heart rate variability), and active recovery to name just three.
In this blog post we’re going to focus on soft tissue work, and leave Z-health styled active joint mobility work for another day. We’ll also mainly point elsewhere for “after” tips & tricks for recovery and regeneration.
If you’ve been in any leading gym, listen to the Strength Coach podcast, or just like to keep up with fitness blogs online, you’ve probably heard of and perhaps started to use foam rollers as part of your recovery routine. And while the science right now is fairly limited on these high-density devices, foam rolling (along with a move away with flexion-heavy core work) is one of the newer trends relative to the way things were done in the 90’s.
Perhaps the simplest way to think of a foam roller is as a poor man’s massage, and as a self-massage device for the larger areas on your body (quads / calves), foam rolling or other forms of SMR (self-myofascial release) are now a staple college-level sports training. If you’d like to learn more about foam rolling, the best free resource I’ve found so far on self-myofascial release is Robertson Training System’s PDF e-book on SMR.
SMR on the cheap? Grab a foam roller, a tennis and/or lacrosse ball, and throw a water bottle in the freezer (for plantar fascia).
If you foam roll religiously, rather than hit up the PVC pipe as some do, I’d actually recommend you learn more about trigger points and move from the coarse kind of STW (soft-tissue work) you get with foam rolling to more targeted trigger point release work. If you’re tight and/or in pain, Clair Davies’s book The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook is hard to beat.
If you have more dough to drop on SMR, I’ve heard positive reviews of TriggerPoint performance products and a Tiger Tail / Stick may not be a bad idea. And of course if you’re stuck here, finding a qualified bodyworker to work with you will definitely make things easier, whether it’s your local physical therapist, a nearby CK-FMS or Z-health certified trainer, or a bodyworker who practices ART, or so on, will definitely be worth your while.
For the more clinically minded, it’s also worth diving deeper into the world of trigger points, with Janet Travell’s (second edition) of Myofascial Pain and Dysfunction: The Trigger Point Manual (check your nearby medical school library if you’ve got one). Travell, who was the first female doctor to be the personal physician for a US President (JFK), coined the term “trigger point” decades ago, and has written the seminal papers and textbooks in the field.
And whereas much of SMR and STW remains yet to be verified or disproven scientifically, trigger points in particular have been the subject of some scientific scrutiny over the last fifty odd years.
What is a trigger point? According to Travell [1998], a “Myofascial Trigger Point (clinical definition) [is] A hyperirritable spot in skeletal muscle that is associated with a hypersensitive palpable nodule in a taut band. The spot is painful on compression and can give rise to characteristic referred pain, referred tenderness, motor dysfunction, and autonomic phenomena.”
The important parts of this definition are that TrPs (trigger points) are generally defined as being located in skeletal muscle, and that pain or tenderness can be referred, which means that if your back hurts it might be actually referred from a trigger point higher up or lower down in your kinematic chain.
Another “common misconception” according to Travell is that “simply treating the TrP should be sufficient”, whereas you often want to release the trigger point and stretch+strengthen the appropriate areas (physical therapy style) as well as “upload new software” to your brain that tells it to use your muscles appropriately. Otherwise, trigger points will return when stressors add up over time.
Travell continues in writing that “central TrP in the upper trapezius is apparently the most frequently identified myofascial TrP location in the body” [Gerwin Shannon in Pain, 1997] and that the
“quadratus lumborum is one of the most commonly overlooked muscular sources of low back pain and is often responsible, through satellite gluteus minimus trigger points (TrPs), for the “pseudo-disc syndrome”…” [p.29 1992 ed. of Travell, lower body volume].
To unpack that, what does that mean for you? Well if you’re having upper body (neck / shoulder pain) perhaps you have active or latent trigger points that need to be addressed, through self-massage or bodyworker care or mobility work, and if you’re having lower-back pain perhaps you might want to self-palpate for TrPs around your QL (quadratus lumborum)… (easier done with a ball, stick, or fingertip than a roller) and of course, check out some of the resources linked to above.
There’s some debate as to how much pressure one should apply to trigger points, or even whether we should focus too narrowly on TrPs rather than the postures and motor programs that maintain in the first place, but these discussions aside, it’s definitely worth at least learning about what your body feels like, first hand.
What then, after the game? You probably know of cooling down and static stretches, but perhaps you haven’t heard as much about contrast therapy, HRV work, and active recovery.
Active recovery is the simplest to explain–it says what it means and means what it says. As mc explains in her blog post on addressing DOMS (delayed on-set muscle soreness), active recovery–getting your heart rate up the day or two after a hard practice/tournament seems to help you recover better than simply doing nothing at all.
The benefits of contrast therapy, for example using hot and cold showers, are a little bit more unclear, but I found it interesting that washing your face in cold water might help “immediately accelerating post-exercise parasympathetic reactivation“. As you may or may not recall, the sympathetic nervous system is your “flight or flight” response, whereas your parasympathetic nervous system corresponds a bit better to relaxing and recovering. So, we want to discourage, at times, sympathetic stress and encourage a parasympathetic response. If you’d like to learn more, go read a bit about the tug-of-war between these two nervous systems.
What then, is HRV or heart-rate variability training? Well it’s one way to encourage a parasympathetic response by practicing the ability to increase the coherence of the variability of your heart rate (which naturally speeds up and slows down over the course of seconds and minutes). In other words, if your heart rate is varying in a chaotic fashion, you’re probably in fight-or-flight mode, whereas if it’s more coherent, you’re probably nice and chill. One blog post is not enough to explain HRV, but just to link out if you’d like to learn more. Check out the various HRV training methods based on biofeedback, from HeartMath to other biofeedback-based devices.
In sum, remember that “Work + Rest = Success”, so work hard, work smart, rest hard, rest smart =)
Today we’re going to do a review of Bryan Doo and Dan Cogan-Drew’s Ultimate Fitness DVD (Amazon detail page here).
Bryan Doo, now a strength & conditioning coach for the Boston Celtics, and Dan Cogan-Drew are long-time Ultimate players on Boston’s Death of Glory club team, and it’s great to see them bring their Ultimate training expertise to the table in producing this well-made DVD.
After an Introduction but before the Cooldown lap, Bryan and Dan take us through Warm-ups (both for a start-of-day and for in between games), Speed / Agility / Quickness, and Functional Strength Development. You may have seen a number of these drills in Baccarini and Booth’s Essential Ultimate, such as the scramble-up (shown below), but it’s always useful to see live athletes performing the drills. In particular, Bryan Doo is an exemplar of movement quality and as he goes through the drills makes sure to point out common pitfalls and does some impromptu coaching and cuing for the demo athletes he works with on the DVD.
In this review I’m going to focus on the Warm-up and Speed / Agility / Quickness drills, since strength work has been covered extensively elsewhere here. I also didn’t want to get distracted quibbling with the advice to draw-in versus brace for core work or pondering the 2,000 or so Newtons of force a Superman is measured to exert on the spine [see Stu McGill's survey works], and the interconnected too-much-flexion debate.
Bryan’s Warm-up #1 (start of day) consists of:
- High Knee Hugs, Straight Leg Deadlifts, Step / Lunge / Twist
- High Knees, Butt Kicks, Carioca, and Backpedaling.
Your team probably does some variation of this, but as they say the devil is in the details, and you can always get better at warming up more safely and effectively. For example, when you do high knees, do you just hike your knees or do you also make sure you get some arm drive action in there too?
When you do a Step / Lunge / Twist, do you also make sure (1) the lunging foot stays pointed forward (rather than internally or externally rotated) with heel on the ground (2) lunging knee forming a 90 degree angle with (3) core musculature is engaged with an appropriate level of tension and a tall/long spine and (4) twisting only to the lunging leg side?
Another example. When you do cariocas as a warm-up, do you go for distance or take smaller steps, trying to open up your hips and lower-back as a warm-up as Bryan suggests?
These may seem like simple corrections, but as Pavel says when it comes to fundamentals, “it is the mastery of the basics that separates the elite from the rest.” While we’re at it, for extra credit I’m going to mention the concept of bone rhythm that I learned from Dr. Cobb as part of the Z-health system.
You are what you consistently do, so why not do that well? =)
I’m not going to cover Warm-up #2, but just mention that some kind of Spiderman is a good thing to get better at.
And rather than ramble on about the dozen or so Speed / Agility / Quickness drills that Bryan has picked out I’m just going to suggest you check out the 1-2 Stick preview video on Cogan-Drew’s web page for another sample of the high-quality instruction and footage offered on this DVD.
Now, go and check out those hips!
Over the summer, I walked past an informal summer league team practice on a nearby field and noticed that an amazingly high number of the players wore at least one ankle brace. As Dr. Nuwer reminds us in her injurytimeout.org article on ankle, ankle sprains are one of the most common injuries in Ultimate, but in general many folks interested in getting stronger, faster, or even just want to get out of knee / ankle / foot pain don’t think twice about their ankle complex when they plan out their training program.
In this blog post, we’ll cover a few ways to think about how you (re-)train your ankle/foot complex. We’re not going to cover acute care or serious ankle dysfunction here, go see your medical and fitness professionals to take care of that first. But, if you’ve already been to the doctor and gotten an opinion or two from a physical therapist or personal trainer, here are a few points to ponder.
Earlier here on UltiTraining.com, we briefly touched upon the joint-by-joint paradigm of looking at the body, looking at when, where, and how the average athlete may need more mobility and/or stability. Zooming in on the ankle complex, Gray Cook and many other fitness professionals today would agree that many typical athletes may need more mobility in the foot and ankle, whereas many also need to learn how to stabilize under load at the knee (for example avoiding valgus collapse–caving in as you squat).
But let’s simplify things further a little bit, and just look at how well an average athlete moves her feet or ankle. Or perhaps more accurately, doesn’t move them. She might wear stiff sneakers all the time, which means that the 33 joints, 26 bones, and 20 muscles in the foot alone aren’t getting much work. In other words, her feet are getting weaker and dumber. With an elevated heel, she might have extremely limited dorsiflexion–difficult bringing the toes back up towards the knee–and a tendency to heel strike as she runs, which some research suggests may increase eccentric load on her knees.
We’re not going to cover barefoot training in detail in this blog post, but suffice it to say for now that warming up once in a while in bare feet on grass just might be a useful tool, *if* you currently are not in any ankle/heel/foot pain and already have good hip mobility and knee stability.
Earlier we talked about feet getting “dumber” and by that we mean to remind ourselves that the joints of the foot are supposed to be mobile and move, from your toes on up, and not only that but the mechanoreceptors in your foot/ankle joints and muscles are constantly sending back information back up your spinal cord about what’s going on down there. Think of it this way, if you threw a disc with mittens all the time, would you expect to have a really good sense of where your fingers are when you catch and throw? Why do the same for your feet and ankle joints?
Photography by 'shadowcompanion2'
The ankle joint itself is a hinge joint, and as we talked about earlier, many modern humans now have restricted and/or asymmetric dorsiflexion, which basically means you can’t hinge your ankle up very much. This doesn’t sound that bad, until you remember that the body tends to act as a function biokinematic unit, and with every single-leg footstrike, you can put up to 8-10x your bodyweight on each foot if you’re sprinting hard for that deep cut. A joint-by-joint perspective may suggest that the load gets shunted higher up the kinetic chain, and suddenly your knee joints are working way harder than they need to.
I could go on but I’ll just lob out three high-level suggestions.
First, keep symmetry in mind as you think about your ankles. If you sit down and dorsiflex (“pull up”) your ankle, is it the same on one side compared to the other? Can you deep squat staying on your heels?
Second, remember that your body as a biomechanical unit needs a good sense of proprioception to move well and manage injury risks. Research on ACL injuries in soccer suggest that proprioception training can be an important tool in injury prevention. Don’t have an Airex pad? Try standing on a pillow and doing bodyweight single-leg movements such as a squat or deadlift. Single leg balance work? Your ankle is gonna like it.
Finally, try to balance soft tissue work (self-myofascial release, perhaps a lacrosse ball for your plantar fascia/aponeurosis or a Tiger Tail on your calves) with mindful joint mobility, whether it’s a wall ankle mobilization and ankle circles, a simple rolling motion and alphabet tracing, or a targeted Z-Health R-phase lateral or medial ankle tilt before you do those calf raises.
If you’d like to learn more, Gray Gray’s institute page is a great place to dive in. Ankle’s away!
With just two days left to vote in the 2009 UPA Board of Directors elections, we thought we’d bring one candidate to you and encourage to vote for whichever UPA Board of Director candidate strikes your fancy.
One candidate wants 50,000 folks in the Rose Bowl to see Ultimate in 2015, while others want to focus on outreach or the college series.
Jason Chow stood out to this UltiTraining.com blogger for his work on UltiSpace.com in the virtual world, his coaching at ARHS and the National Ultimate Training camp, and his candidate platform focused on the growth of youth programs, injury awareness & prevention, and developing awareness of the sport of Ultimate.
Tell us about yourself.
I started playing ultimate in high school at Amherst, spent four great years at Syracuse, and have been playing and coaching ever since. This year played on Dark or Light for the series, a team of current ARHS players and alumni. Coaching at the National Ultimate Training Camp has to be one of my annual highlights. The community of players and coaches who come together for purpose of growing in skill, fitness, and competition is unlike anything else I know. I currently teach at ARHS, run the fall intramural league, winter indoor league, and coach in the spring. I plan on pursuing my M.Ed this coming spring and am really excited to go back to school.
I skimmed both sides of the argument and my thoughts lie somewhere in between Mike and Adam’s. I believe that regulating play like Mike is talking about (maybe not as extreme) is a fine idea. I like the value it puts on safety and responsibility. I think that limiting play should be league-based. I don’t think it should be an all-encompassing rule that governs youth over all levels.
There is a good book out now called Essential Ultimate, written by Michael Baccarini and Tiina Booth. I think it’s a great resource for coaches and players who are looking for support.
Thanks Jason!
If you are reading this then you probably aren’t at Club Nationals right now. I feel the same way.
Thanks for the submissions this week. Keep em coming!
Some good reader submissions this week. Let’s get into it.
TMuscle.com just posted a new article by Andy Bolton and Elliot Newman, reviewing the tips and tricks to Andy’s deadlifting technique. I really love deadlifting so this was a very interesting article to me. I took note of 2 different things right away:
- Andy recommends a belt on DLs over 400 lbs. I always wondered where a belt should come into play. I have never worn one, but it is good to know when I should.
- Not to use chalk until you need it. Using chalk enhances your grip, but you can strengthen your grip without using chalk on until you need it. This is how I feel about using straps for DLs as well.
The article also breaks down Sumo Deadlifting as another option, for those of you that choose to pull Sumo. Watch this video of Bolton pulling his world record weight of 1,008 lbs and then check out the article from TMuscle.com. The man is a beast!
With the rise of Ultimate as the States’ fastest growing team sport, it’s great to see the development of the UPA Coaching Corps and efforts to develop more women leaders in the sport. In college-level and pro sports, coaches are often divided into two camps, game/sports coaches who focus on strategy and sport-specific drills run on the field, and strength & conditioning (S&C) coaches who may train athletes on the track and in the weight room.
by jontunn
Now, imagine you are the S&C coach for your college Ultimate team. What do you think your #1 job is? You might answer, “to make players stronger and better conditioned”. Well, that’s not a bad start. Perhaps better is “to make athletes more efficient at sports movements”, to crib a random PLU S&C web page. But at the professional level, if you ask a S&C coach what their #1 job is, they might actually say it’s injury prevention.
If you skim Mike Boyle’s Functional Training for Sports or listen to him talk on the StrengthCoach podcast, you’ll hear Coach Boyle come back to this time and again. As S&C coaches, or perhaps more aptly as athletic development coaches as Vern Gambetta would have it, it’s very easy to be seduced by the desire to max out your sets / reps / 1RM lifts or presses, but how much this does really help on the field? How many of you have gotten injured just training for your sport?
In “Strong Athlete, Zero Injuries” (PDF), Coach Boyle reminds us that “undisputed reality is that professional sport uses the avoidance of injury as the measuring stick of success in strength and conditioning. Shouldn’t that tell you something? Pro teams don’t test squats or deadlifts. I don’t know one professional sports team that does 1RM strength testing. That should also tell you something… Success as a strength and conditioning coach at the professional level is measured by keeping the best players playing.”
In retrospect, this is obvious, how many of the best players on your Ultimate team aren’t playing right now due to injury?
“The NFL uses a statistic called “Starter’s Games Missed.” The NHL uses a similar stat called “Man Games Lost to Injury.” Same concept.” Does you or your S&C coach keep track of how many games, tourneys, or even practices you missed? “What gets measured, gets done.” Are you measuring your own (team’s) rates of injury?
“The real key is that strong and healthy aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive… There was a time I believed that everyone should have a sore back for a week after a deadlift workout and that everyone iced their shoulders and took Advil after every pressing workout. I now know that wasn’t true. I want my athletes to have all the benefit that science and experience can provide.”
(For more on injury prevention, also see this injury prevention roundtable and this on ACL injury prevention yo.)
So, given this, how shall we approach our training? A few high-level principles to guide us:
- Train movements, not muscles.
- Strength is a skill.
- Movement quality, not quantity.
If you’re a bodybuilder, you might want to train muscles, not movements, but as a competitive sports athlete, you probably want to try it the other way around, focusing on multi-joint, functional exercises with your feet (foot) on a stable surface. Examples? In the strength sphere: Bodyweight squats and compass (multi-planar) lunges. One-legged squats and single leg deadlifts. Pushups (see Strength by Sara or Eric Cressey on this one!) and Kbell Swings and Get-ups.
[In "Strong Athlete, Zero Injuries", Coach Boyle continues with "8 Ways to (Weight) Train Safely and Effectively", which is targeted toward the T-nation crowd rather than sports athletes, but two bits of advice I like are to try one-legged squats and DB snatches. I actually like bilateral deadlifts (Mike doesn't) based on what Gray Cook has to say on DLs vs squats, and enjoy KB snatches even though they're way more technical than a DB snatch.]
Do these train muscles? Probably, but you should be focusing on training the movement and not the muscle, since fundamentally athleticism is about the ability to move well, brute strength does not suffice.
You also want to be able to move with good linear speed and quickness / agility, and here I will just point you to the excellent Ultimate Fitness DVD featuring Bryan Doo (review forthcoming in another blog post).
“Strength is a skill” is a reminder from Pavel Tsatsouline that strength is not simply about the sarcoplasmic hypertrophy of your muscles, but also about the mind-muscle connection, the techniques of proper breathing, rooting, and alignment. Approach it as practice, not just mindless reps if you would, comrades =) Same goes for how you move! Movement quality, not quantity. Symmetry.
Two more principles before we call it a night.
4. Recovery and Regeneration
5. Find your Weakest Link
I don’t have a cute phrase for this off-hand, but it’s worth reminding ourselves that training is merely a stimulus. Perhaps the most important phase is this one, recovery and regeneration, what happens off the field and outside the gym. Whether you think of this as Supercompensation or Regeneration it matters how you eat, sleep, and hold yourself all those other hours of the day when you’re not in cleats or Frees or VFFs.
Finally, Gray Cook in Athletic Body in Balance reminds us that you need to constantly be looking for your weakest link. As athletes and people, we tend to play to our strengths, which is great, but also holds us back. If you can do a 2x BW DL but not a rock-bottom deep squat, then maybe mobility or flexibility is your weakest link. If you can run for miles with ease but have knee pain after practice, maybe you (after you consult with medical / fitness professionals) need more strength / activation in your posterior chain (get off that treadmill!). Maybe you need soft tissue work–today at a tourney I was in serious TMJ pain which I localized to a trigger point in my SCM, and even though my energy systems were raring to go, you can’t do much when you’re in serious pain & startle (soo unlike these guys!).
Throwing, catching, landing, running, soft tissue restrictions, hip / thoracic / ankle mobility, posterior chain strength / gluteal amnesia, cutting / other sport skills. What’s your weakest link?
Go.
