Posts Tagged ‘conditioning’

Even the best athletes in the world say “I can’t” much more than they say “I can.” Yet, the elite figure out a way to get it done, even when their body and mind don’t want to.

I was recently running with a friend who quit before I did. I also had a solo workout in which I quit before I completed my intended volume. And last week a client of mine told me that he couldn’t do any more [reps]. All of these situations raised in me the question…

What If you HAD to do more?

What if you were forced, FORCED, to keep going? Could you? Read the rest of this entry »

….was the phrase uttered to 4 of my athletes this week.  You see, we have a policy here at Athletic Edge, that, if you puke, do it in a trash can, and if you puke in a trash can, you’re gonna get rid of the bag yourself.

Now understand that pushing people to puke isn’t the sign of a good trainer, nor is it ever my goal.  Furthermore, I never insist that someone on the brink of vomiting would continue to work – it’s simply not productive for any of us.  If they let me know, I’ll insist that they rest.

Yet, I can at least respect those who work until they puke, because it’s not easy and it’s not a good feeling.  Like I said, I don’t want or ask them to do that, but if they quietly go to that point, then hey, at least they worked hard.

Reason for all the fluid loss this week was that I had a large group of college players with whom I have been working 3 times per week for 4 weeks now.  Workouts started out tame, and have progressed to be pretty difficult.  The guys who have come consistently are in great shape, and can now handle a heavy conditioning workload.  Those who, because these workouts were voluntary for their school, decided not to come regularly but DID decide to show up on the last week got a rude awakening.  They were hurting, and left with a leaky, smelly trash bag in hand.  Shame.

Oh, and don’t drink a quart of blue gatorade 10 minutes before working out.  Turns out, it comes back up in a beautiful shade of green…

Today at the Athletic Edge we had a nice little workout.  Our day consisted of deadlifting, flexibility and mobility, weighted push up and rotator cuff work.  We capped it all off with a Tabata Interval set of Front Squats @ 65 pounds.  What is a Tabata Interval, you ask?

20 seconds of work followed by 10 seconds of rest, repeated for 4 straight minutes. In other words, hard work with virtually no rest for way too long.  You won’t see any of us high level athletes lose our composure in battle, but believe me, when the camera turned off Steve, my workout partner for the day, and I were both hurting.

Our spotting method worked flawlessly – instead of racking and re-racking (which takes precious seconds) we had two spotters (trainers Steve Evans and Matt Acevedo) take the weight for the 10 second rest periods.  This interval was brutal, even with only 65 pounds on the bar.  The fact that we did a lot of high-rep deadlifting beforehand probably didn’t help either. Enjoy!

Pitchers and baseball players in general have an interesting sport to prepare for. Team sports like soccer, lacrosse (if you consider it a real sport), hockey, basketball all require a good amount of stamina, as they require nearly constant motion.  The needs in those sports is somewhere in between anaerobic and aerobic.  Baseball and football are different from the others, and similar to each other as both are played in short, high-intensity bursts followed by rest intervals between plays.  

Interesting thing is, though, that pitchers have historically been part-time distance runners, doing tremendous amounts of sustained running between outings.  The validation for this practice was that pitchers needed strong and enduring legs to go deep into games.  

While it’s true that during a 7-inning outing a pitcher will be pitching over the better portion of two hours, he isn’t doing it in one sustained effort.  

Rather, any pitching performance is broken down into half-inning intervals of pitching and rest, which is further broken down into shorter intervals between each batter, and then even shorter intervals between each pitch.

Training is supposed to make the athlete better prepared for game situations.  If we want a pitcher to best prepare himself for his act of pitching, then it doesn’t make sense to perform sustained cardio work between starts.  Rather, pitchers should be condition like they play: by working in intervals. Read the rest of this entry »