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Body Mass and Performance

I was asked the other day by one of my athletes what the ideal body mass was for helping his performance.  Now, this could be answered a number of ways.

According to “Essentials of Strength Training and Conditioning” the text for the NSCA-CSCS, this individual should present with 11-13% body fat being a baseball player.  This will put him in the leaner than average category, but it doesn’t really define what position he plays.  This is based off normative data that a sample of baseball players who are considered to be a good representation of all baseball players present as.  I don’t think I would argue much.  However, you’re going to see a wide spectrum of body composition across the sport.

Some research looks to see how body fat% has an impact on performance.  Items like agility tests and sprint tests are the items in question.  In terms of performance markers for the sport, I think that they are a decent representation.  Assuming that the quality of the research was acceptable (few are), it almost seems like common sense that the more body fat I carry, the slower I will be.  Again, not really a good reflection of position.

Some other research was actually done to reflect positions in baseball.  That was cool to look at.  Finally something objective to the actual position with a large enough sample size to rule out error.  And…short stops are leaner than everyone (roughly 11%), pitchers are fatter (14.4%).  Now we’re getting somewhere with this.  Even if the research was exclusive to minor league baseball.

Another research article pointed to the direct relationship of body weight and velocity in pitchers.  So now we have a reason for pitchers to think big.  But that doesn’t necessarily mean to pack on the fat.

Anecdotally, if this baseball player is a pitcher and is working hard in his offseason training, he will be getting stronger which in turn will lay the foundation for him to also become more powerful.  Once January hits and he is in the cages pitching, he should see a nice improvement in his velocity.  At the end of the day that is what we are trying to accomplish with a pitcher.  Maybe his body fat% is hovering the 11-13% range, maybe it’s 20%, or maybe it’s 8% which has been reported by some as the standard.

Bottom line is, eat a diet centered around whole foods making sure to get enough food to stay in an anabolic range when recovering.  Get plenty of sleep keeping in mind that those hours of sleep before midnight are much more valuable and we should be aiming for 8 uninterrupted hours.  Put the time in the gym!  Don’t sign up for 4 days per week and make excuses as to why you make it 1-2 times.  The gym should be exciting and a grind all at the same time.

We are 3 weeks into our baseball offseason training program and it’s going great!  If you have any questions please feel free to reach out.

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Guest Post: Time for a Change

This is a guest post from one of my interns from the summer and current sports performance coach.  Kathy is a very intelligent and driven individual who has donated her time around a hectic schedule to Young Performance.  She aspires to bridge the gap between PT and performance and has some really good ideas.  You can find more on her blog at blendingptandsc

             I’m a PT student who, like most people, has no solid idea of what field to practice in. After going on a few clinicals, I found out that my expectations of rehab didn’t really exist in the real world – at least not yet. Having this existential crisis, I decided to go figure it out. I began throwing myself into different jobs and internships in the health and fitness field. This summer alone, I’ve been a PT aide at 3 separate clinics, a personal trainer in training , a kickboxing instructor, and a strength coach intern – which has lead to the creation of this blog. There were two glaring problems that I kept noticing: 1. the health and fitness field is muddled with misinformation and 2. everyone is constantly trying to one-up each other.

1.  People are quick to believe what they hear or read without looking for evidence.

Carbohydrates are bad. All fats are bad. No rest during a workout is a good thing. There are so many health myths, so many “fads” backed with no scientific evidence, and, with the rise of social media, so much bad information posted by a lot of unqualified people. Not only is it dangerous, but it also creates another barrier for health providers who must spend their time re-educating and getting buy-in from their clients.

2. The health field, it’s a very “cut-throat” environment.

Everyone wants to have all of the credentials, the letters after their name in order to be the “best”. People also want to believe that their way of thinking is the right and only way. Hip vs foot, barefoot running vs orthotics – these topics cause a lot of frustration and bickering. It seems likewe’ve  all forgotten why we started in this field, forgotten that we are looking down on our peerswho are using their best judgement to get to the same goal. Just because their way looks different, doesn’t make it wrong. The first thing we learn is that everyone is different and something that might work for Joe Shmoe might not work for the next person – so why are we still stuck on trying to have one golden principle? It’s all theory at the end of the day and if it works, it works!

Long story short, everyone wihin the health and fitness field needs to come together and not only educate people but to encourage peers for their different perspectives and ways of thinking. Without that, we will not progress very far.Guest

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How to Develop Power

At Young Performance, we use a number of tactics to create greater power output for the athlete.  Power, simply, is just the ability to produce force in an instant.  So when we think of power, we think of things like jumps in a variety of fashions.

In reality, I should start off by saying that we need to start by building a strong foundation of strength before we really dial into power.  Some key differences in strength versus power would be the amount of time you’re actually moving the weight.  For power, time is a variable that is measured; and, for strength time isn’t considered necessarily (of course we have our tables that measure relative time under tension, but for the sake of simplicity).  I know this is a huge dump of physics review and believe me I’m gagging just thinking about it.

Now you have a variety of options available to you to help enhance power.  There exists a continuum from general strength to speed/power.  Of course we can start to differentiate different movements into the continuum, but again for the sake of simplicity we will just say that strength-speed, speed-strength, and speed are all products of power.

IMG_0353When I think of my hockey, football, and rugby athletes I think of performing the Olympic lifts and loading them up to fairly high intensities.  The reason for this is to help the athletes absorb force as well as produce a lot of force in an instant to get the bar moving.  I will usually use Olympic lifts with my other athletes as well–baseball excluded mostly–but to a much less degree.  I like to spend my weekend evenings sifting through peer reviewed articles and I have been able to find some interesting statistics.  Mostly that you only need roughly 40% of someones 1RM, or 1 repetition max, to help develop power.  That’s particularly nice for my non-contact athletes who don’t necessarily see the value of a heavy hang clean.

IMG_0385For those athletes who have contraindications to Olympic lifting, or are baseball players, we have a number of other options that we can use.  Most simply, I like to use jump squats with either a weighted vest or dumbbells.  My next go-to would be the kettlebell swing varieties.  It helps to teach extension of the hips and knees in an explosive manner and it does well to keep most athletes in neutral.  I have also programmed things like RFE split squat jumps (RFE=rear foot elevated), split squat jumps, single leg jumps on a box/bench, and landmine push presses.  I feel that these different options help to reinforce the triple extension/jump patterns and offer a variety to the athlete.

We also have our own little built in showcase almost every day.  Especially for our general prep guys.  In our plyometric/power section of the day we include either box jumps or hurdle hops.  We have a number of ways that we can perform them–single leg, medial/lateral, stick, mini-bounce, etc–but the point remains clear.  I am not programming these exercises to weighted, instead, I want to see improvement with the power output.  In other words, I want to see how high they can jump today.

So there you have it, my take on programming for power.  Again, develop your foundation for strength first and then you can enhance your power output.  If you are in general prep or a new athlete to the performance world, you can still jump to enhance the movement pattern.