Sports Specific Training: It has a time and a place.

 One thing I’m asked probably more often than anything else when discussing programming for a particular athlete or client is “So do you like, do sports specific stuff?” The way I answer that question usually surprises the person who poses it. I’m not about to tell you that I don’t think about the sport an individual is training for when I design programs. I think it’s absolutely ridiculous to assume that sports specificity is becoming completely obsolete in performance training, but I do believe that professionals around the world are starting to view it in a different light. I’d like to talk a little bit about how I view sports specificity, how I train to a particular genre of sport and why I think it’s important to touch on but not dwell on.

Before covering “sport specific” cover “individual specific.”

 I perform a battery of assessments with every athlete I work with. Trust me, I don’t do this for my health. As a matter of fact, it’s probably the furthest thing from that, because I hate assessment weeks. They’re boring, they don’t make you sweaty, or teach you any life lessons and you don’t get to get covered in chalk. They’re a necessary evil, however, and without them I’m convinced my programs wouldn’t be half as effective as they are. I use these assessments to determine what kind of canvas I’m working with before I paint. Poor core positioning, muscular imbalances and lack of range of motion in specific areas of need will hold you back (and possibly leave you with acute or chronic injuries) long before skipping out on that crazy cool exercise you saw your favorite NBA player performing in a commercial. So next time you want to ask your coach “How is THIS going to make me better at _____________?” Understand that there may be more to a training program than what you think.

Sport specific programming requires omission just as much as addition.

This idea was first introduced to me a few years back by my former roommate, Scott Peters. I thought he was crazy. Had I known then that he would one day accept internships with the Anaheim Angles, Boston Red Sox and get accepted to the Physical Therapy program at Duke University, I would have listened better. That boy smart. When I think about sport specificity, I first think about what I shouldn’t be doing with the particular athlete. For example, most overhead athletes (volleyball players, baseball players and swimmers) spend so much time in an overhead state that I’m going to avoid training them with weight bearing overhead movements. The idea is to allow for continued health in the overhead position without over loading the pattern and furthering pathology created through over use. Rotational athletes are another good example. You’d have a hard time arguing that making an athlete more explosive in the sagittal plane isn’t beneficial to most every sport, but if supplementing fundamental strength with rotational power will serve the athlete better. Omitting those power cleans and squat thrusts for some medicine ball work or offloaded single-leg work might be necessary.

Too much sport specialization can progress sports specific pathology.

Eric Cressey, a private strength coach in Massachusetts and one of my biggest role models, originally brought this idea to me. Understanding that spending a lot of time in the same position and moving in the same direction over and over eventually will contribute to imbalances and the chronic overuse injuries I touched on earlier. Sometimes getting an athlete back to the fundamentals of strength and conditioning, and away from some of the sports specific movements that are so desirable can be just what the doctor ordered. Continuing to beat up the same rotations, change of directions, and planes of movement the athlete experiences in a competitive season throughout his/her offseason may leave you with a bigger problem down the road than you would have had otherwise.

Hopefully this gives you a little insight as to where the realm of sports specific training might be headed and when and where a good time to implement it would be. It’s important to pick and choose your spots when preparing an athlete for their competitive season. Finding a balance between the over use of certain movements and missing out on important adaptations is something every coach needs to understand. Training smart isn’t always as easy as it seems.

Thanks for reading.

Caleb Heilman

“The only thing I know is I’ll never know everything.” – Jason Green

Youth Wrestling: Time for a change?

After a long weekend of crushing too much food (multiple times), getting a beat down in Scattergories and Easter egg hunts I figured tonight was a good night to take a breath and do some writing. Still being fairly new to all of this, my writing doesn’t come without inspiration. I still have a hard time just brainstorming ideas to put to paper. I usually have to have a significant experience or conversation to get me to hammer something out. At least for now. Tonight’s blog topic came to me during a discussion I was having with my girlfriend’s family members about their experiences in athletic competition and strength and conditioning. One of her cousins is a 12 year old who participates in football and track and field here in Minot and the other participates in football, wrestling and track and field as a freshman at MHS.

The back and forth about athletic participation, work ethic, values learned through athletics and strength and conditioning wasn’t much different from other conversations I have with parents throughout the year. For some reason though, during our discussion of the older sibling’s wrestling experiences, I asked myself a question I can’t believe hadn’t come to me before; “Why do wrestling programs still do things they way they do them?”

While talking with my girlfriend’s cousin he explained to me that he was asked to lose 20+ pounds before the start of the competitive season AS A FRESHMAN. Every program around the state and nation is guilty of this in some form. But why do we do it? Why is losing weight (and almost always through fasting) the way our wrestling programs structure their rosters for competitions?

Brain development in most of our youth is at its peak between the years of 10 and 18 years of age. I know some families who start their kids in wrestling at the age of 8 years old, some even younger. Let’s just say for the sake of discussion, that those kids are asked to cut weight for half of those years. That means they’re experiencing the deprivation of vital nutrition for 3-4 months, year after year, for upward of 5-6 years during an extremely important stage of physical and psychological development. I personally, find that absurd. I tell my athletes/clients that in order to maintain their health and trim body fat, that a realistic weight loss goal is 2 pounds per week in the first four weeks and 1 pound per week every week after that. By those standards, in a 4-month season, a young man/woman could maintain their health and safely lose 20 pounds by the end of the season. Keep in mind, this particular athlete was asked to lose 20 pounds by the start of their competitive season!

So, to answer the question I posed earlier: “Why do wrestling programs still do things the way they do them?” It’s simple; that’s the way they’ve always done them. I’d like to propose a change. I’m going to urge local wrestling coaches to change the way they ask their athletes to “make weight” to fit their competitive roster. Instead of dropping weight, skipping meals that consist of essential nutrition, and breeding weak, tired, and sluggish athletes, how about we try this instead:

Let’s start promoting traditional strength training and proper nutrition. Take my word for it; if the athlete is meant to lose weight, this method will achieve that. This may be hard to believe, but generally when I assess and train youth wrestlers they’re almost always sub par when it comes to true strength. I think this is largely due to them not spending enough time in the weight room performing the traditional movements. A lot of coaches assume that if their athletes spend too much time Deadlifting, Squatting, and Pressing heavy weight that they will gain weight, and in most cases, cutting weight is the ultimate goal. If we flip flopped our way of thinking, however, and allowed these athletes to GAIN weight to qualify for a weight class instead of CUTTING weight to make a class, we just might breed a wrestling team of strong and healthy individuals. I don’t think there is anyone that can argue that a team of well-fed, well-trained wrestlers would have a significant advantage over a team of sleep deprived and malnourished wrestlers. Call me crazy, but if I come into a season at 150 lbs and add 10 lbs of muscle through strength training and proper nutrition to compete at 160, wouldn’t you pick me over the athlete who started at 170 and had to skip meals and weight room sessions to get to that same class? To me it seems like a no brainer.

What I’m asking is that wrestling coaches around the area implement a new approach to roster structure. I think they would see a world of difference in their athletes. Less injuries, higher practice attendance, increased attentiveness, and fewer in season struggles in the classroom could make life a whole lot easier. If nothing else, the coach that has to take your malnourished, 20-pound underweight athlete with hormone deficiencies for spring baseball or track and field will stop pissing and moaning in the break room.

Thanks for reading.

Caleb Heilman

“The only thing I know, is I’ll never know everything” – Jason Green

How Heilman's Performance has gone from Dream to Reality.

The last few months for me have been an absolute whirlwind.  Do you remember that feeling you have, either in high school or college during finals week? The one where every morning you wake up you know you have important tasks to complete. You’re just not entirely sure what they all are, where exactly to start and in the back of your mind you know as soon as you do, something else will likely come up. That’s kind of how I’ve felt since January. Now, don’t get me wrong, this was all self induced. Starting your own small business can be an exciting thing, but there are definitely a few things you can line up first to make it easier on yourself. One of my favorite strength and conditioning coaches, (and certainly one of the most respected in the world) Eric Cressey, wrote an article once upon a time entitled “The smart things I did starting my business” (Cressey Performance). I got about half way through his write up and realized “I’ve done none of this.” So that was reassuring. Trying to get past the comparison of myself to Eric was a difficult one, but once I understood that my path to the profession and current circumstances were utterly different, I nutted up and got the ball rolling. So here is my own spin on the “Smart  (Mostly Crazy) things I did to get Heilman’s Performance off the ground.”

1.    I made a structured business plan.

One afternoon I just sat down at the kitchen table and stayed there. I don’t have some highly touted business degree so needless to say; I had no idea what I was doing. I asked myself though, “If I were going to help support something monetarily, what questions would I want answered first?” I then put together my business plan trying to answer every single question I thought might be thrown my direction. “Who? What? When? Where? Why?” seemed like the most reasonable to answer first.

2.    I knew I needed help and wasn’t afraid to ask for it.

One of Cressey’s bullet points in his article was: “I had three months of operating expenses in pocket.” Well I probably had about three minutes of operating expenses in pocket. So I started asking around. There are few things that will humble a man faster than asking people with disposable income to share it with you because you don’t have any yourself. Lucky for me, there are still a lot of good people in this world. I offered an interest rate I thought correlated with the lender’s risk and accumulated what I needed from some people that believed in me. Unfortunately the big boys (The Bank) don’t care how much money you have, if technically, none of it is yours. So I had more convincing to do.

3.    I was relentless.

Piggy backing off of the end of my second bullet point, my relentless attempt to persuade financial institutions may have been the most frustrating part of the entire process. I was turned away by 4 commercial lenders (3 of who I know didn’t even look at my business plan and 1 who treated me like a 9 year old opening a lemonade stand) before I finally found someone with enough faith and compassion to see and feel the passion in my pitch and work along with me. There used to be a time, from what my father tells me, that a lender/borrower relationship was based on trust, work ethic and a mutual cooperation to make things work. Those days are long gone. Today it’s based on a few numbers, and none of those numbers include the amount of hours someone is willing to put into something in order to make it work. There was one lender in town that was willing to revert, if you will, to the old school methodology, and for that I will be forever grateful.

This post might be slightly premature. I firmly understand that I haven’t accomplished anything yet. If I don’t run a successful business none of this will matter. The last three months of grinding out hours at a job I couldn’t stand, convincing people to take a risk on me, filling out endless paperwork and asking people to volunteer their free time for my benefit will be nothing but a valuable learning experience. In the event, however, that it does succeed. If people start to see the different approach, scientific and biological application, work ethic and personalities my colleagues and I will offer at Heilman’s Performance and things take off, there will be no greater reward than knowing that our “something” was started from absolutely nothing. I’ll tell you this; few things will drive me more to succeed than proving to one particular person I’m selling the best god damned lemonade on the block.

Caleb Heilman

“The only thing I know is I’ll never know everything.” – Jason Green

My Take on Entitlement in Youth Athletes

This post was inspired by a team of basketball players I recently competed against in a local tournament with some of my friends.  All 8 or 9 of the players were a bit younger than my teammates and I and all competed at the same junior college. I don’t have you tell you how rattled they were when they got beat by a bunch of washed up former athletes. They played hard, they were big, and they were talented.  The problem was this: for most of the game they bitched, they moaned, they groaned, made excuses, and still walked as tall as Bill Russell after he won his 11^th. Obviously nobody had ever mentioned to them they were playing junior college basketball in a town in ND that nobody outside of the area has ever heard of.

Before I rant, let me first say this: I too was a young, talented, cocky, self centered athlete in desperate need of a reality check. (I got mine when I tried to compete in a great conference in college baseball) Also, athletes today spend more money, more time, and WORK HARDER than athletes ever have in the past. With populations (especially in public schools) on the rise, you have no choice but to put in the work to make an athletic team. When I played, which wasn’t even that long ago, if you were talented you played. And if you did some sort of strength and conditioning, you got better. Nowadays it’s extremely hard to find an athlete competing at the varsity level year in and year out that isn’t putting in some time in strength and conditioning in his/her offseason. It’s become a necessity, and I think that’s great.

But now, to the meat and potatoes. Youth athletes: Let’s all make a conscious effort to quit acting like entitled assholes. Please understand in the grand scheme of things, YOU’VE DONE NOTHING AND YOU’VE GONE NOWHERE. Take it from one with experience. I understand; you work so hard, dedicate so much time, silence the doubters and eventually convince yourself it’s you against the world. Acting as if people are trying to tear you down is a great way to create extrinsic motivation, but it’s also a great way to have an unfulfilling athletic career with teammates wanting nothing to do with you. If you want to play next level you don’t always have to defeat those around you, sometimes you have to defeat yourself. Trust me when I say this; the minute you set foot in that college locker room nobody gives a damn who you are, where you’ve been or what you’ve done. Every coach and upper classmen that you play for/with now, wants to know who you will become, where you will go and what you can do now that you’re apart of their family. Instead of reminding yourself that everyone wants you to fail, start reminding yourself that you haven’t yet succeeded. If you’re a great athlete, you’ll know you haven’t. Look outside yourself, do what you can to help the team, seek to understand your worth, strengths, and weaknesses, work harder than everyone else, earn respect and help others grow into better competitors. This, I promise you, will make you feel much more accomplished when it’s all said and done. And God forbid you come out of it with a few friends.

This was something I’ve wanted to get off my chest for some time now and I thank those big bruising JuCo basketball players for finally giving me incentive to do so. If at least one youth athlete out there, somewhere, can take this and learn from it, then it’s been worth my time. I just hope, with time, we can continue to breed a culture in the athletic community that values hard work and progress instead of talent and accomplishments. Being able to look back and see how far you’ve come and how much better you’ve gotten through the years should be the barometer for success. Not how full a stat sheet or trophy room is. Hope this can be a friendly reminder; control what you can control, keep your nose out of the air and on the grindstone, everything else will fall into place.

Caleb Heilman

“The only thing I know is I’ll never know everything.” – Jason Green

5 Things You Might be Missing in your Training Program

“What does my program offer an individual that others do not?” This is a question that fitness professionals should constantly be challenging themselves to answer. If the answer is, “Nothing” then maybe it’s time for you to either kick your continued education in the ass or start searching for a new profession. With so many people trying their hand at the profession nowadays, it’s vital for one to not only be proficient coaching traditional strength training, athletic performance, movement mechanics, etc. but also to be unique and constantly evolve. Trying to understand where the profession of human performance is going and not just where it’s been is a never-ending task, and always will be, so if you’re not up to the task you may as well get comfortable with becoming obsolete. There are plenty of coaches in my area who can prescribe a deadlift, squat, a variety of Olympic lifting, and some single joint supplemental work, but if that’s all you think is important to developing an athlete for long-term health and growth you may be sorely mistaken. Or worse, paying premier money for a less than premier program. In order to put together a well rounded performance program for an individual a coach must ask questions, seek out the answers, and lastly PUT IN THE HOURS. That being said, today I’d like to talk about a few important variables you may be missing out on in your training program.

Assessments

I’m not just talking about a vertical jump test and a 40-yard dash. I’m talking about a battery of tests that allow the fitness professional to first conclude what a particular athlete should absolutely NOT be doing in the weight room, where they may have structural/functional issues, whether or not they need to be addressed and what the best route to fix those issues might be. With all of my clients I use the Functional Movement Screen to first determine movement quality and core positioning/function. I then break down into smaller exams like the Thomas test to determine tightness/laxity in the core musculature and shoulder flexion exams to determine mobility and functional issues in the thoracic spine and glenohumeral fossa itself. After the functional and structural assessments are finished I follow up with a par-q form and a short questionnaire to help me determine why I found what I found. THEN and ONLY THEN, do I give a damn about how high you can jump or how fast you can run?

Preventative Maintenance

The lack of preventative maintenance in a program will generally come hand in hand with the negligence of assessments. If you don’t take the time to figure out what might be going on with your client, it’s awfully difficult to design a program to prevent a problem that might arise down the road. This is an extremely important variable for a performance program and is really not that difficult to include. It can be something as simple as a shoulder care program for throwers or a few daily exercises for an individual to help correct tightness or instability in a certain pattern. It can usually be implemented in six to eight minutes a day, but can be cataclysmic to the long-term development of a client.

Foam Rolling

There are a lot of scientists in the human performance realm (who are a lot smarter than I am) arguing recently about what exactly foam rolling achieves. Whether it’s myofascial release, fluid distribution, musculature activation, or wizardry, I don’t care. All I know is this: it makes my athletes feel great and when they neglect it, all those small nagging injuries and pains seem to start presenting themselves again. Look, there is nothing sexy about foam rolling, and most meat heads will roll their eyes at you when you spend a chunk of your training on it. I tell all my clients that foam rolling is a lot like eating vegetables, it’s not going to make you big, strong and fast, but if you choose to avoid the process, you may never stay healthy long enough to get as big, fast, and strong as you would like to be. So swallow your pride and roll around the floor for a little bit every single day, you tattoo filled meat monkey.

An Individualized Warm Up

When I took my first job as a performance coach at the local gym in my hometown, we had one warm-up for everyone. We’d line the athletes up and move them through the same dynamic warm-up day in and day out. I’m not saying it was the wrong way to do things, I just think it left a lot to be desired. We had plenty of athletes who were dealing with mobility issues (that we would have no way of knowing about until it was too late, BECAUSE WE DIDN’T ASSESS) that a cookie cutter dynamic warm-up just wasn’t going to solve. Some athletes have so much joint laxity/instability that putting them through stationary static stretching will only exasperate their problems, so a dynamic warm-up is perfect for them, get their tissue temperature up and get them going. On the contrary, there are some athletes (mostly males) whose mobility in certain area sucks, so taking some time out each day to work specifically on those areas in their warm-up can be well worth your time. You’ll have plenty of time to get them into a short dynamic warm-up to get them warmed up.

Going Heavy

I’m a big supporter of safety first and some athletes may refer to me as a “Technique Nazi” at times, but I’m still no softy. Getting away from the 3 sets of 10 and 4 sets of 8 stimuli is more important to me than you might think. I don’t agree with lifting to failure every single day, but just like anything in life, if you aren’t willing to fail (safely) in the weight room you’re never going to understand how to succeed. Every 4 weeks my clients/athletes (who haven shown they’re ready) are prescribed a “hypertrophy week” where we drop our sets and reps and move heavy shit all over the place. Lifting heavy is the most effective way to simply get stronger, and when you get stronger EVERYTHING IS EASIER. Anybody who would like to argue that being strong doesn’t make most everything in your activities of daily living easier. I’d love to hear it.

If you’re missing out on one or a few of these methods in your daily training program, I would urge you to at least give one or two of them a try. God forbid you find something out about yourself you didn’t know yesterday and change your routine, right?