Lots of people, young athletes in particular, put in a lot of work but don't necessarily get the results they want. The issue is that while sweat is required to get the gains you want, if you invest that sweat in the wrong exercises or programs you won't get the desired results. If a 100 meter sprinter wants to get faster, and spends his days running marathons, he is indeed working hard but his sprint times will probably get worse. This is the same premise for most team sport athletes - sweat doesn't always equal improvement.

I saw a video a friend of mine posted on facebook yesterday - it featured a few high school football players on a field doing a variety of different exercises in what he termed their "phase I" of the off-season. They were mixing in sets of flipping tires, jumping hurdles, running around cones, doing jumping jacks, sprinting, and a few other exercises, a crossfit style workout. I had two immediate thoughts - 1) it's great that these kids are willing to get to work and pursue their goals, and 2) it's a shame that their sweat could have been better invested.

Let's take a look at what they're getting out of that workout. They are most likely getting in better shape, improving heart health, and improving their conditioning. Also, they're bonding as a team and building trust between teammates, which can serve them well during the season. On the other hand, they probably aren't making big strength gains, or as good of strength gains as they could being on a more well structured program with basic tenants of progressive overload and strengthing specific movement patterns.

If we revisit the exercises shown in the video, we should note that nothing is wrong with any of the exercises. The question is, are they the right exercises for their particular goals? Are these exercises going to increase the players' maximal output and low rep max outs? Because for football players, that is largely what matters - how much force can you create in short bursts. Their workout doesn't match their goals, however, that workout might match someone else's goals. Each sport has different needs, and workouts can be catered to match. Generally, a good strength training foundation and progressive overload on the right exercises is the right path.

Working hard is a pre-requisite for getting reaching lofty goals, but it isn't the only pre-requisite. Working hard needs to be combined with working smart and directing your energy in the right direction. Don't just look for ways to make yourself sweat, look for ways to improve performance. Don't waste your sweat on the wrong exercises, and if you find a strength coach who's only looking for you to sweat and be tired, then keep looking. You need a strength coach who knows how to invest that energy to get the best returns.

​Alex Drayson

This has become one of my main strength exercises for the athletes I train over the last few years. Some might say that a unilateral exercise is inferior to its bilateral counterpart, but I would disagree. I actually prefer programming the unilateral movement. Don’t get me wrong, they are both great exercises, but I tend to favor the rear foot elevated split squat (RFESS). If you prefer the bilateral movement that is ok, but think about what is the best movement for the athlete that you are training.

Most athletes are in a unilateral position when they play sports so why not get them into that position in the training facility. I have a few reasons why I prefer the RFESS. Some of them have to do with performance and some have to do with injury reduction.

Side Note: If you injure an athlete while they are training they can’t play. This would be counterproductive.
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Here I am performing the Front Squat and RFESS, while Alex discusses point number 2 below.

So here are a few reasons why you will see athletes at SportPerformanceU performing the RFESS as their main strength exercise.

1. Sport Specificity- I do think the term gets overused and abused in most cases, but for a higher caliber athlete where the term should actually apply, I’m all about it. If you are in a unilateral position during the high majority of the sport you play, mimicking that movement in the training facility is a great idea. Athletes that are sprinting while playing their sport would benefit greatly from using this exercise as their main strength movement.

2. Bilateral Deficit- Yes the elevated foot is helping, I get it, but not to the extent that you can ignore the significant difference when comparing the two. For example the highest RFESS I have seen done in my facility is 265lbs for 3 reps. This athlete's bilateral squat is nowhere close to doubling that number. End of story.

3. Neutral Spine- The number one role of a performance coach is not to increase an athlete’s speed, power or strength; it is to keep them injury free and ready to go on game day. One way to do this is programming exercises that will improvement athletic quality while minimizing risk of injury. The bilateral squat is a difficult exercise for many athletes to do properly. There are many reasons for this, but for the purpose of this point I will focus on the spine.

Maintaining a neutral lumbar spine is difficult for most athletes once their thighs pass parallel to the floor. I’m not going to go into the intricacies of this point, but it is clearly an issue. By performing the RFESS this becomes a mute point, the lumbar spine can no longer go into flexion. Risk vs. reward must always be considered when programming exercises for your athletes. When it comes to maintaining a neutral spine, the RFESS wins.
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Agree or disagree that the RFESS should be your athletes main strength exercise, you have to agree that it is an exercise that most all athletes should be doing. If you prefer it to be an accessory lift, that’s fine, just make sure that your athletes are doing it. 

Being an endurance athlete and I use the word athlete loosely; I just started mountain biking races this year, I have come to appreciate even more how important strength training is to those specific athletes. It is strength training that compliments an endurances athletes sport training in such a way that they will be able to push harder up the mountain, run faster up a hill or explode through the water and off the wall with greater power. 

In all these sports strength training will help you compete at a greater level, but no more so than in swimming. In a sport where hundredths of a second mean everything, strength training should be a focus of any competitive swimmer. Dry land training for swimmers has come a long way in the last few years, but there is still much ground to be made. The old school mentality of dry land training for swimmers was to perform additional endurance exercise such as jogging or jumping rope. Although these activities in and of themselves are great to do, they are not going to help swimmers perform better in the pool. The new thought is that swimmers and other endurance athletes alike need a properly constructed strength training program to follow.

There are many things that would go into a comprehensive strength training program, but for the sake of this post I would like to focus mainly on the pure strength side of things. Strength training is really about force production. To move something faster, yourself or an object, you need to be able to create a greater amount of force against another object. For a swimmer, that would mean applying a greater force into the wall during turns and into the water during laps. Let’s say for example that a swimmer could cut .02 of a second off their time with each turn in a 25 meter pool while swimming the 200 meter free event from strength training for let’s say, a few weeks. If my calculations are correct this swimmer would take off .14 of a second. I’ve heard that is a lot in swimming. That is the difference between a swimmer being on a proper strength training program and cutting that .14 of a second off their time versus one that keeps their same time from not being on a proper training program.  

Ok, so strength training is important, so what do I do? Unfortunately your specific program is not so black and white, there is a lot of gray involved, but there are many staples that should work for everyone if applied appropriately. This would include squat and deadlift variations, sled pushes, pushups, chin ups and rows. Most strength training programs will be built around these main movements.
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Whether you are a swimmer or other endurance athlete make sure that you are following a strength training program that is best suited to your needs. Most endurance athletes should do well with training twice a week and some do like to bump it up to three times a week during their offseason. 

Once the season rolls around, a lot of players stop taking the care of themselves that they did in the off-season. The truth is, the rigors of the season, practices, and games require just as much attention as the strength training of the off-season.

1) Drink and eat properly - if you don't fuel yourself right, you won't be at your best. Period. Try filling a car with soda and french fries and see how well it runs. Our bodies need complete foods, not pre-packaged sugar bars and snacks. Eat lots of fruit and vegetables, get some real proteins and healthy lipids (fats, like avocado and fish), and drink tons of water (no, gatorade is not as good as water. It's just sugar water).

2) Sleep - our bodies get to recover when we sleep. It's vital to our functionality, not just as athletes, but as people. Get some good sleep every night. This means planning ahead at times. Don't leave that paper to the last minute or cram for that test. Plan ahead, and get a bit done each night so you never have to compromise your sleep.

3) Lift - you don't need to lift four times a week with heavy sets and high volume like the off-season, but you need to maintain strength. When strength falters, injuries follow. Try to get at least 1-2 lifts per week, with low volume and moderate-high intensity. It shouldn't take more than a half hour to 45 minutes.

4) Recover - there are so many ways you can help your body recover with "active rest" - this includes using the foam roller and manual therapy to help promote blood flow and break up knots. It means doing what we call "developmental" exercises, which address any restrictions you might have in movement patterns. This means perhaps some static stretching in the evenings after practice, and more active mobility work as often as possible.

If you want to compete at the highest level, you need to prepare for it. Take care of yourself the right way, and you will be at your best on the field.

How much time do you have to spend training outside of what you do for your sport specifically? After practices, competitions and the other daily life activities how many hours are there left to train? This is a question that needs to be answered thoroughly and honestly to take full advantage of being on a training program that is best suited to your time availability. Everyone’s time is limited so the question is how can we be the most efficient with ours.

With limited time during certain parts of the sports calendar there has to be laser like focus on what the most important things are that need to be done. When an athlete is in season their time spend in the training facility will be decreased compared to the off season. This is a probably the time of the year where their time will be the most limited. There is no room to be adding things to the training program for the sake of more being better. For that matter, during any part of the sport year more being better is nearly never the case that should be taken with few exceptions.

 This will be vastly different when comparing a younger athlete to a veteran. And when I say younger I am referring to a 12 yr old and a veteran would be 18 yrs old if he had been training since he was 12. A 12 yr old that has no time constraints and has never trained before would probably do great on three training sessions a week no matter if he is currently in season or off season.  That would be the best case scenario. If three times a week is not in the cards I would not go below training twice a week. Training once a week, no matter the time constraints, will produce limited results.

For a more seasoned athlete, let’s say an 18 yr old baseball player that has been training for 6 years now and is in season and pitches twice in the upcoming week has to schedule their training volume for the week. Now it gets a little trickier.  This week might only be 1-2 sessions depending on how he is feeling.  It might involve more soft tissue work. Maybe he is feeling great and wants to get a few sets of heavy deadlifts in relative to an in season program. The next week he might pitch once or have an off week. What happens then? There are many variables when it comes to scheduling and coaching a higher caliber athlete that need to be accounted for. There is also no way to predict how an athlete is going to feel in the middle of a season or how much time they have to commit to training on a given week, but a coach with a good eye will make the best of both situations.

The point being, do not get obsessed with hitting a certain number of training sessions every week for the whole year. Take into consideration the time of the year as it relates to the sport being played, how experienced the athlete is as far as training experience and how recovered the athlete is for the training session. With all these things taken into consideration a proper training program can be put together.

James DeAndressi B.S, NASM-CPT has been interning at SportPerformanceU this summer and will be today’s guest blogger. James earned his bachelor’s degree in exercise science from Southern Connecticut State University and is planning on attending school this fall to become a physical therapist assistant.  Below you will find his piece on why including a proper warm is so important.

It is clear based on research, observation, and comparison that a good warm up before a workout can increase the overall quality of how you spend your time in the gym. The question is however, what makes up a good warm up and why is the warm up part of the workout important? All trainers may have different opinions and different ways of training but for the most part, it is fair to say that most qualified trainers in any setting should agree with the warm up being a key part to an individual’s daily routine.
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At SPU we will typically start a client with soft tissue work as well as some specific dynamic warm up exercises. Soft tissue work for a client will be mainly foam rolling or simple active massage unless the trainer is certified and/or licensed as a professional health care provider. They need to be legally bound to doing some type of manual soft tissue work on a client. Foam rolling is safe, effective, and backed by research to roll out fascia to fix cross linked muscle fibers. This will in turn make the muscles fire and perform the best it can for that specific person at that specific time. 

Foam Rolling Techniques

​A good warm up needs to consist of anything we as trainers believe will have a positive impact on our client during the workout. Mobility, or in other words, the ability to move freely through a given range of motion is one component to a good warm up. Exercises to increase range of motion include ankle dorsiflexion at a wall or shoulder wall slides. Corrective exercises are another key component. These exercises will be put on a client’s program depending on the results of some type of movement analysis. Corrective exercise is a broad topic but in the simplest of terms, they are specific exercises that will be targeting some type of human movement deficiency. Examples of some corrective exercises would be Unilateral or Bilateral Internal/External Rotation of the shoulder joint or hip joint and bird dogs to increase core stability as well as to strengthen a specific deep muscle connected to the spine which can cause pain. Trainers should take note of any types of movement deficiencies during every training session in order to progress or add/subtract corrective exercises. In other words, analyzing movement should not be an afterthought but should be constantly on a trainer's mind during sessions. To learn more about SPU’s specific biomechanical analysis, read our blog which gives some detail on this topic.

​Dynamic exercises are another way we can prepare a client’s body for the upcoming workout. At SPU this is the final part of the warm up before going into our power, strength, speed, and conditioning blocks. According to Eric Cressey, in his book Maximum Strength “we are focusing on raising body temperature which in turn will raise muscles temperature. Lubricating muscles and joints as well as increasing mobility in key joints while enhancing stability in others in order to perform strength movements more efficiently” is also part of the equation. Some examples of dynamic exercises would be leg raises or a lateral shuffle. 

​Trainers who understand the importance of a well-balanced exercise program will have a warm up section that is not overlooked, rushed, or inefficient. For a client’s own personal well being, I would recommend changing trainers if they did not properly warm up a client before a workout. Fitness professionals should all look at the warm up as a line of defense, if you will, for decreasing injury. As fitness professional including a solid warm up is a necessity. 

For as long as we can remember, static stretching has been considered a cure-all for injuries and maladies. What's the first thing your coach tells you to do when you get hurt? Most likely "go stretch it out." While static stretch serves a purpose, it's really not a cure-all.

First, it's not really a good warm up. Most folks are up to date on this and use a dynamic warm up, but I still see some teams do static stretching prior to activity. (Just as an aside, static stretching is where we hold a limb at the end range of motion of a particular joint for a set time; dynamic stretches include continuous movement). Using static stretching as a warm up has actually been proven to decrease physical outputs. 

Second, most injuries don't require basic static stretching. Take a muscle strain, for instance - the muscle is damaged because at some point it took on too much force at too great a range of motion. Stretching the muscle even further doesn't really accomplish anything positive. There are some cases where physical therapists and doctors might use stretching during a rehab protocol to help regain a lost range of motion, but this is for much more traumatic injuries that have greater impact to function and require a more comprehensive healing method. But, speaking of range of motion...

Third, static stretching isn't always the solution to a "tight" muscle. In many cases, tightness is a symptom of something else, like neuromuscular patterning or stability in an adjacent segment/joint. In this case, stretching accomplishes very little. Have you ever met anyone who says they stretch all the time and still seems very tight? It happens fairly often - stretching isn't the answer to every problem. In some cases, it even makes the problem worse. A kid with limitation in the hip flexor might go to stretch the hip flexor and instead just arch his lower back giving the illusion of hip stretch, but really create low back problems without actually doing anything to the hip. In reality, the problem might just have been a weakness somewhere in the hip complex that made it not willing to move into a full range of motion.

The point of this article is just to point out that stretching isn't a cure-all - it's one of many tools that we have, and to be honest, it's one of the smaller, less useful ones. Stability work, soft tissue work, modified stretching with small movements and controlled isometric contractions, and strength all tend to get better results for increasing mobility than stretching.

Alex Drayson

As much as we try to prevent injuries from taking place with solid training plans, quality nutrition and the right amount of R&R, we still have a pretty good chance of running into an injury sooner or later. How serious that injury is will depend on a multitude of factors. Were you playing football and took a helmet to the side of the knee or on the track sprinting the first 100 meters of your 400 meter race? Whatever the injury is and how long it keeps us out will vary, but how you respond to an injury will likely dictate how well you recover and how fast you return to play.
Attitude is everything. If you have the right attitude you can accomplish anything. Our mind is by far the most powerful tool we have. If you have two athletes with the same injury and everything else is equal besides their attitude it is easy to say you would take the athlete with the better attitude. But it’s not just that their attitude is better, it is that their attitude will make their recovery that much more successful. If your mindset is to get back to the level of play you were at before the injury took place your focus on the things you have control of will be greater. Those things include your training, nutrition and recovery program.
Having the right attitude with or without an injury is something that has to be developed. It takes work and doesn’t happen just because you want it to. Practice being more positive about the good things you have and worry less about the negative. Think about the good things that can happen today instead of bad things that might happen. Be grateful for what you have. Stop complaining. Help others; it will make you feel better about yourself and your situation.
You have the choice to be a positive or negative person and the choice you make will affect you as an athlete. Having a positive attitude will make your outlook on your injury less daunting and leave you will more energy to focus on getting back to play. Think positive, it’s amazing the possibilities that will open. 
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During my time in this profession I have had many young men tell me that they could not gain weight, it was impossible and only an act of God would suffice. Well I’m here to tell you that that is a load of you know what. Just like anything else in life, it comes down to how much work you are willing to put into it. There are two problems facing the supposed hard gainer. First and foremost they need to be eating enough quality food to actually put on weight. This would seem to be pretty straight forward, but most are missing the boat on this one. Second and just as important they need to be on a quality strength and conditioning programs.

Below you will find 10 simple tips for how to gain some quality size. 

1. If you are eating all the right stuff and have not gained weight in the last month eat more of what you are eating. If you are eating three eggs, eat four instead. Having a quarter cup of rice, eat half a cup. Just having half an avocado, eating the whole thing. See if just adding more will do the trick.

2. If you are not eating the right things here is a small cheat sheet.
Protein-Eggs, Chicken, Turkey, Milk, Salmon, Steak
Carbs- Sweet Potatoes, Bananas, Rice, Red Potatoes, Black Beans
Fats- Eggs, Cheddar Cheese, Avocadoes, Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Almonds, Salmon
Fruits- Bananas, Strawberries, Oranges, Grapes, Pineapples
Vegetables- Broccoli, Spinach, Eggplant, Tomatoes, Carrots
If you eat a lot of the things on this list you will gain weight.

3. Maybe all the meals are right, but you are missing what should be in between. Some might be able to gain weight with only two or three meals a day, but other need more. Here are a few options.
A. Jerky, Pecans and Banana
B. Hardboiled Eggs, Blueberries and Oat & Banana Cookies
C. Greek Yogurt w/ Homemade Trail Mix

4. Make sure to get a protein, fat and carbohydrate source at each meal. Missing either would be a big mistake when trying to put on size.

5. Meal Prep! If it is important to you, put in some effort! Don’t watch a 30 minutes of television that evening and spend some time prepping your food for the next day. Hard boiling a few eggs take a few minutes and putting a banana in your bag takes seconds. Putting some almonds in a plastic bag doesn’t take too long either. A little effort goes a long way.

Here are some tips I wish I had back in my day from a strength training prospective.

6. Stick to the basics! And don’t only stick to them, master them! Learn how to clean, squat, bench, deadlift and press properly. No, just doing bicep curls does not count as a training session. Stay away from machines and isolation exercises, you will thank me!

7. More is not always better when trying to get your weight up. Extra strength training sessions and large amounts of conditioning will put a quick stop to your efforts. Three or four solid strength training will work great.

8. If size is the goal, the majority of your training should focus on hypertrophy. There is still plenty of room for your 3-6 rep range, but you better be bumping it up a notch as far as reps are concerned if you want to put on size. 8-12 reps should do the trick.

9. Here is a question. When does your body actually build muscle and gain size? Is it when you are in the gym training? No, it is actually when you are home relaxing or better yet sleeping. When you train you are beating your body up. It will need a nap or two and 8+ hrs of shut eye a night to reap the benefits of all that training you just did. Get to bed early!

10. Be Consistent. This goes for everything in life and putting on size is no different. If you really want to put on size you have to be consistent with both your nutrition and your training. Don’t skip meals or training sessions and get to bed on tie every night.
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There you have it. Ten tips for putting on size. Now get to work!