These types of articles are scary. As a “fitness person” I’ve know for years that the business world has more interest in disease than in health. There is lots of money in sickness (junk food, drugs, surgery’s, tests etc.) and very little in health. Take a second and read this.
Seasoned Investigative Journalist Exposes Inside Strategies to Censor the News
Nice simple breathing article. ( I don’t think you need the Butyeko Method but the first part is great)
Breathing Techniques to Improve Your Workout
I’ve never been a cool down guy but the evidence is mounting. Mike Vaughn’s YOU OWE ME 20 BREATHES sounds better every day.
An attendee at the recent Perform Better 1 Day in Chicago asked for some reading recommendations so I thought I’d share them here.
The basic two for everyone in every field are:
How to Wins Friends and Influence People- Dale Carnagie
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People- Stephen Covey
then from there work you way through:
Good to Great- Collins
Made to Stick – Collins
Goals- Brian Tracey
Slight Edge- Jeff Olsen
Never Eat Alone- Keith Ferrazanni
Creating Magic- Lee Cockrell
Start With Why- Simon Sinek
Hows that for a start?
Had one of my former interns write the other day asking for some presentation tips so I thought I’d share the here:
I think the big secrets aren’t secrets. You need to be funny, you need to be confident, you need to know your material. I think good video is also key. People get bored easily and love to see video illustrations. I know I always made notes about the best talks I saw. I wrote what I liked and didn’t like about speakers. I always remember loving video.
I also think that preparation is important. I hate when people can’t get their videos to work etc. I always use my own computer, arrive early and check that everything works and the videos run. As with everything lots of things can be helped by preparing.
Harvey Mckay in Swim With the Sharks said something to the effect of “their are thousands of ways to screw up and most could be avoided by more attention to detail”
Hope these help.
Michael Boyle's Strengthcoach.com Blog
I have had the pleasure of reading some great books in the past few year, many centered on how people succeed in a wide variety of professions. Books like Outliers, Talent Code and Talent is Overrated inspired me to share my story.
I am a “fitness expert” I guess. I am also a very average looking, balding, fifty five year old with no distinguished athletic resume. If this is the case, how did I end up a fitness expert? Simple, I read more and coached more than most people. As Outliers author Malcolm Gladwell would say, I have put in my ten thousand hours.
The bottom line is that success is much more about hard work and perseverance than it is about talent. We all know that the best players don’t make the best coaches, we just don’t always know why. My theory is the best athletes never had…
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This is a follow up to a post about why we no longer squat.
“I had another epiphany the other day. Another Ah-Ha moment. Sometimes when these ideas occur I can’t decide whether I am smart or dumb. Am I smart because I had this thought or dumb because it took so long? A member of my staff and I were talking about wall slides. If you don’t know, wall slides are a great exercise borrowed from physical therapy to develop the combination of shoulder mobility and scapular stability.”
Parents always fall into this trap. I love the U14 dads who are trying to stack a team to win the U14 Nationals. Guess what, that may be the wrong approach if your goal is for your child to advance to the highest level.
Jamie Rice, Head Coach at Babson College had a great point
“If they’re competitive, they’ve probably had adversity. That resilience, that elasticity is really important. That gets back to growth. We want kids who are winners not because they played for quote-unquote winning teams. They’re winners because they’ve pushed themselves, they’ve challenged themselves and they’ve overcome something. They’ve lost and then they’ve won.”
Being on the team that never loses is bad for kids. Losing is good. It builds character. It creates resilience. It creates drive. I have never sought out strong teams for my kids. What I do want is for them to play in competitive games. In truth, I could care less who wins or loses as long as the game is well played.
Thoughts?
I’ve unfortunately become famous ( or infamous) on the internet for my views on lower body training. A friend asked me if I could briefly explain my thoughts so I wrote this up. The question of why we don’t squat has both simple and complex answers. The simple reason is that we found the back squat and front squat to be the primary causes of back pain in our athletic population. At any point, in any season, approximately 20% of our athletes would be dealing some kind of back pain that was either caused by squatting or exacerbated by squatting.
The problem was finding an alternative that would allow similar loads. The answer came in three steps.
Step one was actually a picture of one of Joe DeFrancos athletes doing really heavy rear foot elevated split squats ( I think it was with 120 lb dumbbells). That picture opened up my mind to the idea that we could use really heavy loads in unilateral exercises . My first thought was “wow, that would be 480 for reps with two legs”. As a result, I reevaluated and added heavy rear foot elevated split squats to our programs.
Step two was an article by sprint coach Barry Ross. In the article Ross talked about how deadlifts required the use of more muscle mass than squats and were in truth a better total body exercise. As I sat and pondered, I had to agree. Grip work and back work were certainly a feature of the deadlift absent from the squat? I disliked deadlifts because my memories of the deadlift were the ugly ones I did in 1980’s powerlifting meets. Again as a result we added Trap Bar Deadlifts to our program.
The last step was beginning to look into the concept of bilateral deficit. The bilateral deficit research ( actually not new) supported what we saw. What we saw in the split squat was that our athletes were using proportionally heavier loads than they had used in the squat. In fact after one year we saw that our athletes split squat and front squat were equal.
As we progressed in our always experimental programming we saw the change that we desired. We had more healthy athletes. As I have always said, healthy athletes are goal 1, better athletes come second. What we found is that deadlifting gave us a bilateral, more hip dominant choice that seemed to decrease back pain while rear foot elevated split squats actually gave us both higher loads and unilateral, sport specific loads.The only thing wrong was that we were rejecting the sacred cow of squatting.
My thoughts have always been controversial but, always rooted in what was best for the athlete. Unfortunately the detractors ( haters is the popular term now) don’t want to think. They simply want to do what they have always done.
This brings me to one of my favorite quotes from Lee Cockrell in his book Creating Magic:
“What if the way we had always done it was wrong?”
Food for thought and fodder for debate.
PS- We have added front squats back with our young athletes to teach the clean catch and we do some goblet squats with beginners but, you won’t see any athletes with big loads on their shoulders in our facilities unless they are required to do that for a college test.
Here’s another really good reason to exercise as is there weren’t enough. No wonder our adult programs are exploding?
Exercise and Important Component of Cancer Treatment and Dementia Prevention
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