Another thing I got up to on a recent trip to the Unites States (where I brushed up on my Active Release Techniques in San Diego) was to go and hang out with my buddy Joe Dowdell in New York before travelling up with him and a few of his trainers to the 2011 Eleiko Strength Summit.  Joe owns Peak Performance, which is New York’s top personal training gym and he has everyone from Wall St bankers to NBA/MMA athletes to movie stars to Google’s CEO training there.  For instance, while he and I trained one day, Hillary Swank and Ethan Hawke were both getting trained by personal trainers.  And if you are wondering, yes they all have to do the prowler and sled no matter who they are! His gym has all manner of gym equipment (no gimmicks though) and he and I share a really similar philosophy to training: make sure your training contains the exercises that will give you the most value for time invested.

It doesn't matter if you are a movie star, you still have to push the sled!!

After I had had enough of the views at the top of the top of Empire State Building and jogging in Central Park, we drove up to Rhode Island for the Eleiko Strength Summit held at Charles Poliquin’s personal training education gym facility.  The Eleiko Strength Summit is a great event that was hosted by the Bloomberg family who are the owners of Eleiko.  Among the attendees ranged from personal trainers, strength & conditioning coaches and exercise physiologists.  There were a number of speakers who all gave insights into how they train their athletes.

Here are some great pointers I picked up from the Eleiko Strength Summit:

1) One new variation on barbell pulling and elbow flexion (e.g. bicep curls) exercises is to use straps as handles on the bar.  By doing this, it will improve grip strength, add a unique overload to your muscles and instantly add more exercise variations you can use with minimal equipment.  One thing I definitely like is the strap variation for bent over rows as it gives you a greater range of motion that you don’t get with regular barbell bent over rows.  This is because without the straps the bar will hit you in the chest and you will not be able to get as full as contraction of the pulling muscles.

A pair of lifting straps can instantly add a number of new low cost variations to traditional barbell pulling and curling exercises

2) Jonas Sahratian, the head of strength & conditioning for the University of North Carolina mens’ basketball team, only gives athletes that he has not seen train personally, programs containing bodyweight exercises before they arrive to his squad.  This is because a) bodyweight exercises can be extremely tough and beneficial for correcting weak muscles and conditioning (just think of gymnasts training) and b) it is going to be pretty hard for an athlete to injure themselves or mess themselves up with only bodyweight exercises which is his biggest concern.  Jonas says his most important job is keeping his athletes healthy and he also gave case studies of how they used pool work in between gyms to keep players on the court.

3) Sean Hayes from the University of Georgia basketball program gave us brilliant progressions for speed work drills that he had used effectively in his previous job with the Buffalo Bills NFL team.  He also highlighted the differences that he makes to the drills based on the sport e.g. basketball has a much shorter distance for players to accelerate over vs. football players.  One thing he really drilled was that if an athlete is not functionally strong, it is almost pointless doing a lot of speed work with them – they are not going to get anywhere near the benefits they should.

4) The head strength coach at Yale University’s football program, Emil Johnson gave us all his off season training regime.  The two biggest things he has learned is to forgo back squats altogether in favor of front squats (due to the size of the athletes he works with) and also to make everything in the off season a competition.  Yale’s football program does this by choosing 7 teams from their squad and having a draft night (just like the NFL).  Emil then showed some video of his team working out which I have put below and you can see how this competition set up pumps up the athletes to really push their training!

This video definitely git me pumped up to train!!

5) Mark Knapp (and Rickard Nilsson who was absent) gave a presentation on the testing process athletes should undertake to determine weaknesses and what is the limiting factor in performance.  Nilsson (who is a former Swedish Olympic weightlifter and now is part of SOC - Sweden’s Olympic Committee) has developed a physical testing procedure or “Fysprofilen”.  For your interest, Sweden actually has the lowest cost per Olympic medal (e.g. for the amount of funding the receive, Swedish athletes win the most Olympic medals) so the SOC are doing something right there.  Now the Fysprofilen is adjusted for 38 different sports and the physical characteristics those sports require out of athletes to be successful e.g. a shot putter is going to require different physical qualities than a field hockey player. The biggest thing the SOC have found is that in most cases the biggest factor in how well a team or athlete will perform is directly correlated to their aerobic capabilities.  Yes shock and horror but wait, this is where it gets interesting… their aerobic capacity does not really help them with performance in the sport (it does of course but is not as important as strength & power in most sports).   Rather it helps them recover better between training and competitions so they can train at a certain volume needed for top performance.  Which makes sense - the athletes that can keep up with a high level of training volume and recover from it quicker are going to be able to produce better results.  Their basic marker was a 3000m time trial run and if you ran it over 12 minutes, your aerobic capacity was too low for top performance in most sports.  Between 11 and 12 minutes, your aerobic capacity wasn’t bad but it still needed work and under 11 minutes and you only needed maintenance aerobic work e.g. once every 7 to 10 days.   Now as a note, they did mention that some athletes can still dominate in their chosen sport without any aerobic training but generally they are blessed with a superior genetic aerobic capacity or other “agents” that aid recovery.

Do not be shy.  Leave some comments below and I will give you all what I learned from the Bulgarian Weightlifting coach, Ivan Abadjiev in my next post.  Oh and make sure you watch that Yale video again just before you train - it is awesome for training motivation!!