I’ve been doing quite a bit of traveling and speaking around the United States lately and one of the biggest things I’m trying to do is educate people about screening and assessing themselves and their clients.  It is enormously important and also enormously overlooked and forgotten in our realm.  We’ve become very good with practicing technique, programming properly and spending time mobilizing.  The issue is that we don’t really understand mobility.  People come to me saying they’re mobilizing but they’re still in pain or they’re still limited with “X” or “Y” exercise.  The first thing I’ll ask is if anyone ever evaluated them to see where the issue is coming from, or even if the individual even needs more flexibility work.  Are you using the right exercises?  Do you know how to tell if your exercises are making a difference?

Being able to assess our athletes will allow us to hone in on their specific deficits and efficiently correct these.  It’s important to know the source of someone’s dysfunction because if we guess wrong we’re essentially spinning our wheels by applying an intervention that doesn’t get at the root cause of the problem.  Also, if we apply a shotgun approach to mobility then we’re being incredibly inefficient.  Mobility and corrective exercise is already not very sexy, no need to waste time working on things that don’t need to be worked on.  We want to spend the bulk of our time training and mobility should be short, sweet and effective.  However, we can’t ignore mobility as some experts will espouse.  Not everything can be fixed by squatting more and some things can be made worse by this approach.

Think of it this way.  Imagine someone who has poor overhead squat mechanics.  This could be coming solely from a right ankle dorsiflexion limitation stemming from …read more

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Well, the dates for this year’s open and regionals level competition are now up.  It’s happening!  The first open workout is scheduled to be announced February 26th 2015.  At fitness pain free we’re starting our pre-season preparation.  Month’s of off-season skill and strength work are starting to be blended with more conditioning work specific to what we’ll be seeing at the open this year.  We’ve spent the past 9 months building efficiency with gymnastics skills, olympic lifts and building baseline conditioning to carry us through the competitive season.  

We can never be completely sure of what will pop up in the open but if previous year’s events are any indication we can have a pretty good idea.  Doublets, AMRAPS with an average time of 10-12 minutes, snatches, clean and jerk, burpees and box jumps are all something we should be getting mighty good at.

This month’s programming is really getting specific.  If you’re wondering how to progress from off-season training to in-season, here’s how I do it.  If you don’t have a plan for training the last 2 months before the open, I’ve made the plan for you.  Check it out with the link below.

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What’s New?:

• Progressively adding more olympic weightlifting into met-con to prepare for the open while minimizing injury risk
• More dynamic gymnastics skill preparation.  I’m thinking we’ll be seeing more muscle-ups this year.  Be ready.
• Game plans for workout combos we might be seeing this year.  Build a knowledge database of how to approach your workouts so you’ll have the right game plan when you see the open workouts.
• Critical and non-critical workouts.  Part of any good training program is knowing when …read more
  
  

Lifters who want to build muscular size get overly fixated on lifting heavy. There are better, faster ways to get bigger. …read more

Don’t freak out, but not everyone is built for barbell back squats. Luckily, there are plenty of hardcore alternatives. …read more

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