The next two entries are going to address sport-performance training as it pertains to lacrosse and baseball.
Being a former Division-I athlete and current strength coach, I’ve had the luxury of being exposed to various sports-performance training and methodologies since I was eighteen years old. Further, our P360 list of athletes include professional athletes of multiple sports, members of the USD men’s soccer squad, and over 45 local lacrosse players from Orange County to San Diego; which has provided a very nice variety in training technique. While principles are the same across the board for most team sports, each sport presents its own unique challenges and priorities in training its athletes.
Lacrosse is no different as it contains aspects of coordination and raw physicality. There are six key factors in developing a well-rounded, complete athlete and I’m going to show you our philosophy at Performance360 from the ground-up for every single one of our athletes (all videos contain real P360 athletes).
1. “Prehabilitation”
Often overlooked as an important part of an athlete’s training, I believe “prehabilitation” (or injury prevention) to be just as critical as any speed or strength training. You wouldn’t build a mansion on a sand dune, so you need to first ensure a rock-solid foundation in your soft tissue quality before building on top of it. There are two phases to injury prevention that should be utilized.
Soft Tissue Quality (Foam Roller)
The video above shows just a fraction of the total body foam rolling that you should do prior to training. Foam rolling is gaining more and more recognition in the sport-performance world due to its positive effect on the quality of soft tissue, the loosening of tight spots and knots and improved overall muscle function. Simply put, your whole body will move and react better by incorporating foam roller work into your training. It’s very uncomfortable at first, but as the quality of your soft tissue improves so to does foam rolling tolerability.
Mobility (Stretching, Warm-Up)
This is designed to prepare your entire body for what lies ahead. You are not just “warming-up”, but activating muscles, joints and tendons for the stresses that you are about to place upon them. This incorporates a series of stretches and dynamic movements that include:
- Kneeling Quad Stretch
- Supine Bridge
- Sleeper Stretch
- Band Walks
- Swiss Ball Push-Ups
- Deceleration Lunges
The modern warm-up of taking a jog around the block is outdated and inefficient. As athletes, we need to prepare our bodies for more intensity and stress than common fitness enthusiasts. Your workout is not the same as theirs, so why would your warm-up?
2. Resistance Training
Strength training is an obvious and crucial part of any athlete’s training program, but sport-specificity and its movements greatly dictate specificity of your training program. Now, there are a few different schools of thought in terms of what type of format to utilize for resistance training. I am a firm believer in supersets as the most efficient way to train as an athlete. Having seen the benefits first hand as a former Division-I athlete, I am convinced it is superior to straight sets as you can work more muscles in a shorter amount of time. The simple reality is that there are more amateur athletes than professional, and time is a critical factor that must be recognized and managed accordingly.
Lower Body
Where you are in your offseason dictates what type of exercises you are going to perform in a given cycle, but by and large it will be a lot of olympic style lifts in the initial offseason and unilateral movements (lunges, step-ups) closer to the season. There are really three main goals when working lower body for sports-performance.
- Strength/Power – olympic style lifts such as squats, deadlifts and snatches are excellent for developing muscle fibers that directly translate athletic attributes such as shot velocity and checking power.
- Acceleration & Deceleration – you also want to be very cognizant of both acceleration and deceleration aspects of your lower body training. The athleticism and ease at which you can go from full-speed to a complete stop is very important in preventing minor injuries (i.e. hamstring strain) and serious injuries alike (i.e. ACL tear). Walking lunges are a great deceleration exercise.
- Balance – 90% of all lacrosse shots happen while on the run or at least off balance making it very important that you incorporate balance drills in your training. Unilateral movements with barbell load across your shoulders are excellent for this.
Upper Body
The majority of lacrosse upper body strength training will take place in the core (below), but there are certainly some important exercises to implement for complete, symmetrical strength.
- Wide Grip Seated Row
- Pull-Ups
- Neutral Grip DB Bench Press
- Pushups (of any variety)
- Forearm Training
Core Training
This is a HUGELY important aspect of any athletic training and lacrosse is no different. In fact, since lacrosse is such a rotational sport it is arguably the most important aspect of strength training. In sport, you want to perform core exercises that lengthen your abdominal muscles as opposed to standard crunches, which shorten them. Some examples include barbell rollouts, reverse crunches, pallof press, planks and bridges.
This an exercises invented by John Pallof made popular by coaches such as Eric Cressey. It’s an outstanding exercise at developing core strength for any athlete. Specifically, by resisting the cable from rotating your core, you’re developing your core stabilizers and protecting the all-important lower back.
3. Speed, Agility & Quickness
Grant it, these are three completely different athletic qualities and the training is a bit varied for all three. But, for the sake of breaking up training splits I am including them all in one group as I believe you can work on them simultaneously. You want to train all three of these qualities at as close to 100% intensity as you can (similar to plyometrics, below) in order to get maximum benefit, and the one thread that all three have in common is the energy system used to fuel the movements. By all measures, all three of these movements happen quickly and do not last long. Let me explain.
Speed – in lacrosse, your burst of speed might happen for a maximum of ten seconds, but usually around four to seven and is rarely in a full sprint longer than forty yards.
Quickness & Agility – shaking a defender, moving laterally to cover an attacker, moving semi-laterally towards the goal; these are all moves that happen in a matter of a few seconds.
To fuel these movements, your body uses its very first source of energy known as ATP and Creatine Phospate. It is stored in the cells of your muscles and generally burns off within four to ten seconds. Likewise, to train these movements athletically you want the duration of most drills and exercises to last within that timeframe. These include sprints, ladder drills, cone drills, burst suicides and mini-hops.
With Performance360 fortunate enough to be based in San Diego, we are lucky to have the sand at our disposal as well. Sandblasting is an incredible way to work on speed as it provides natural resistance that gyms and ramps cannot supply. Both the San Diego Padres and Chargers utilize the beaches as part of their offseason training.
We also put every single one of our athletes through intense ladder drill training to constantly improve footwork and lightness on one’s feet. There are countless ladder drills that you can perform and we have a core group of about eight to ten exercises that our guys go through EVERY agility day.
4. Plyometric/Elasticity Training
Plyometric training is still relatively new in the world of sports-performance, and there is research on both sides as to whether or not it’s truly effective. Well, consider me a believer as I believe the following: To jump higher, you need to jump. That is a bit of a simplistic statement as plyometrics and jump training have benefits far more advanced than increasing your vertical leap and broad jump. The physiology behind plyometric training can be explained by a scientific term known as the Stretch Shortening Cycle (SSC), wherein the short stretch of your muscles prior to contraction results in a more foreceful and rapid contraction, aka, you become more powerful.
Power and speed; those are the two main attributes we are after when training for plyometrics.
It’s also very important that you pay attention to capacity when training elasticity as plyometrics are to be done at near 100% effort. As soon as your efforts drop it’s time to stop that particular exercise, thus you are generally not going longer than eight seconds or six to eight reps on a given drill.
5. Endurance
This is a tricky one as frankly, there is a lot of old, outdated information and psychological belief on what to do for sport endurance training. Aside from cross-country, I cannot think of a single sport where you should run for a prolonged distance as part of your preseason training. Sounds silly, right? I know, we’ve all been raised that running for distance is how to prepare for a season’s “conditioning” rigors. But, let me ask you? How many times in a game have you run for thirty minutes consecutively, at a maintained speed of six mph? Never, right? So, why would you prepare your body to do so beforehand? Seems a bit counterproductive if you ask me.
But don’t just ask me, let’s ask science. While distance running certainly has some great benefits for your health and for conditioning, there are also some serious drawbacks as it pertains to athletic performance; the main negative being what it does to your muscle fibers.
In layman’s terms, we have three main types of muscle fibers.
- Type I fibers (slow twitch)
- Typer IIb fibers (fast twitch)
- Typer IIa fibers (somewhere in the middle)
As athletes, we rely heavily on our type IIb, fast twitch fibers for just about everything that makes us successful (sprinting, shot velocity, checking). Without training these fibers, we would be completely useless and probably end up fetching water for the starting lineup. Each fiber is responsbile for a different type of action within our bodies. Type I fibers are primarily used for aerobic, endurance activities such as running for longer than a sprint, whereas Type II fibers are best used for anaerobic, high-intensity activity that are shorter in duration(1).
Here’s where it gets dangerous for athletes to run for distance. In order to use your Type II muscle fibers with maximal effort, you need to first recruit your Type I fibers. This same prinicple of summation works the other way around, however. Once you have exhausted your Type I fibers (slow twitch), which is what happens when you run for distance, your body calls upon your Type II (fast twitch) fibers for help. Over time, this can lead to a fiber shift in your Type II fibers towards more of a Type I phenotype(2)…a bad, bad thing for athletes.
Think of what would happen to a running back if he lost his burst? That’s precisely the reason you don’t see those players do any long distance running as part of their speed programs.
The answer? Cardio intervals that alternate between jogging and sprinting every thirty seconds for twenty minutes. This will significantly improve your conditioning while more closely simulating game action.
6. Flexibility & Recovery
There are many different stretches, forms and technique to improve one’s flexibility, and in my opinion, it’s not important how you work on it. It’s just important that you work on it consistently in your training, spending at least ten to fifteen minutes a day on your “tight” spots and areas that require attention.
There you have it. Follow these six Golden Rules and you’ll see your game drastically improve throughout the course of an offseason.
(1) Cressey, Eric. “TMUSCLE.com | Cardio Confusion.” T NATION | The Intelligent and Relentless Pursuit of Muscle. 20 Jan. 2005. Web. 27 July 2010. <http://www.tmuscle.com/free_online_article/sports_body_training_performance_repair/cardio_confusion>.
