Brian Schiff’s Blog

I have trained hundreds of soccer players over the years ranging in age from age 8 to the ranks of MLS professionals.  The sport has taught me such an acute appreciation for body control and field agility.

For years, I have focused my lower body training on ground based movements such as lunges, squats, and multiplanar reaching progressions with great success.  To me, the lunge has always made great sense in terms of the apparent functional carry over or at the very least the related muscle activation pattern with sprinting, cutting and changing direction, not to mention acceleration.

A recent study in the May Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research looked at how walking forward lunges and jumping forward lunges impacted delayed onset muscle soreness, hamstring strength and sprinting performance.

Interestingly enough, after 6 weeks of training, the group doing walking lunges showed a 35% increase in concentric hamstring strength, while the jumping group had improved sprint running performance.  In past studies of 10 weeks of training using Nordic hamstring exercises, soccer players typically showed an 11% increase in eccentric hamstring strength. 

Meanwhile, neither group expereinced an increase in quadriceps strength, but the  control group actually saw a 7% reduction in quadriceps strength.  This would lend credence to my belief that while all the running in soccer is quad dominant, running itself does not increase quad strength per se.

Now, in regard to muscle soreness, there were no significant differences between groups per se, but delayed onset muscle soreness as measured 2 days after exercise did negatively impact running and jumping, but not strength.  No real surprise here.

The takeaways for coaches is that incorporating lunge walks and jumping lunges in training may bring about dual benefits.  Improved sprint performance is desirable as well as better hamstring strength for the prevention of muscle and knee injuries.  Increasing hamstring strength obviously is helpful in balancing Quad/Ham ratios for the reduction of ACL injuries as well as hopefully decreasing the likelihood of hamstring strains at ground impact through mid stance in running.  On the latter point, I favor deeper or reaching lunges to provide a greater stretch or elongation of the proximall hamstring fibers as well. 

I also like to employ a walking lunge with trunk rotation as part of my dynamic warm-up with my soccer players.  I ask them to rotate the trunk to the side of the lead leg which helps encourage hip abduction thereby activating the gluteus medius and reducing the internal rotation and valgus moment at the knee.  So, if you coach or train young soccer players, be sure to consider adding these body weight lunge exercises to your program 1-2x/week in the off-season and pre-season.

Golf is in the air in Dublin, OH as Tiger and the PGA have invaded my neck of the woods for the Memorial Tournament.  Too bad I am on vacation missing it!!  Anyway, I just read a new research article validating what many of us have been saying for years about dynamic warm-up – this time it relates to golfers.

Do you care about club head speed, accuracy and consistent ball contact?  Then listen up.  In the most recent edition of the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research, Jeffrey Gergley reveals some important findings relative to a passive stretching regime coupled with an active dynamic (AD) warm-up versus just an AD warm-up and its effects on golf performance.

In a nutshell, his study involved 15 young male competitive golfers.  Immediately after the warm-up, each subject was instructed to hit 10 full-swing golf shots with their driver after their normal pre-shot routine with 1 minute rest intervals between each shot.  The results are as follows:

Golfers who used the 20 minute passive stretch routine in addition to the AD warm-up with golf clubs saw:

1. A 4.91% decrease in club head speed
2. A 5.62% decrease in distance
3. A 31.04% decrease in accuracy
4. A 16.34% decrease in ball contact consistency

Wow!!  The take home message is this – golfers should focus their warm-up routine on active movements with the golf club emphasizing the bio mechanical range of motion needed in the golf swing itself.  Using a thorough dynamic warm-up will adequately prepare golfers to hit the ball better and reduce injuries.

Want such a warm-up?  Check out my Healthy Golf Shoulders E-Book for such a warm-up at www.healthygolfshoulders.com.  A sample warm-up move from it can be seen below.  

I had a former client of mine email the other day and ask for some hamstring exercises to relieve stiffness and soreness.  This female athlete suffered two ACL tears in high school in the same knee within 7 months of each other.  The first one was non-contact and the other was due to a questionable slide tackle  from a competitor only a few weeks after she returned ot full play.

Needless to say, I rehabbed her both times and she did great.  This girl is a phenomenal athlete to be sure.  She moves powerfully but gracefully at the saem time.  She is going to play for Clemson next year on scholarship.  After her surgery, she had some mild hamstring stiffness and soreness that eventually resolved in her return to play progression with me.    Since she needed some summer rehab exercises to knock out the stiffness again, I decided to put together a short video sequence of exercises for her to do.

Keep in mind, many field and court athletes suffer hamstring strains.  This athlete just had some residual stiffness related to her surgeries.  In the female athlete, we cant’ spend enough time strengthening the hamstrings.  However, here are some critical errors I have seen strength coaches and therapists make over the years:

1. Focus too much on isolation exercises
2. Rely too much on passive stretch/pain response
3. Under emphasize eccentric proximal closed chain work
4. Disregard the rotational component of the hamstrings 

Any one or combination of these things will lead to incomplete rehab or almost guarantee a recurring injury and chronic inflammation.  while I do not profess to know it all when it comes to these things, I do have firsthand experience (two torn hamstrings – ouch!) and I have put athletes with chronic hamstring issues back to full play in as little as 3 weeks when they have had up to 12 weeks of unsuccessful rehab elsewhere.  Magic?  Not at all.  It involves systematically tarfeting the tissue and properly preapring it for the activity to come.

So, I have included a series of 5 exercises I think you should include as part of a performance, prevention or rehab plan for your athletes in this short video (less than 60 seconds).  Not only will these exercises make your athletes healthier, they will also improve strength, mobility, and balance as well.

I want to wish everyone a Happy Memorial Day.  I have included a clip of a recent interview I did with the local Fox News affiliate on the rise in certain injuries I have seen in youth sports.  Unfortunately, I continue to see certain overuse injuries and other patterns of injuries that we, as strength and conditioning professionals, can reduce with proper training.

This is the last part of my ACL series (for now anyway).  Today, I want to share a simple drill for teaching athletes to decelerate properly when moving side to side.  So many kids lack the ability to slow momentum correctly at high speeds.  Rather than stay low, they often tend to remain upright.

This posture not only reduces power and quickness, but it also increases injury risk.  You see, it is darn near impossible to tear your ACL when the knee is flexed near 90 degrees.  The knee is more at risk when the flexion angle is closer to 30 degrees (in general) when examining non-contact injuries.  Teaching athletes to stay low will improve force generation, change of direction speed and reduce injuries.

So, in today’s video I will show you how to do just that.  Keep in mind this drill can be done for quickness (shorter strides), power (longer strides) or just form work (shown here).

If you enjoyed these videos and want more information on my exact training program to prevent ACL injuries, you can pre order my DVD now.  It will normally retail for $34.95, but if you pre order now, you can get it for just $19.95.   I will throw in free shipping anywhere in the US too.

To order, simply go to www.BrianSchiff.com.