Are you sleeping enough? Are you sleeping well?!

With a busy holiday season ahead, busy academic schedules, and for some of us, even busier athletic training and competition schedules- our focus on sufficient and proper recovery has never been more important...

Reducing the likelihood of burnout and fatigue is a top priority, but how does good recovery take place? What does it look like?

While active-recovery methods like yoga, low-intensity spin cycling, de-loaded resistance work, foam rolling, and other mobility exercises should always play an important part in our approach to recovery, often, the most-neglected and yet, most influential factor in effective recovery for athletes is sleep.

So what does good sleep look like?

The National Strength and Conditioning Association recently released a publication on the importance of sleep for athletic performance.

Along with the article, which highlights the importance of sleep duration and quality for the sake of improving athletic performance, reducing injury risk, and improving the overall quality of a training session, the NSCA also published this cool info-graphic, which does a great job of simplifying what good quality sleep looks like for an athlete!

Check it out! How many of these recommendations are you currently following? Is there anything you can do right away to improve the quality of your sleep? And as a result, your athletic performance??

Happy training,

DV

Extra-Curricular Strength & Conditioning Program Orientation Session: This Wednesday!

Hey BCSS!

If you're interested in learning about extra-curricular strength and conditioning opportunities this year, be sure to attend the lunch-hour information session this week!

This lunch-hour session is important for all students who want to participate in extra-curricular strength and conditioning/fitness programming this year at BCSS.

This includes, drop-in training sessions and scheduled, sign-up programs.

The session is taking place in the lecture hall on Wednesday during common lunch from 12:10-12:45. Students who will be able to receive a copy of strength and conditioning / fitness program schedules for the 2017/18 year, and will also be able to learn about opportunities to complete facility orientation sessions and submit requests for custom fitness/strength and conditioning program development.

If you plan on attending, you can sign up in advance at the Athletics Office, or just sign-in at the door on the date of the session.

Hope to see you there!

Happy training,


DV

Program Design Template for SSF / LTAD

Greetings SSF and LTAD students!

This post is just for you!

The link below will provide you with access to the generic 3-day program design template for your SSF and LTAD strength and conditioning programs.

Remember: You do not have to use this template if you would prefer to use your own.

Using the information we discussed in our seminar on deliberate practice and program design, you should be able to create a 3-day strength and conditioning program that is both unique and purposeful to your role as an athlete.

Your program should be designed with consideration to:

1. Exercises that are sport-specific;
2. periodization / the current stage of the training year (off-season, pre-season, etc.)
3. specific fitness goals that you have and areas that best-serve your potential improvement.

Here is a link to the template if you are interested in using it.

Students at BCSS Training Independently This Year

Welcome back smarter athletes!

Those of you who are hoping to train independently this year... this message is for you:

If you are interested in training on your own during a drop-in training session or during a spare period, please download and complete these forms, and return them to the athletics office as soon as possible!

“As many repetitions as possible” probably not your best bet while conditioning during the in-season...

You can hear me out on this one- or turn the other cheek... but I’ve been at this for a while folks, and this isn’t rocket science. 

If you’re approaching, or well-within your competitive season in your training year, the fitness you’ve built up-to-now should be looked at like an investment. Because it is one.

It is your time and your energy packaged up into a measurable state of potential performance...  And if you haven’t been working on it that much- better luck next year. 

Either way, there’s nothing you can do overnight to magically boost it. Truthfully, your biggest goal in-season should be to maintain the fitness you’ve built, avoid injury, and recover well between competitions and training sessions. 

This doesn’t mean that it’s a good time to be lazy or slack off during training sessions either though. Remember, the goal here is to maintain fitness, so you still need to manage your current ability levels when it comes to the fitness you’ve built. 

One of the most effective ways of communicating this in my opinion, has been to tell athletes that during their competitive seasons, they should end their training sessions feeling like they could have done more. 

By reducing volumes, increasing inter-set rest times, and maintaining regular intensities rather than trying to push for new heights in every session, athletes recruit muscular strength and utilize energy systems in capacities that encourage fitness levels to stay where they are while working at non-exhaustive, sub-threshold levels.

So... Don’t call it “hitting a plateau”... call it “maintaining fitness”- when you’re in-season, that’s the whole point.

Happy training, 

DV

If you're not going to take it from me, take it from Kevin Pillar...

In an era of weight loss tips, CrossFit challenges, and other body-image trends dominating media coverage in the health and fitness industry, there are very few things that can make a strength and conditioning person happier than this story.

Toronto Blue Jays star outfielder Kevin Pillar needs no introduction- but to aspiring athletes in all sports and positions, his off-season workout philosophy might...

Pillar's focus on "moving more like a child..." is in the simplest of terms- focusing on the foundations of building and maintaining a healthy state of physical conditioning. Mobility and stability are top priorities. Yes. At this point, the relaxed and healthy state of muscles and joints are more important to Kevin Pillar than muscular size or the exact amount of force those muscles and joints working together can produce.

Without achieving optimal levels of mobility and stability, we immediately place ourselves under disadvantaged circumstances when it comes to strength, power, and speed.

This is where we should welcome our friends in the respected fields of physics and biomechanics...

They will tell us that the ability to produce force will forever be restricted by the limitations imposed on a joint angle. In physiology, this often means that the high-resting tension in large muscle groups caused by a lack of mobility training, poor recovery, and excessive volume are in-fact our biggest limiters.

But let's put a positive spin on it...

If our biggest limiters on gaining new strength, power and speed can be lifted through increased involvement in flexibility/mobility training and improved recovery, likely without even breaking a sweat, what are we waiting for?

Happy training,

DV

Exercise Video Index for SSF Programming

Happy Monday Everyone,

This week, students in the SSF course are going to begin programming their first phase of strength and conditioning work.

To help you with that, here is an index of resistance exercise videos that you can use to help re-familiarize yourself with some of the strength training exercises you might like to incorporate into your program. For those of you looking for the PDF version of the program builder, you can download it here.

Once you've finished developing your program design, feel free to bring it to me so that we can go over it together!

Happy training!

DV