Joel Younkins I think it's becoming quite clear that a lot of coaches/former athletes/parents are concerned about athletes specializing in a sport too young or even in high school. Times are catching up where we are realizing that our young athletes are getting overuse injuries from their sport, can throw a ball better than they can perform a push up, and have a sports schedule that is all year round now. Times are changing fast, and the model for our young athletes don't seem to be changing any time soon. Have things gone too far to turn back around? Is there anything we can do to help manage their year long sport schedule? My goal for this Lifestyle Blog post is to help allow you understand why Early Sport Specialization could be detrimental to young athletes, realizing that it's probably not going to change any time soon, and that if we choose to stay this route what I think can help solve a couple concerns that come with this sport schedule. What Are The Main Issues With Early Sport Specialization? At first glance, it may seem like a good idea to specialize an athlete early on in their sports career (12 and under) if they show signs of excellence in it. The thinking of trying to capitalize on talent at a young age could only give them a much more advantage in the future. Or have the thought of, everyone else is playing year round, my child better do the same if he/she doesn't want to get left behind. But any extreme actions will always come with a cost. There are some negatives to this, so let me point out a few flaws that could potentially happen to these athletes.
Please let these implications sink in before we move on... I'm Not Sure What The Future Holds When I was in Youth Sports, Junior High, and High School, I was never really aware of the idea of specializing in one sport, even though by the time I was 16, I was left focusing on one sport 100% which was football. I never looked at it as "specializing," I just wanted to focus on football and to be honest, I rather play football and train for it more than I rather play for other sport teams. So personally, I can't say I am confused by this new wave of sports culture, but I know if I could go back I would change a couple things. This Lifestyle Blog isn't about me, just giving you some insight, so lets move on... The reality of players specializing in one sport is a normal conversation in the athletic world. Athletes are specializing much younger now too. Unlike waiting until you're deep in your high school career. Trends are taking place in sports to go all in because of competition levels are raising each year. Few athletes seem to have the athletic abilities to jump from sport to sport and still outperform the athletes that play it all year round. But for the rest, they may feel pressure to focus on one sport very early on. Below are a couple reasons where the pressure is coming from.
So as much as I'd love to see some pressure released from these young athletes and rebuild a sports model in this country that encourages our youth and high school athletes to play multiple sports. And to allow athletes, parents, and coaches to have the awareness that when it comes to college, the cream will rise to the top. But for now, I just don't see that shift happening anytime soon. What Do I Think Should Happen Next? You can call me being biased all you want right now, but I have come to grips that this model of athletes playing all year round isn't going anywhere any time soon. It may take a couple generations for this to die off. But until then, I highly suggest that these athletes coming to realization that if they want to play Baseball, Volleyball, Motocross, Basketball, etc all year long, then you better be spending at least 8 months out of the year in the gym building physical abilities and preventing yourself from injuries. High concentrations of repetitive movements is a recipe for injuries, unless you are doing something about it to build and protect yourself physically off of the field, court, or track. Two to three times a week of short gym workouts can go a long ways to keeping an athlete healthy and on a positive note, actually allow you to play this sport that you're so passionate about, at a higher level! Conclusion I get it, athletes are specializing too early too often. Coaches are struggling to fill rosters because athletes are limiting their sports that they play. Injuries are happening that shouldn't and some athletes are missing out on certain athletic abilities that their sport doesn't provide. But try to get comfortable with this culture of athletics, because myself and your Facebook posts about Christian McCartney article about playing multiple sports aren't going to change anything (yet). We have to figure out ways to keep our young athletes safe and healthy if this is the road we're letting them go down. I am highly against specializing at the youth level, but once the athlete becomes mature enough to start thinking about their future (13-16 years of age) and they want to start focusing more on one sport, you better be ready to keep their physical abilities up to speed with their sport skills. We can at least try to do this for our athletes! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value!
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Joel Younkins Have you ever said, "I don't have great balance"? Whether you're referring to balance in general or balance in a specific skill. If you've never had to say this, I'm sure you're aware of the idea of feeling unbalanced from time to time. Quite often, balance gets brought up in the training world and people speculate on ways they think how they can improve it. In this Blog I'm going to explain to you how most people think to improve balance and how to actually improve balance, both generally and specifically! What Most People Think Is Balance Training When people think of training methods to improve balance, both generally and physically, they would assume to train on unstable objects. For example, Bosu Balls, Swiss Balls, Indo Boards, are just a couple of options. They believe that if you make the surface unstable, that it will help the "small muscles," "core," and "coordination" with everything else that you do physically. There is a flaw to thinking this way. Training on unstable surfaces can be great for the rehab setting. Going from unhealthy, back to baseline health. But in the world of going from baseline to improve performance, training on unstable surfaces majority of the time, is a waste of time and can even be counter intuitive to your training. When you train on something unstable, you drastically decrease the amount of force that you can produce. This means you become weaker. Imagine that you're walking with shoes on a sheet of ice. You stop and tell yourself to either jump as high as possible or to start sprinting as fast as possible. What will happen next is that you can't, your body will shut itself down to purposely to make you weaker as a defensive mechanism to provide you safety. The second reality is that, training on these objects, you will just improve the skill of training on that specific object. Say for example, you start doing Squats on a Bosu Ball, you may realize it becomes easier after a couple weeks. What's happening? You're simply improving by learning the skill of standing/squatting on a Bosu Ball, not really by getting stronger. This will actually have very little, to no carrying over to training balance in real life. It's like saying learning how to throw darts will make you better at typing on a key board. So What Should I Do To Improve Balance Then? You know how earlier I told you that there's General and Specific Balance? We're going to go over these concepts and I'm going to give you a background on how to approach these to give you direction on how to improve both qualities. General Balance- This is just your overall balance as a person. It's knowing we're your center of gravity is. The best way to improve this, simply just moving through ranges of motion and moving as a person. What also drastically helps this, is having stability in your joints, especially the hip and ankle joints. When you can create stability, it will help give your body frame a stronger foundation to keep you stable. Specific Balance- Specific Balance is having spacial awareness in whatever activity (skill) that you're performing. Meaning, recognizing what your body is doing without having to think about it. So just like with General Balance, you can learn to know where your center of gravity is, but we can take this concept further in developing Specific Balance. It's very helpful to just create drills to have landmarks to control your body. For example, Line Hops, Altitude Landings, and Agility Drills. Once you master these types of drills, these will help the balance in your Specific Skills (sport). Conclusion Improving balance isn't about training on objects to make you less balanced. It's about building stabilization throughout your body and then learning and improving your spacial awareness. If you have a specific activity that you need to perform, mastering the correct technique of that skill will almost always help improve your balance for that! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! Joel Younkins Welcome back to the last installment of the Lifestyle Blog: Motocross Training Part 3! In Part 1, I briefly reviewed the Sport, Sport Demands, and Popular Training Approaches of Motocross Training. I gave you a quick back ground of the sport and essentially why it's important to be physically fit. In Part 2, I shared my philosophy on the use of Strength Training and Plyometic Training when training Motocross Riders. In Part 3, I'm going to cover another very important topic to the Motocross Athlete; Conditioning! Conditioning When it comes to Conditioning for the Motocross Racer, we keep it all primarily aerobic based. We perform training that focuses on primarily using oxygen as it's primary fuel source which is your Aerobic System. Whereas compared to the other two systems, Lactic and Alactic Systems that do not use oxygen as their primary fuel source. This is critical to understand because when we can utilize oxygen for energy, we can sustain our energy outputs for potentially hours on end. If the racer doesn't have an efficient Aerobic System, their heart rates will likely climb higher much faster and more often when they try to push the pace on race day. When heart rates become too high, your body doesn't want to use oxygen as it's primary fuel source anymore. It needs something that works faster to produce more energy. It starts using glycogen (sugar) from your muscles to create that energy to keep up with the higher rate intensities. This is what we call our Lactic System. This may sound like a good thing, like it's your body's reserve, and essentially, yes it is. But, after 30-90 seconds of running off of your lactic system, this will cause immediate fatigue and you gas out. At this point, you will basically have to ride around slow to bring your heart rate back down until you can recover. This may take a few seconds or even a minute or two and in a race, we don't have this kind of time to spare. And, this cycle will probably keep happening the rest of the race if you try to push the pace again if you don't have an efficient and developed Aerobic System. So at this point, you may be asking yourself... "How come when I watch Supercross, the announcers say that they are 90% of their max heart rates? That seems really high to me." To answer this question, yes it is high, because of stress and anxiety levels. Think about sitting down to watch a scary movie. Your heart rate may be elevated compared to what your body physiologically is doing inside. It's stress hormones that is causing the increased heart rates. Motocross Racers are humans, not aliens with special powers. At this point, if you are feeling confused, just realize that there is a certain number of your heart rate that you will quickly run out of energy. And you do not want to race above this heart rate number (remember, this number will be lower inside of the gym compared to on race day). We call this the Anaerobic Threshold; the tipping point where you start to shift from using mostly oxygen to using glycogen. What do I recommend and do for our racers? It's pretty straightforward, nothing too fancy. It's just manipulating a few numbers and following some parameters. We really just focus on developing a couple of qualities to improve aerobic performance.
Conclusion We covered why a Motocross Racer needs to be physical fit for competition, Strength Training, Plyometric Training, and Conditioning all so they can perform on race day at a higher level. What I want to leave you with is a realization of how this all fits together. Because Motocross Racing is a sport with a large amount of variables that dictate success, you have to realize that your ability to ride the bike is ALWAYS the most important variable. Everything else that you do should support this variable (riding ability). Your physical fitness, practice, bike set up, nutrition, and overall planning and organization of your program. Training WILL WORK BEST when it is working with your riding abilities. If you put good work in the gym, but are not riding, the work will not fully be able to express itself because of decrease in seat time. It's the same thing as building your race bike in the garage to have all of the best parts, but you don't decide to ride it until round 1 of your series. The gym is the garage for your body. I hope that you've enjoyed this series and you can now take away some value or at least clear up some confusion on certain fitness topics in regards to Motocross Training. If you've enjoyed what you've read so far, you will really enjoy and get much more from my eBook that I am re-releasing Friday March 1st. The JYT Moto Method 2.0. It will have much more detail than what I've covered in this series, plus an 8 Week Competitive Training Program, 4 Riding Practice Methods, and a Moto Mindspace section where you can gain insight from today's and yesterday's top racers! We'll see you inside The JYT Moto Method 2.0! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! Joel Younkins Welcome back to the Lifestyle Blog: Motocross Training Series! In Part 1, I briefly reviewed the Sport, Sport Demands, and Popular Training Approaches of Motocross Training. I gave you a quick back ground of the sport and essentially why it's important to be physically fit. There are many different philosophies for training motocross racers, but I'm writing this to share mine with you. In Part 2, I'm going share my philosophy on the use of Strength Training and Plyometic Training when training Motocross Riders. I'll share my perspective in regards to utilizing Strength Training and I will share how common Plyometric exercises can be incorporated in a training plan for a Motocross Racer, in a way that many heavily overlook! Strength Training A lot of racers (and some Motocross Trainers) are intimidated when it comes to getting their racers stronger with lifting weights. Some even think it’s counterproductive to the sport. They may claim that it's the culprit to arm pump and that you don't need to get big and bulky as it will cause a decrease in a racer's endurance. The reality is, if you're an athlete and not lifting weights trying to improve strength levels, you are really missing the boat when it comes to improving Physical Performance. Even Golfers lift weights to perform better. Not taking anything away from Golfers, but when the recreational form of their sport is encouraged to drink beer while they play, it really says something when competitors still put in the work to improve their strength! At my facility, our racers train all of the same compound movements (Squat, Bench, Deadlift, Rowing Variations) that the rest of my athletes perform. My goal is to get them as strong as possible with the given amount of time that we have to train. Strength gains are most important while not placing too much emphasize on building size. You can improve strength while not improving muscle mass. I do typically like to add some muscle mass (5-15lbs) to them if we feel it's needed so that they have added protection on their skeletal system when they crash. But if they’re serious racers, they will never really have the time to “get huge,” but I do want them to be put together as athletes; think a MMA Fighter frame, not a Bodybuilder frame. The goal isn’t to give them so much volume that they turn into Elite Weight Lifters, but I don’t want them to have the same levels of strength as a marathon runner would have either. But in all reality, serious racers don’t even have enough time to perform enough Strength Training to get too big and too strong for their sport. When you factor in their aerobic training (we’ll get to that in Part 3) and all of their riding they need to do to keep skill level high, there simply isn’t enough time or energy to lift enough to make dramatic size increases. So, this is actually very important to understand, because the time that they do have for Strength Training, needs to be taken very seriously! Plyometrics We don’t perform Plyometric Exercises so that they can jump higher and run faster. But we do use them as a means for them to train the shock component of these exercises. True Plyometric Training is actually intended to be Shock Training. Plyometrics cause a shock to the body and that is where athletes learn to absorb and produce force. I don't worry much about producing it with Motocross Racers because I'm mostly concerned with them being able to absorb it. Why is this important? Well, remember in Part 1 when I discussed that the body needs to withstand forces from the track? Between Strength Training and learning to absorb forces using Plyometric methods in the gym, we can help train this ability to be prepared for optimal performance when racing. We’ll do different jump/plyo methods so their lower body can withstand the forces on the track through their foot pegs and through the handlebars. For the upper body, I mostly use medicine balls to do a lot of reactive passes off of the wall or the ground. For the lower body, we’ll have them perform box jumps, altitude landings, reactive plyo jumps, and some reactive hurdle jumps. While their bikes have suspension to absorb the forces from the track, the use of Strength Training and Plyometric (Shock) Training enhances the racer's ability in helping their bodies absorb the shock from the track. In addition, it helps them maintain proper riding technique. When a large shock happens to a racer during a race, it’s not uncommon to see hands come off of the bars, feet come off of the pegs, and see their heads simulate a whiplash pattern. We put the work in to prepare our athletes for these moments for their most effective racing performance. Up Next In Part 3 of this Lifestyle Blog Series we'll be covering my philosophy on Conditioning for the Motocross Athlete. See you in Part 3! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! Joel Younkins Since beginning my coaching career in 2010, I’ve been working with Motocross racers as part of my clientele. My personal and professional ties to motocross racing have given me a unique opportunity to learn and understand the training needs of these clients. I listen to the racer's feedback as well in developing my approach which I will share with you in this next 3 part series of the Lifestyle Blog. With this Lifestyle Blog Series, I wanted to help give you an understanding of the sport and the physical demands. Whether you're a racer looking to broaden your training knowledge, a fan of Motocross, or a fitness enthusiasts interested in learning more about motocross training, you're on the right web page. In Part 1, I'll briefly review the Sport, Sport Demands, and Popular Training Approaches. As the blog progresses, you will gain insight in the my training philosophy. Sport Overview First, let's start off with a quick background of the sport of Motocross. It’s a race where you have races vary in length (my professional racers race 2, 30 minute motos plus two laps which is about 35 minutes total) and racers have to perform jumps, hills, turns, bumps, etc. on various natural terrain. It’s a continuous event, so they don’t stop until the checkered flag waves. There are different styles and formats of dirt-bike racing, like Supercross & Off-Road events, but we’ll stick to Motocross in this blog series as it is the basis of dirt-bike racing and will simplify the preparation requirements for training that we’ll discuss. These same principles will fit into the other forms of competitive dirt bike racing. Sport Demand Physically, here's a quick overview of the demands as an athlete who races: Racer's bikes have a lot of power, so they accelerate fast. The bikes withstand a lot of forces from the track even though they have good suspension. And the racers absorb forces as well. Which means they operate the whole race on high elevated heart rates. It’s a true mixed event as they need to be aerobically fit to maintain high energy outputs, but also be strong enough to withstand the forces of the bike and the tracks to maintain proper physical riding technique. If they crash, it’s not only important that they are in good physical shape to promote recovery, but good physical fitness also lowers their chances of an injury when an accident does occur. Popular Training Approach If you dig a little into the motocross industry on how coaches/trainers are preparing their racers, you will see a lot of different approaches. And in my opinion, this has caused more confusion between the racers than it has helped. You will see everything from Circuit Training workouts, to Crossfit as being the holy grail, and to training racers to simulate endurance/road bicycle athletes. When I got into working with racers, it was very hard to listen to everyone in the industry. I decided to stick with what I learned through Track and Field Coaches and from traditional Strength & Conditioning Coaches that I was learning from at the time in my younger 20’s, and I adapted these same principles to create my own philosophy in training Motocross Racers. The biggest challenge in preparing motocross athletes, is that there are a ton of variables in play when the race is happening. It can take time, and feedback, to see if what you’re doing is working, both as a trainer and as a racer. I develop training programs to promote their physical fitness and check in to see how training is helping their performance. I like to hear my athletes say that they can charge at the end of the races to make last minute passes. This give me a good indication that our aerobic endurance and aerobic power are translating to their sport. I also like to know that because they’re stronger, they can maneuver the bike with less effort, which in return can allow them the opportunity to perform their skills at a higher level. Lastly, but most importantly, I want to give them the best chance at staying injury free when they crash, so tailoring their training toward their performance, success, and safety is my ultimate goal. Up Next This is my philosophy on training Motocross riders and in the next section, I will move on and share my perspective on Strength Training & use of Plyometic Training Philosophy and how I have incorporated these principles for competitive racers. See you in Part 2! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! Joel Younkins Have you ever heard about the Anabolic Window for muscle growth? You know, that magical 30 minute window after your workout where it is extremely critical to get protein in you to make huge gains?! Well, if you have been up to date on the research, it doesn't really seem to be a real thing, or at least that window is extended much greater than 30 minutes. If this is news to you, don't worry, your workout still counts even if you don't get protein in immediately after your workout session. So, what does this mean about protein powders now? Do we need to throw away our protein powder because this isn't as true as we once thought? Not so fast...If protein powders fit into your budget, don't throw them away just yet. I'm going to share my thoughts on why I still drink a protein shake post workout and recommend them to my clients as well. Yes, I have my own Private Label of supplements, and yes I'm going to tell you that they taste amazing and they seem to digest really well for most people. I like to think that it's a great quality product. I even created this Brand after I knew that the Anabolic Window wasn't a real thing...But, I DO NOT MAKE A LIVING SELLING SUPPLEMENTS. In all honesty, I created the brand to have supplements that I knew my clients could have access to. If people outside of my facility want them, then that's cool too! But, me having my own Brand ONE EVO, has zero influence of my opinion on this topic. So hang tight and lets get to my thoughts on protein shakes... "I got the shakes that'll make you quake" -Cheeseburger Eddie We know that in our body, we store protein in our bloodstream. We don't have any fast reserve of using protein. So, I find it very beneficial that if you're trying to gain muscle or minimize muscle loss in an optimal manor, you should be consuming protein at least every 4 hours. I find this to be a very good idea if you're trying to maximize performance and physique of your muscle quality. Why is this important to know? Let's talk about training and meal timing. Most people are going to have their pre workout meal 1-2 hours before your workout. Then they will probably train for a hour or so at the gym or wherever it is. Then it may be another 1-2 hours until they can have their post workout meal. So if you're like me, my pre workout meal and my post workout meal will be closer to the 2 hours range as I need time for food settle to digest in order to train well and I can never eat solid food right after a workout. Let's do some basic math for people like myself who need the 2 hours pre and post workout. Pre Workout Meal: 2 hours Workout: 1 hour Post Wokout Meal: 2 hours Total time between meals=5 hours So, this is where I believe a protein shake can help fill a small void in your day. When you have a decent amount of time that passes by, like your workout, you can easily drink and digest a protein shake to get some protein in your bloodstream. This idea is not motivated by the 30 minute anabolic window, it's just to a convenient time to digest a shake and will mostly NOT HURT your progress if you do decide to drink a shake afterwards. Most people are not going to be able to eat and digest steak or chicken during or after training to rely on getting in their protein. This is where the idea of drinking a shake can come into play to help you fill that big gap. We are talking about convenience, not solutions to bigger problems. What is the most important thing for you to consider about protein shakes? That they are available to HELP YOU along throughout your day. They are not meant to replace any lean protein food. I tell my clients that supplements are like icing on a cake, and that if the cake itself isn't any good, no icing will make up for it. So if you have protein powder and it helps you fill a void throughout the day to keep your nutrition in check to help you, then by all means drink your protein shake! Even if the Anabolic Window is a lot bigger than we thought... Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! Joel Younkins If you read my last Lifestyle Blog, What I'd Tell Myself As A Young Athlete, you would've read about things that I obviously did wrong and how I would've improved them from what I now know and understand. But in this Lifestyle Blog, I wanted to follow up the last post with the positives that I learned from training while playing College Football. As I look back in this phase of my life it was really a big learning experience not just for life lessons in general, but it also really helped open my eyes to learning new insights about training from what I used to do and thought I knew. And I wanted to share with you some of the things that I learned then, that I've even carried with me even up to today! 1.) Eating "healthy" doesn't mean it's correct. I remember during my first collegiate football season, I was a Redshirt Freshman. This meant that I got an extra season of football, since during a Redshirt Season you only practice and do not play in games. Because I wasn't playing in games, and only had to worry about practice, I didn't take my nutrition too seriously. I didn't gain the Freshman 15, but I knew I wasn't at my best and wasn't eating as good as I should be. After that first season, I knew I didn't want to play on the Scout Team again, I decided to start stepping my game up and focus on getting better to make sure I could play on Saturdays instead on standing on the sidelines. So during the Winter Break, I really focused on eating clean and followed a healthy diet. I thought I was on point with it and I came back on campus about 10 pounds lighter, but feeling really good! Then, sometime before Spring Football, when I still played on Offense, we had to do these self evaluations, then have a follow up meeting with our coach about them. One of the things was Nutrition, so I circled Championship performance because I was proud of myself for how "healthy" I was eating. Well my running back coach, Coach Eddie said to me, you've lost weight since you've been here, I don't think you're at a Championship Level. At first I was crushed thinking, "damn I thought they would be happy I'm eating so good" and I tried conveying that to him. So he told me to talk to our Strength Coach at the time who was Todd Burkey, who I always had a ton of respect for and still do to this day. So I met with him and he gave me some great ideas of how to eat more towards performance and not just eating to follow a general healthy diet. This way I could still perform well but not lose weight as well. That was a moment that changed my outlook on how I looked at Nutrition and that eating healthy means various things. 2.) I learned how to squat correctly. In my last post, I wrote about how I would've like to squat more at a younger age. But I didn't really get proper coaching on the squat until college. This actually made squatting more enjoyable and didn't feel like my body was going to snap in half. I went from squatting bands in high school as my primary leg work to being able to Squat over 400lbs in college. 3.) Technique will take your training to the next level. I only got to work with Coach Burkey for about a year before he stepped down as the Head Strength & Conditioning Coach and went on to work as Men's Basketball Athletic Trainer. But I'll never forget this one quote on one of the first days working with our new Strength Coach, Coach John Patrick who I gained a huge amount of respect for as my coach and later on as a mentor. He told us, "if we can't perform something with no weight, then how will we expect to do something with a lot of weight." That really stuck with me. I'm not sure why, but it was just one of those things and I used to think about a lot as I was training in college and even afterwards. I think it started my thought process to really think and breakdown each movements to fully understand them! 4.) Old habits can sneak up to bite you later on. Before my Junior Season in college, I was running during a team workout before the official Summer Conditioning started. We were in this long gym in Stambaugh Stadium. I was running down the court, and out of nowhere, it felt like someone shoved a knife right into my spine. I didn't know what the hell just had happened, but by the time I left the stadium that morning, I couldn't stand up straight. It never fully recovered and I could never rehab it back to the level it needed to be to play college football again. I would have never guess that morning, that would've been my last team workout I participated in. I went through a period of depression that I never wanted to admit to or really tell people about. But I don't ever remember blaming anyone for it. I think I only blamed myself because by this point, I knew my high school workouts weren't the smartest workouts. And if I had anyone to blame, it was myself for not trying to be more intelligent about my training when I was younger. Hard training will only last for so long if it's not calculated. I simply think the abuse from the game and not so great training in my younger years, it was just a breaking point for me and my time was up. 5.) Set your goals higher than what you think you want. Growing up, I used to just dream and work towards playing college football. I always thought NFL would be awesome, but the dream was college. I just enjoyed following it more, always have. But when you set a goal, and you reach it, sometimes you find yourself looking around, saying "what's next?" This happened to me a lot during college and I remember saying to myself, "ok I've made it hear Joel, now what are we going to do?" What I learned was that the guys who ended up going pro, always wanted to go pro more than playing college. This is what I've concluded when I hear NFL Athletes speak. That was always their dream and college was just a stepping stone to the NFL. I'm not saying that I would've ever been even good enough to play in the league (I think my college career would've been better playing linebacker, my position I always played, but that's another topic for another day) but I think that shift in focus goes along ways when you look at why you're doing something in that moment. Instead of just saying, I want to play for YSU, in my mind I could've said, I have to play collegiality so I can get to the pros. This isn't a regret, this is just a lesson learned that I've taken with me after college was over. I know now, when I set a goal, I think how can I make this goal even bigger??? Conclusion I wanted to follow up the last Blog post with this one, because this was the next evolution towards a Coaching Career. These 5 things I shared weren't the only things that I learned in college. And I could've probably wrote what I did wrong in college article too, but I wanted to balance out the good with the bad. All in all, you shouldn't have any regrets, because it's all just lessons learned from mistakes and victories! Lessons Learned... Talk soon! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! Joel Younkins Yep, that was me back in High School...In my prime playing days, full of youth, talent, and hard work! By now, if you know me and have been following me, you know that I started training back in Junior High (2001-2002ish) and I have never looked back. I'd like to think that I trained hard, at least way harder than most high school athletes did. Not only did I do team workouts, but I did do more training on my own as well I did Jump Stretch classes too (training with bands). I'm proud of my efforts back then, but knowing what I know now, I'm not always so proud of how I did things. There were people along the way who helped me tremendously and who had a huge impact of me wanting to go down this path of becoming a Physical Prep Coach. So this isn't to discredit any of those individuals, because I put in a lot of good work because of all of their efforts towards helping me. These are my thoughts on what I would change, zero blame is being placed on anyone else. In this Lifestyle Blog, this is simply how I would do things differently if I could go back in time knowing what I know now. 1.) I would focus more on implementing more low intensity workouts in the week. I used to think that they best way to train, was to train as hard as possible, as much as possible. I would end up pushing hard for 5 days straight. For example, I would lift hard 3 times/week. Do jump stretch another 3 days a week (usually on my off days of lifting). And I would also do ten 40 yards sprints a couple nights out of the week at the track as well. Sure I got stronger and faster with all of the work that I was putting in, but eventually it cost me heading into the summer of my Senior year where I pulled my hamstring. I knew that going into summer college recruiting camps, that I would run a good 40 time to attract eyes of the scouts, but instead I couldn't even run the 40 because I was hurt. So they had no times on me and coaches don't like looking at hurt athletes. It's like looking at a hurt race horse that they can't use. So instead, I would have reduced some of the over all weekly volume and placed my hard sessions on one day, and do lighter workouts the other days. So I would've done sprints and weights on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and used Tuesday and Thursday to work on some light conditioning, ab training, mobility/flexibility work, and football technique work to fill in the gaps of my hard exhaustive workouts. This would allow me to not just work hard, but work smarter too! 2.) I would have focused more on Squatting and Deadlifting and less on Power Cleans. So, since I did Jump Stretch on my off days from lifting, I tried to avoid doing as much direct lower body work as I could in the weight room. I liked getting stronger at Squatting, but to be honest, Jump Stretch roasted your legs so bad that I would look at just trying to survive the next day at Jump Stretch. And Jump Stretch workouts, in my opinion have no where near the amount of training effect when looking to add real lower body strength when compared to that of Squats and Deadlifts. It made you tired more than actually making you stronger and faster... So every gym workout, I would basically Bench Press, then Power Clean, and then I would then just do Body Building lifts or sometimes I would add in the the Jammer Press Machine too. I would allow Jump Stretch to dictate my lower body work. Which now looking back, wasn't my best decision I've ever made... I really wish I would've learned how to Squat and Deadlift the right way back then and chilled out on Power Cleans. I had a perception that Power Cleans were way more important than they really were. If I felt that way about Squats and Deadlifts back then, it would've made me a stronger and faster athlete without a doubt! 3.) I wish I would've ran track, well kind of. My one my football coach always wanted me to go out for track. He was the Head Track Coach and said it would help me for football. I did believe him, but I remember thinking that I rather just train instead of being a part of the track team. I just liked training more than the idea of being a part of the track team. So instead, I ran A LOT of 40 yard sprints and spent a lot of the time at the track. But I wished I would've at least spent more time doing speed drills and learning how to run like a sprinter. Instead of just relying on running my fastest to get faster. That worked, until it didn't and it only worked so well...I became a faster athlete for sure, but I truly believe I could've been a lot faster than I was! 4.) I ate good, but not good enough. I think my nutrition was good, but could've been way better! My breakfast was usually pop tarts and coffee on the way to school. Today, I do not recommend this breakfast to my clients HAHA...I packed a lunch to avoid cafeteria food and to make sure I could eat enough, so my mom always hooked up the lunch. I was more obsessed with protein shakes back then, sampling every flavor of Muscle Milk had to offer than learning about the foods I was eating. I sweat a lot, so I drank tons of water and Gatorade to hydrate for games, but I've never been a big salt fan and never added salt like I should have either. I was probably too often loaded up on water which is not going to help performance either if your electrolytes are not balanced. I guess all in all, I would've focus more on educating myself on nutrition earlier on, improving my breakfast, not placing so much emphasis on protein shakes, staying hydrated during the week instead of waiting the day of the game, and also adding salt to my diet too. 5.) I would've focused more on recovery methods, especially during the season. My form of recovery after a brutal Friday Night Game was to chill out on the couch watching college football and eating some pizza. I wish I would've known about Hot and Cold Water Therapy back then and how to use these methods. I would've gotten more massage work done too. And I probably would've spent more time stretching the next 2 days after my games, or at least focused more on light cardio Saturday morning to help jump start my recovery time. Conclusion I could probably go on and on and really do a deep dive on how I could have improved. But these are just surface things that I would FIRST change if I could go back in time. These are for sure things that I know could've made life not just easier, but made me a more efficient athlete and could've kept me healthier over the long haul. Again, this is not throwing shade at any individuals during my Junior High & High School athletics. I had a lot of great influences at that time and people doing their best to help me then. This is just me telling my younger self what I would do now. I place no blame on anyone for anything. I appreciated all of the help I ever got a long the way! I did work my butt off and trained so hard for so long doing things that weren't always correct (or smartest) and it eventually caught up to me. I wasn't able to make it through my entire college football career without a career ending back injury that still affects me to this day. And sometimes it can still ruin my days with the pain I deal with. So when I do give advice to my young athletes and clients, it does come from a legit genuine place of, "I know what it takes and I also know what not to do as well." I'm not the "Do what I did back in the day guy!" I'm the "Do it better than what I did back in the day guy!" Cheering for YOU! -Joel P.S. Look for my next Blog to be about the positive lessons I learned in my college career! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! Joel Younkins So this past weekend, I got the opportunity to go to my first TEDx Talk with my wife Kelly. She found the event and coordinated everything, so I basically had to just show up...Thanks Babe! Anyways, we've watched a lot of TED Talks over the years, finding them very fascinating, and they always seem to bring good perspectives to their topics. So we were both excited to attend this event. And it didn't disappoint! The Theme of the event was called What If?, as all of the 20 Speakers talks seemed to be in line with this theme. I wanted to find 3 main takeaways from everyone who presented that day. And a few different concepts kept coming up in many of the Talks presented in different ways. I want to share with you the 3 Things that I found to be a reoccurring topic and some of the notes I had written down for each of these idea... 1.) We're All Connected In this world, we share it with a lot of other people around us. <We place judgement on others, but the judgement should keep us curious about others and their lives. <We are connected by family and our family history. <We are connected with others through our work and how we work together. <We shouldn't always be looking for the next best person. Instead, get to know those in front of you. But don't be afraid to keep a little bit of mystery for others to learn about you and let people miss you a little bit. <We're connected by different skill levels. <Laughter to others is a gift. <3D printers will be the next disruption of how we share our ideas with others. <We can even save trees through human connection. <And we should be open to others, smile at others, and always try to look for good in others! 2.) Beliefs Control Our Actions Whatever we believe in our minds, is the perception of our own reality. <When connecting with others, we react with emotions first. <We should be curious about our own beliefs and fears and decide what thoughts that we want in our heads tomorrow. <If we believe to feel better, we can work better. <Discover our own perceptions of ourselves. <We can change our own perceptions through hope, exercise, and a sense of belonging. <Changing perception, means changing our outcomes. <Don't have back up plans in our minds so we can only believe in one outcome. <Beliefs are just our own opinions of ourselves and others. <Action over ideas is what gets things accomplished. <You can give your brain a pattern to fall asleep faster. <Widening your horizon can open up more opportunities. 3.) We Can Write Our Own Stories We don't have to accept a personal narrative that is either given to us by others or even ourselves. We have a choice to change that narrative if we want. <We can achieve this by communicating better to others better. <Learning the 5 Stages of Learning a New Skill (Newbie, Clumsy, Expert, Mastery, Genius) and how to progress through each phases. <Create your own crucible to live by. <We create our scripts that we want to live and then live our scripts. <You can predetermine your wins. <And don't be afraid of your Top Rope Moment where you can risk everything to fulfill your dreams! Conclusion Like I stated earlier, it was really a great event. It was refreshing and it gave you great energy to hear the speakers present. You can really tell how much work they put into it and how much it meant for them to be on stage. They weren't there just to entertain you, they were there to speak for themselves and get out their message out to the world. Which I found very encouraging and you can hear their passion as they spoke. There really wasn't any complaints about the speakers or the event as a whole. I will tell you this, when we left the event, the first thing we both said that we would want to attend it again next year. As guests or as speakers ;) Below is a direct link to the event page if you'd like to see more specifics about the TEDx Youngstown Event! TEDx Youngstown Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! Joel Younkins I originally wrote this post as a weekly VIP Newsletter email. But in this Lifestyle Blog, I wanted to rework this message as I think many of us get confused about the reality of Individual Differences and how it applies to us as individuals. Too often, many people assume that Individual Differences means that you are an exception to the rule. Before assuming this idea, we should slow down and unpack what's going on first. Are you ready? You sure?? Okay, lets get to it! I get it, we know that we are all different from each other. There is no exact copy of us somewhere else in this world. In another galaxy, I don't know, maybe? But on earth, you are you and I am I. Yes, you are unique on this earth... But, you need to realize that I'm not your mother...I'm not here to tell you that you're special...I'm here to make you a monster! Now, assuming that you do not have a disease or specific condition, the reality is that we are all more alike than different. Let me explain my vantage point on this topic in regards to fitness/training... In training there's something called Individual Differences. There's no perfect training program, perfect diet, and everyone responds to stress a little bit different from each other. But in training, we have principles that we should follow first. You must know these principles before you can start getting into individual differences and understand them before jumping ship. There are always exceptions to the rules, but usually the exceptions do not mean 180 degrees in the other direction. I'm going to give you 3 example situations of common beliefs people may have established for themselves and we'll go through what they are, why they should improve these ideas, and finally how to make better adjustments for them. I hear people talking about what they think works so great for them. Sometimes I know they are legit, and other times I know that they are just rationalizing their own belief system because of how they're responding to their internal feelings about their choices. These are 3 examples of training/fitness claims that you could potentially hear...
Now, you have to understand that these people have their own beliefs at the time of saying these things. You usually we hear them say, "this is just works best for my body." And the human mind can be very powerful, especially in the human performance world. But in these instances, they can all probably improve if they just shifted their minds back to the basic training principles. Let me explain why these thoughts are not very accurate...
I didn't make these rules up, I just know that this is how it works from years of education, learning, and coaching day in and day out. What we need to understand is that we all respond to everything A LITTLE BIT DIFFERENTLY. But we must start at the root of the basic training principles and then you work out from there to find the adjustments that YOU NEED to optimize your training. Let me explain how we could make some adjustments for these 3 examples...
So as you can see, Individual Difference are not as dramatic as they seem to be. Again, assuming that we're talking about healthy individuals. But it's not a case of new rules to follow, it's a case of making certain adjustments to each persons abilities and personal differences. You have your own finger prints, your own DNA, your own stress, your own experiences, but when it comes to training we all start with the basic training principles. The purpose of this Lifestyle Blog was to tell you that if you're a healthy individual, that you probably do not need your own set of rules to win at this game. You just need to understand it, work at it, adjust to it, and then repeat! You're not a special snowflake, you're a savage :) Talk soon! Thanks for reading and hope you found some great value! We have a favor to ask from you. We want to share our free content to help other people like yourself become more educated on fitness and wellness. Please take a moment to like and share the blog post on social media, tell a friend, and engage with the authors by commenting below and asking further questions. We thank you for the support and promise to keep over delivering you with more value! |
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