Show Outline
It’s baseball week here at Robertson Training Systems, so who better to start it off week than Eric Cressey?
Eric is a world-class strength coach, and he’s been a good friend of mine since 2003. Needless to say, he’s super smart and there’s a ton of great info in this episode.
Here’s what we cover:
First and foremost, how his beautiful twin daughters are doing.
Why he took the plunge and opened a second training facility in Florida.
How Eric would build the perfect baseball player.
The biggest issues he sees with young baseball players, and how he thwarts the “early-specialization” argument.
The driving issues behind the shoulder and elbow epidemics, and how to fix them.
Why we’re seeing so many oblique strains in Major League Baseball these days.
The advice Eric would give to up-and-coming strength/performance coaches who want to train pro athletes.
The best advice Eric would give to himself if he could alter the space-time continuum.
Side note: My apologies for the strange audio on my end. I’m having a handful of experts look into it but it’s apparently related to the updated Yosemite operating system on my Mac 
Links Mentioned
Eric Cressey
Cressey Sports Performance
Full Transcript
Mike: Hello and welcome to In the Trenches Fitness. I am your host, Mike Robertson, and I’m joined on the line today by my man, Eric Cressey. Now, Eric, I know you’re a busy man so thanks for taking the time to be with us here today. Could you start by just telling us a little bit about yourself?
Eric: Yeah, for sure. I am most commonly confused as being Mike Robertson. People actually think that we’re the same person but, in fact, we do lead two markedly different lives. I co-founded Cressey Sports Performance. We have a training facility about 40 minutes west of Boston and then we just opened our second location in Jupiter, Florida, so about an hour and a half north of Miami. That’s kind of the everyday life of Eric Cressey. We work with a lot of professional baseball players but see folks from all walks of life, as well as, you know, players on the amateur side and all that. We write a blog, kind of do things along those lines, speak at conferences but I think most people probably know who I am if they listen to your stuff so we can get right to the good stuff.
Mike: Absolutely. Honestly I mean, that’s enough about you because really what everybody wants to hear about are these little girls. How are the Cressey twins doing these days?
Eric: They’re doing well. Our girls are just over four months old now. They were born, actually, the day after Thanksgiving so we joke that we got a two-for-one Black Friday special at the hospital. It’s definitely been a big-time paradigm shift, but they’re doing well. They’re starting to sleep through the night a little bit more so life’s gotten a little bit easier there. They’re just about to head north to Massachusetts to get their first exposure to the cold here so we’re getting them packed up and hopefully prepared for that.
Mike: I was actually going to ask that. So you guys are going to move back up there for the summer?
Eric: Yeah. We split our time. We’re in Massachusetts, basically mid-April until late August, early September, and then the rest of the year down in Florida. We kind of go wherever the baseball players go. Up there is really busy on the college side because of the Cape Cod Baseball League and a lot of other local collegiate leagues start in the summertime. Obviously it’s a lot hotter down here in the summer, and then we come back down here once the Minor League season ends and really have our pro crowd, you know, roll in here from September until late February.
Mike: That’s awesome, man. It’s basically like you’re 70 years old right now. You know what I mean?
Eric: Exactly. No, it’s snowbird. Actually I’ve been joking, I’m more of a snow owl because I’m actually kind of nocturnal because of the twins. It all works out well, though.
Mike: Awesome. Well everyone should be familiar with your backstory like you said, so let’s start by talking about CP South. You know, I’m super interested. What made you pick up a pregnant wife, the most amazing dog in the world named Tank, and open a gym in a different state?
Eric: You know, it’s interesting. I’d always talked about it with my business partner. You know, I think we always wanted to do something in a warm weather climate because it will allow us to kind of expand our baseball region, our influence on that front, and really offer a better service by being able to be on field with the guys and do our throwing, our hitting, our sprint work outside instead of being indoors all winter. Certainly, we still have a really strong clientele up in Massachusetts, baseball guys, but being down here has opened some doors in that regard and it’s also been an opportunity for us to continue working with athletes further into their career.
We have a lot of Minor League guys who trained with us throughout their Minor League career and then once they started to have a level of career success, one of the common things you’ll see is guys who move to a warm weather climate mostly because wives, girlfriends, kids who want to be in an area like that. Also, because it may be closer to their spring training facility. Really, if you look at wanting to be near a spring training facility you either have Florida, Arizona. I’m much more of an East Coast guy and so in Florida there’s really kind of four locations you can look at. You can look at Fort Myers, you can look at Tampa, you can look at Orlando or you can look at the Jupiter area. Really, my wife and I visited all of these at one point or another and Jupiter was the one that really resonated with us and hit home as a place where we’d want to live.
There’s obviously a lot of northern transplants down here and direct flights back and forth from Boston, New York, Connecticut to get here and stuff so that side of it was really good. I also had some pro guys that I worked with who were located down here and I had a history with them. Steve Cishek, he was the Marlins closer, he’s a longtime friend, and my wife is close to Steve’s wife and stuff. We had a couple guys like Steve who lived right in the area and had been with us for five, six years in some cases. Jupiter was a good fit on that front. It was also a relatively untapped market. You have the Marlins and Cardinals spring training complexes here. The Mets are about 25 minutes up the road and actually just announced recently that the Astros and the Nationals will be opening a new complex here in 2017.
We’ll have five complexes within a 30-minute radius, which really kind of parallels what you see in the Phoenix area on the spring training side of things. That’ll certainly be a good opportunity on the pro side to work with more guys. I think the other thing, too, that was super important in my decision was I had some guys down here, Brian Kaplan and Shane Rye, who had become close friends and people to whom I had referred athletes and we’d collaborated on a number of cases. They brought some high school athletes up to work with us in Massachusetts and some of the guys I watched over from afar, trained with them down here so Brian had a big-time expertise on the baseball side of things. Shane actually more so on the lacrosse side of things.
We teamed up and effectively combined two businesses down here so it wasn’t like starting a business completely from scratch. Instead, I had some guys on the ground that I knew and had worked with so it worked out really, really well.
Mike: Oh, that’s awesome, man. Very cool and I’m excited to hear that it’s gone so well for you, especially first year in.
Eric: Yeah, I mean it was super challenging, no doubt about it. I mean, it’s been very, very rewarding and it took a lot of time to get to the rewarding point where, as is always the case, it took way too long to get it open and it cost way too much money to get it open and, like you mentioned, we gave up a lot. My wife had a very successful optometry practice in Massachusetts that she’s actually kept. She brought a partner on so she’ll see patients when we’re back there but she stepped away from a lot and we had to make sure that it was a good fit for her. She’s luckily very, very passionate about what I do, otherwise this would have been dead in the water before it even happened. We also moved away from the medical mecca of the planet in Boston to have kids and, interestingly enough, Florida is the state, I think, that has the highest incidence of fatalities from hospital-related causes in the country.
That was a leap of faith as well. Obviously, we had a great experience from when she had her C-section and we had the girls but it’s just a lot of moving parts. Like you talked about in that recent blog of yours about not being afraid of failure. You’ve got to throw caution to the wind sometimes and challenge yourself and I could just feel myself getting, I think, a little bit too comfortable with what I was doing. It turned out to be a big-time blessing. My business partner in Massachusetts was originally actually very opposed to the idea. He worried that it would stretch us too thin. He wasn’t sure that there would be someone who could handle the tough cases that I’ve always taken at the Massachusetts facility so we were wondering what would happen when I left. Those guys have absolutely crushed it. They’ve done double digit growth every month over the previous year since I left.
It’s been awesome watching our coaches up there grow and take on more complex cases, and really take a feeling of ownership in the facility that they might not have otherwise had if I had always been there to answer the tough questions and handle the tough cases and stuff. It was really cool to see how they stepped up and it’s allowed me to go from just being a head strength coach to being more almost like a brand ambassador. That’s the difference between building a business and building a brand. A lot of this stuff I’ve learned, I never would have learned if I had just stayed inside my comfort zone and done what I’ve always done.
Mike: That’s awesome, man. Like you said, you got out of your comfort zone and that, by default, forced them out of their comfort zone as well.
Eric: Yeah.
Mike: Awesome. Well it is baseball week so I’d love to dive into that topic with you. If you could build a perfect baseball player, what physical qualities would they have?
Eric: You know, it’s an interesting question because the thing that, I remember actually sitting in a roundtable with J.P. Ricciardi, who used to be the chairman of the Blue Jays and a special assistant to the GM for the New York Mets now. J.P.’s a local guy in Massachusetts who’s signed some really big names over the years and done a great job on the scouting side of things. He made a comment about how big leaguers come in all shapes and sizes. I mean, you have guys like Randy Johnson. You have guys like Dustin Pedroia. You have, literally, guys who are as stiff as you can possibly imagine. You have guys who are strung like a banjo and super tight. There isn’t that one thing that you look for in everybody. The thing that makes it so tough to really predict is that there are a lot of guys who are successful because of traits and not necessarily athleticism or physical qualities.
It’s not just, hey, he’s got a 38 inch vertical jump. He’s going to get to the big leagues and steal 120 bases. He’s got to get on base to be able to steal bases. That’s relying on sports vision, reaction time, things along those lines. We see guys that may not be freak athletes but instead they may have really long fingers so they can throw better changeups or they may just have great feel for throwing a cutter or a slider. You know, you see other guys that can throw a knuckleball. Tim Wakefield played well into his 40s. It’s a difficult thing to really appreciate so if I had to, I guess, from a pitching standpoint, I’d say obviously left-handed. I’d say, beyond that, you don’t want to be too tight and you don’t want to be too loose. You want to be somewhere in the middle. If you look at some of our hardest throwers historically, they were never guys that were absurdly like tissue shortness. They weren’t guys that would go out and throw and the next day they’d walk in with a 10 degree elbow flexion contracture.
Likewise, they weren’t guys who could just tie themselves into human pretzels. I look at our guys who have been 100 mile per hour arms and that’s something they all seem to have. They have just enough passive stiffness to obviously help stay healthy, but at the same time, they aren’t so absurdly tight that they can’t put themselves in a good position to be successful in terms of getting down the mound, getting good lay back, things like that. It’s a tough question to answer but what I think it does feed to is just how challenging training pro guys really can be because you have to individualize for every single guy. Everyone that walks through your door has a unique story to tell. They’ve got different cumulative trauma injuries, they’ve got more wear and tear on their bodies, they throw different mechanics, they may swing a little bit differently. You have guys that throw righty versus lefty, swing righty versus lefty.
We have a high school 15-year-old who switch-hits and switch-pitches. We have a guy in the draft this year who was actually the MVP of the Cape Cod All-Star Game last year, up to 94 lefty and also up to 90 righty throwing. It’s one of those things, man. There’s all kinds of crazy stories and every athlete tells a different one.
Mike: Absolutely. Well let’s look at the other side of that then because you’re absolutely right and that’s kind of what I was alluding to or trying to get you to say was that everybody’s different. You kind of maximize the traits that they have.
Eric: Yeah.
Mike: On the flipside, what are some of the biggest issues you’re seeing now with the young kids that are coming into your facilities?
Eric: It’s an interesting discussion point and it really speaks into the whole specialization debate. What I can tell you is that we opened our first facility in Massachusetts in 2007. I started in Massachusetts working with baseball players in 2006. If you took the average teenage athlete that walked in in 2006 or 2007 and compared it to 2014, ’15, we’ve devolved. The general movement quality that’s in place has gotten worse and worse. It’s because we haven’t built that broad foundation with lots of play. I get fired up when I open up my Facebook feed and I see a new video from Jeremy Frisch working with six-year-olds, doing all kinds of different stuff. Just having fun, teaching kids new movement patterns, and letting them play. We’re getting rid of recess.
In certain areas, kids, it’s not safe for them to go outside and, more often than not, there’s someone dipping their hands into the pot trying to make money off of them. An 8U travel program or something like that and it’s just not the way we develop athleticism long-term. I think the thing about specialization is, baseball is an absolutely awesome example of how to interpret just how bad it is for kids, for a couple of reasons. The first, obviously, throwing a baseball is the single fastest motion in all of sports. It’s incredibly stressful on a shoulder and elbow and it’s also a very, very unnatural position so you take those two together and it snowballs.
If you think about what really is happening in baseball, where it’s a better example of why specialization is bad when you compare it to soccer or basketball, at least when you go out to a soccer field or you go out to a basketball field, you do different things. Kids are going to change directions, they’re going to backpedal, they’re going to run forward, they’re going to sidestep. They’re going to do a variety of different things. When you’re a baseball pitcher, you do the exact same thing over and over again. In fact, you are less effective in your sport if you do things differently each time, if you don’t repeat your mechanics. When you take a sport like soccer or basketball and we basically make it more of what we call an open-loop challenge, meaning that kids have to respond to a stimuli. Whereas throwing a baseball is more closed-loop. It’s very much dictated well in advance.
You say, “I’m going to throw a slider on this pitch,” and you go and you throw a slider just like you’ve thrown the last 100 sliders. Where you see how there’s this continuum is all these structural adaptations are taking place and throwers, they’ve all got calcification on their UCL and SLAP tears. Then you look at a hockey population, which is a middle-of-the-road, to me, between basketball, soccer, versus baseball. In hockey we see these guys who get stuck in this incredible anterior pelvic tilt posture, they’re really, really extended. We can look at the research and we can say, “Wow, as these kids get older and older and older, the incidence of femoroacetabular impingement goes up, the incidence of labral tears goes up,” because they’re like a middle-of-the-road.
They might have a wide variety of activities on the ice but, at the end of the day, it’s all done in that same fundamentally problematic position. It’s just a good example, to me of, hey, if you want to see how bad we are at developing athletes, just look at baseball. It’s really, really shameful. On that hand, it’s frustrating but on the other hand, I’m very blessed in the sense that it’s given me a really good opportunity to make a difference and carve out a niche that’s ultimately in something I’ve really enjoyed doing.
Mike: Absolutely. To kind of follow up on that, how do you deal with the whole concept of sports specialization with, say, the parents that are coming into your space? We have this discussion every single day, I feel like, with some parent at our gym. I’m just interested what you guys are doing to kind of head that off at the pass?
Eric: I think the first thing to recognize is that it’s a combination of both physical training and actual just discussions. I think it helps to be very proactive with these things. Where I’ve had the most success, candidly, is citing examples of our players who have been really, really successful. We have a lot of guys actually who are in professional baseball, underneath our training systems who are really late bloomers. We talked about Steve Cishek before. Steve was a guy who didn’t get a single Division I piece of interest out of high school. He threw 81 leaving high school. He went to Carson-Newman, it’s a Division II school in Tennessee and grew five inches his freshman year, got involved in a strength program for the first time, and all of a sudden he was throwing 93 by the end of his freshman year. He was a fourth round pick and in the big leagues three years after that.
You look at a guy and like that and you’re, like, “Man, this kid played basketball, he played baseball when he was growing up, he did all kinds of different stuff and he wasn’t good enough in high school to be the guy that got overused.” There are so many examples of that that I’ve seen across our pro crowd that it’s really, really remarkable. If you talk to most of our Major League Baseball guys, most of them were, they were the point guard on the basketball team, the quarterback on the football team. Ryan Flaherty’s one of our guys, he’s a utility player for the Orioles. Ryan plays just about every position short of pitcher and catcher on the field and Ryan was runner-up Maine state high school football Player of the Year when he was in high school. These guys did multiple sports, but we’ve, for some reason parents have been brainwashed into thinking the only way that you could succeed is to really go and just go at it this one away.
What we try to do is we try to give them examples. Don’t just say, “Hey, this isn’t a theoretical world. It’s going to work.” I want them to know, hey, Tyler Beede was a first round pick twice and he never threw more than 80 innings in a year at high school. That’s really difficult to do. I want them to know that other guys paid attention to what long-term development really meant. Adam Ravenelle started with us in eighth grade when he was 125 pounds and was a fourth round pick after closing the College World Series last game for Vanderbilt. He stayed healthy throughout that entire period and part of it was because he played basketball and golf in high school and he kept strength training and doing all this stuff. There are samples, over and over and over again, of guys who have done this well. Who have done it without any specialization, who have been healthy.
What we know is that the kids who throw all their eggs in one basket, who specialized and just try, try, try to do well and then they blow out their UCL at age 16, they aren’t playing in the big leagues. Those kids don’t make it. They miss out on too much important development. They miss out on the social aspect or they miss out on the physical aspect of it. Even once they get religious about arm care, they’re very much behind the eight ball to get the recognition and innings they deserve. That is, for me, some of the most difficult stuff. I actually talked to a strength coach in Major League Baseball a couple of years ago that said that they did some in-house numbers on their players and they found that if you had a surgery while in the Minor Leagues, it cut your chances of making the big leagues in half. You can just imagine what that means for having surgery when you’re 15, 16, 17. It throws a lot of wrenches in the plans.
Mike: Absolutely. That’s a fantastic answer so thank you for sharing that because, again, we’re always looking for ways to try and better our approach and we do a lot of the same stuff but it’s great to hear you kind of reiterate that more important than talking theory is giving case studies and giving examples.
Eric: Yeah.
Mike: Awesome.
Eric: I think we can also, we can work backwards from the problem, like the really end result, and that’s to look at the injuries in Major League Baseball right now. They’re astronomically high and certainly there are a lot of issues that are contributing to it but one of the biggest issues is that these guys are damaged goods. There was an article a couple of years ago where Dr. Andrews talked about how a lot of the kids that he sees that are coming in and having Tommy John at ages 19, 20, 21, they’re kids who have evidence of previous areas of calcification on their ulnar collateral ligament. There was some low-level pathology that resulted from a 12-year-old going out and throwing 110 pitches when he wasn’t ready for it. He might not have felt it, he might not have perceived it or anything like that but there was a low-level trauma to that ligament that just never quite healed up the right way and it weakened the ligament over the long-term.
Mike: Wow, that’s crazy. Well, let’s kind of shift gears to that because we talk about shoulders and elbows all the time and obviously kind of the reason that we’re known as the same person is our love affair with functional anatomy. When it comes to shoulder and elbow issues, and obviously this is a massive topic, but if I could kind of ask you a two-part question, here. Number one, what factors are driving the shoulder and elbow issues that we see? Number two, how can we address them in our training?
Eric: Yeah, so again, it comes down to social factors and physical factors. From a social factor standpoint, I think we know overuse is the single, biggest predictor of long-term injury. We know that over and over and over again. Kids are throwing too many innings. When you throw over 100 innings in your high school year, your risk of injury goes up 350%. Injured pitchers in the adolescent years attend, on average, four times as many showcases as uninjured kids. Overuse is the one thing that time and time and time again, always predicts injury. I think that one of the reasons it happens is because the more that we throw, the more we lose passive stability. What that basically means in the context of throwing is, when you lay your arm back during max external rotation there are a couple of things that are happening.
One, that your elbow, your UCL is getting a little bit looser so it’s basically stretching out over the course of time. Now your shoulder, we know that pitchers actually acquire external rotation over the course of the season and that’s likely happening because their anterior capsule, their glenohumeral ligaments at the front of the shoulder, are becoming a little bit more and more loose each time they throw a baseball. Obviously, if we don’t have good passive stability, we need better active stability to take care of it. We need good cuff function, scapular control, even just the muscles that cross our elbow that protect our UCL, they need to have good tissue quality, good strength, all that stuff.
The tricky thing is, just as that passive stability is falling off as the season’s going on, kids are also losing cuff strength over the course of the season, the tissue’s getting grittier and grittier and not really doing its job as well. You kind of have this perfect storm of issues that comes about from a social thing. What do you do to kind of regain that? You get a ball out of your hands because when you get a ball out of your hands you automatically start regaining passive stiffness, so you create stability where you otherwise don’t have it. Then what’s just as important is, you can start to build strength and improve tissue quality a lot easier when you’re not constantly beating up on your shoulder and your elbow with regular throwing. That’s why, for me, the first three months of the off-season is so crucial.
It drives me bonkers when a Minor League guy wraps up his season September 5th and we don’t hear from him until November 1st. He literally misses out on 10 weeks that are the most important time to really get everything going the way that it needs to be. I’m not saying that he’s got to squat 500 or do anything in that period, but just get some manual therapy, do some arm care stuff, get the ball rolling, get your mobility back. That’s the social side of things. I think on the training side of things, what physically do we see as kind of our biggest issues? I think we just have to understand that everybody responds to throwing in one of two ways. There’s nothing else other than these two things. Either guys get looser or they get tighter. If you’re loose, you’re really hyperextended elbows, you can touch your palms to the floor when you do a toe touch, you can tie yourself into a human pretzel.
These are your threes on the Functional Movement Screen shoulder mobility test. Those guys get looser. They go from being loose to excessively loose, they become unstable. At the other end of the spectrum you have guys who just adapt to exercise and get really, really tight, okay? What we know is, we need to teach these guys to manage those, whether it’s with extra soft tissue work, extra basic mobility exercises or, if they’re loose guys, we’ve got to almost the next day, come back and do some low-level stability stuff, just almost remind them how to stabilize a joint. Those are kind of the two broad things but in terms of specific adaptations that play into injuries at the shoulder, we see lack of scapular upper rotation as the one thing that almost everybody has. We lose upper rotation the more we throw.
You know, a lot of the pitchers will be stuck in scapular depression, their shoulder labral will sit too low, they’ll be very lat dominant. Underneath that umbrella there’s other stuff. You’ll see guys who have adducted shoulder blades. They’ll have a military posture. They won’t all be really winged out or abducted. Some guys will be really anterior tilt, other guys won’t. You’ll see some guys who have very flat thoracic spines, other guys who are very kyphotic. The other thing with the shoulder is, do they control humeral anterior glide? Meaning, as they lay their arm back to throw, the ball likes to slide forward in the socket and we have our anterior capsule, our biceps tendon, and really our rotator cuff to protect us if we’re gliding forward. If that cuff isn’t doing its job, a lot of times guys are getting bicep symptoms.
They may have neural stuff, basically thoracic outlet type symptoms because there are nerves in the front of their shoulder. We do a lot of stuff just to educate guys on not just having a strong cuff, but having a strong cuff in the positions that matter. So true external rotation up at 90 degrees, and also having an end of range external rotation. I’m not a big fan of just testing cuff strength where the elbows decide. I think we need to make sure guys are strong in that laid-back position. You’ll see a lot of guys that know how to cheat cuff tests and then they don’t really present well when you test them in the positions that matter. Elbow is largely like a slave to everything else.
If you get your shoulder, you get your core control, get all that stuff where it needs to be, the elbow kind of comes along for the ride, goes where it needs to be. I would say that focusing on good tissue quality is really important. We actually saw an athlete recently who had kind of basically been diagnosed as a UCL stretched out, even though there wasn’t actual anything that was hinted at on the MRI in terms of being an injury. He had kind of been to some different physical therapist and hadn’t really gotten better and it turns out he was really, really limited in supination. It was really just a classic example of gross range of motion limitation and some soft tissue work cleared things up. Otherwise they are just going to be sitting around treating an MRI, but you need to have a medical diagnosis, you need to have a movement diagnosis.
I don’t make any claims of being a physical therapist but what I do claim is that I see this a lot. I see a lot of arms on a regular basis. I mean, I put my hand on 35 to 40 armpits a day and I’m covered in sweat and I’m in the trenches, which is probably fitting for this podcast. So it just has given me a pretty good sample size to draw from and it’s helped me to ally myself with people who know what they’re talking about. I refer out all the time to manual therapists, physical therapists, pitching coaches, you name it. I want guys to get better so a lot of times I’m just kind of the primary care. I’m the gateway to that and I defer people in different directions, depending on what they need.
Mike: Absolutely. That may be one of the most comprehensive answers I’ve ever had on this podcast.
Eric: I talk way too much. That was like a Bret Contreras response right there.
Mike: No, that was amazing. I love it, I love it. Just to give you your kudos, you know, a lot of the position specific cuff work, yeah, I totally stole that from you. So like, Radley and Stout, those guys definitely got that from you.
Eric: Right on.
Mike: Now another topic that you’re hearing more and more about are oblique strains. Following that same model as before, what’s driving this issue and how are you dealing with that?
Eric: You know, I think it’s kind of that same extension or that extension problem we talked about with respect to hockey players and really most young athletes. We know a lot of athletes live in a state of extension. They’re in this full inhalation mode, really can’t get air out, can’t get rectus abdominis external obliques going. I think what we see are, with oblique strains we take, an example of the obliques, they work in the sagittal plane but they also are super important in the transverse plane. When you have an athlete who is involved in a sport like baseball, what you have to appreciate about the rotation that takes place is, your pelvis and your torso are actually rotating in opposite directions. If we were to look down on a right-handed pitcher from above, his torso is still rotating clockwise while his pelvis is rotating counterclockwise towards the plate when he’s delivering.
What that does is it creates this separation and it’s no different than a hockey slapshot, a golf swing, really anything that happens in rotational sports. It’s just a really, really dramatic difference on the baseball side of things in terms of the sheer amount of total rotation because the stride is so long. On top of that, we see it with guys who may not have enough anterior core control to really manage it. It’s just one of those things where I think the obliques are kind of thrown under the bus as the most important thing for kind of protecting against that excessive stretch. When you have guys that don’t have good hip rotation, you have guys who don’t have good thoracic mobility, they need to crank more through their lumbar spine to get that range of motion they’re trying to create. It’s an example of a guy just trying to create good separation and sufficient motion, but just not driving it from the right places.
Mike: Excellent. Now, I want to just kind of gear back just a little bit because those are really myopic, focused questions. You know, I know there are a ton of young coaches listening to this and all of them either, A, want to be Eric Cressey or, at the very least, B, want to train pro athletes. You’ve obviously been doing this for quite a while now. What is one piece of advice you’d give the up and coming strength coach if they want to be successful training pro athletes?
Eric: You know, it’s funny. If you asked me back in 2006, “What do you want to do?” I mean, I was actually working a lot more with basketball and soccer from 2003 to 2005. My mentor was Chris West at UConn and I was really fortunate to work with Chris. He had four number one teams in the country in his weightroom. Men’s and women’s basketball, men’s and women’s soccer so that was my frame of reference. I had some shoulder issues but I really wasn’t super involved in baseball until I first started with some guys in 2006. I just found that I enjoyed training them and probably more significantly, after just a couple of months of training I realized, holy crap, these guys are a really underserved population. Nobody’s taught these kids about how their body moves, nobody’s helped them to understand why they’re unique, nobody’s taught them, hey, be an advocate for yourself because this is how your shoulder works.
That was something that I had had to do myself because I was a guy who had a bad shoulder, I was scheduled for surgery, I didn’t really get rehab that helped in any way. Then I went and rehabbed myself because I learned, all right, here’s what works for me. I can be an advocate for myself now. Here I am, 12 years later, and I still haven’t had my shoulder operated on. What I would tell you is, all I did was try to solve a problem, okay? And this is true of anything. I remember Randy Hetrick from T.R.X. had a great interview recently for a business magazine where he talked about, all he tried to do was solve a problem. He was a Navy SEAL, wanted to maintain a training effect while he was on a submarine, threw a strap over a pipe and did some inverted rows.
He’s turned into this multimillion dollar company with this incredibly broad reach after getting a Stanford M.B.A. and just leveraging his ability. All these people start talking about the end goal but no one ever thinks about what’s a problem that I can solve? I think that’s the first thing. I think that goes for any successful business and all I’ve tried to do is stay true to that. How do I continue to solve this problem in the best way I possibly can? That’s the first thing I would tell you. The parallel to that is, I would say, “Small hinges swing big doors.” That means, don’t try to go and train the pro athletes. Like, it’s actually funny, I have a lot of really close friends who are agents in the baseball industry and they kind of jokingly send me the pamphlets and flyers that they get from random facilities. They basically get spammed.
There are guys that will send these nine page brochures about themselves to players’ locker rooms in Major League Baseball. It’s just like putting a flyer on a car and I look back on that and I’m like, “We never did that.” All we ever tried to do was deliver a high-quality product to whoever trained with us. I mean I have middle school kids who are in professional baseball now. I had no idea that’s where they were going to wind up but we tried to deliver to all of them. You don’t go for the big fish right away. Sometimes just focus on delivering a good product, be very, very good at what you do, but also be focused. I think a large part of our success with Cressey Sports Performance in the baseball realm is that we’re not trying to be everything to everybody. I don’t do NFL combine prep.
You don’t see me really diversifying myself. If I’m going to diversify it’s going to be more in the context of working with a tennis player, seeing a swimmer, working with an NFL quarterback. That’s the stuff that makes the most sense because my expertise is really shoulder and elbow. To go out and take on something completely different, it’s going to spread me way too thin, it’s going to irritate my wife, it’s going to take time away from my family, and ultimately I think it’s going to take away from our credibility within that specific industry. That’s the thing I would just tell you is, focus on solving a problem, be very good at what you do, and don’t try to hit on the Prom Queen before you’ve even dated the girl on the JV cheerleading team, you know?
Mike: Awesome, man. That’s an awesome analogy.
Eric: I shouldn’t be using that now that I have twin daughters, but you get it.
Mike: I got a daughter too, man. That’s part of the reason I’m staying in the lifting games for the next 20 years. Okay, Eric. We’re almost done but I’ve got one more big question and then our ever popular lightning round before I let you go. If you could alter the space-time continuum and give the old Eric Cressey one piece of advice, what would it be?
Eric: Wow, wow. I’ll give you one for my training and one for my business, how’s that?
Mike: Love it, love it.
Eric: Training standpoint, I would have told Eric Cressey, powerlifter circa 2002, “Lift raw. Don’t get involved with lifting and powerlifting equipment and stuff like that.” That to me, was what took some of the fun away from powerlifting. I think if I had stayed raw and done stuff that way, I would have been in a much different point with my lifting career and I think I would have been a better and more successful lifter and had a lot more fun. I think on the business side of things, there really isn’t a lot I would change. I’m thrilled with where I’m at in my life but one of the things I probably would do is, I would just, basically, emphasize to myself, invest in things that you understand. I’ve done little bit of angel investing and stuff like that and it doesn’t always work out.
Obviously that’s the case but what I would do is, I would say, “Ask a lot more questions, regardless. Don’t be the guy who’s ready, fire, aim all the time.” That goes for everything from lease negotiations to investing in certain companies, things like that. Just I would have done more homework on more things early in my career instead of just saying, “All right, I’m going to throw my money at this and hope it works.” I haven’t lost a ton of money with that but I see places where I could have made more productive investments and saved myself some time, energy, money and headaches. That would probably be the biggest thing, is just be a little bit more conservative and ask more questions up front with just about everything you do in business.
Mike: Wow, that’s a great answer. Great answer. All right, man. Let’s do our lightning round. Then I’ll get you out of here, okay?
Eric: Yeah.
Mike: This one actually came from Tanner, Tanner Gerz on Twitter, and I’m going to modify it ever so slightly but, “What are one or two of your favorite exercises for building rotational power?”
Eric: Speaking broadly, skaters like Heiden’s, is a great kind of pushup exercise to train stuff in the frontal plane. A lot of guys really struggle to get good loading in the frontal and transverse plane, otherwise we wouldn’t have hitting coaches, pitching coaches, and things like that. I like that. Really, any kind of rotational med ball, shot put or scoop toss. My personal favorite’s probably either a figure eight shot put, which is kind of a drill we used to teach rhythm on rotational stuff and hip loading, or a step-behind rotational shot put. Those are all good ones.
Mike: Excellent. All right, next. We’ve got a fill in the blank. “The most annoying music or musical artist that Tony Gentilcore plays in the gym is?”
Eric: Tiesto. God, that stuff’s awful. It’s like shopping at Old Navy. Oh, I just can’t stand it. It seems the song goes on for, like, four and a half hours too. Yeah, it’s just not my thing.
Mike: Awesome, man. All right, next, “The funniest athlete you’ve ever trained is?”
Eric: Oh, wow. The first guy that comes to mind is a guy named Chad Rogers, he’s actually retired now and he’s probably listening to this because he’s working his way into the fitness industry. We call him Dragon. He and another guy started calling each other Dragon and Nighthawk after “Step Brothers” came out. Chad has this unbelievable ability to keep a straight face while making any social situation awkward. Remember Jim Breuer on Saturday Night Live when he used to do Goat Boy?
Mike: Yes.
Eric: Chad did a perfect Goat Boy and what we’d do is, we’d go out to dinner or something and Chad would be in the middle of making his order so he’d be like, “I’ll have the chicken Cobb salad with a side of [makes goat noise],” and the waitress would just, no idea what to do. He’d do that. He did the Invisible Man a lot so he’d be in the middle of a conversation with somebody and just start talking to a random, wide open space in the middle of the gym and people wouldn’t know what he’s doing. He’d do the handshake and just hold on while people started to walk away. Chad’s one of my favorites. We still talk a lot to this day, so he is one. Then probably among active athletes, I’d say Jack Leathersich. Jack’s in the 40-man with the New York Mets and what I love about Jack is he’s got some Dustin Pedroia in him.
He doesn’t really care what anybody thinks of him. He’s super quick arm lefty, pitches in the mid-90s, great slider, strikes a ton of guys out, and great worker but, more importantly, he’s just got swagger. He’s fun to see in the off-season. He always keeps our staff entertained. We have a good time.
Mike: Absolutely. You know as well as I do, that’s a huge part of it.
Eric: Yeah, I mean there was one day this off-season actually where my business partner posted a picture, I think on Instagram. Jack one day decided, “Hey, Tony, we should do our arm care stuff outside,” so there’s a video of him doing, like, a half-kneeling 90/90 hold, kneeling on a picnic table with, like, four feet of snow around. It was like Rocky going to train in Siberia, I guess.
Mike: I love it, I love it. All right, last one, “What book or books,” because I know you, “What book or books are you reading right now?”
Eric: You know, I’m not going to give you my current book because it’s terrible. It’s actually an audiobook and I’m nine hours into a twelve hour book and I’m counting down the minutes till it’s over with. I picked a bad one so I’ll give you my last good one, which was my last book, “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.” That was one I’m almost ashamed to admit I didn’t read 10 years ago, but that was a really, really good one. Actually I think Connor Ryan was the one that convinced me to read that. That’s a great one that I recently finished up.
Then another one that’s really good that was actually a recommendation from Don Reagan, who works a lot with F.M.S., was “Legacy,” which looked at leadership with the All Blacks New Zealand, or sorry, the rugby club. So really, really good stuff on that front and I really enjoyed that and I actually took some stuff away that helped a lot with coaching and the writing side of things.
Mike: Excellent. I love it, man. I’ll make sure I put up links to both of those. Eric, man, I know you’re so busy so I appreciate the time, brother. Where can my readers find out more about you and all of this great baseball information you’re pumping out?
Eric: Right on. Ericcressey.com is my website and then our facility address is cresseysportsperformance.com.
Mike: Awesome, man. I’ll make sure I get those in the show notes. Again, thanks for coming on, brother. I appreciate it.
Eric: No worries. Thanks for having me. Always good to catch up.
Mike: Awesome. To all the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We’ll be back in a few days with our next episode featuring the one and only Carlo Alvarez. Until then, take care and have a great day.
The post Ep. 44 – In the Trenches with Eric Cressey appeared first on Robertson Training Systems.